Category: TIF

Friday roundup: Chicago mayor endorses Sox plan (whatever it is), Jazz owner seeks NHL team (and new arena), Jaguars public price tag still $1B

access_time personNeil deMause

Was it a week and a half for you too? Sure was here! I’m a little afraid that the sports powers that be have decided to address popular anger over the great stadium swindle by dumping so many new subsidy deals on us at once that outrage fatigue kicks in, and I’m even more afraid that it’s working. Are your eyes starting to glaze over like mine at all the billion-dollar-plus figures? Are you ready to stop demanding that your elected officials stop catering to billionaires, and instead just watch some TV, as long as you can afford TV? Some Soma would sound pretty good about now, wouldn’t it?

I’m just joshing you, I know that the only people left reading this site have deep wells of outrage. In which case, the bullet points that follow will be like a long, cool drink of water to slake your thirst for laughing to keep from crying:

 

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Caps/Wizards arena bill would create mega-TIF to divert all taxes to help pay off $1.5B in project bonds

access_time personNeil deMause

Two leading members of the Virginia state legislature introduced legislation to create a sports authority to build a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria on Friday, during a snowstorm, while muttering, “Shh, don’t tell anyone, let’s keep this our little secret.” (Two of those three things are true.) The bill language is here, and a quick perusal reveals that it would:

  • Leave the negotiation of a lease for later on, but require that the teams pay rent (undetermined) and parking fees and payments on naming rights to the arena district (but not the arena itself) and seat license funds (“if any”) to the state. The term of the lease would be required to be as long as the term of the construction bonds, but there’s no indication if the teams would have any out clauses or state-of-the-art language allowing them to leave early if the state doesn’t sink more money into upgrades.
  • To help fund the rest of its $1.5 billion in bonds, the state would collect “all sales tax revenues,” both state and city, from the arena campus, as well as “all personal income tax revenues, corporate income tax revenues, and pass-through entity tax revenues.” (Since the project would be state-owned, it would already be exempt from paying property taxes.) This would be a mega-TIF, the same rarely employed mechanism that was proposed last year for a Commanders stadium in Virginia; they have tended not to work out too well, coming under particular criticism for the part where arena district employees have their income taxes paid directly to their bosses.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin immediately promised that not all the tax revenue is expected to be needed to pay off the arena project, though none of the many numbers he threw around on Friday actually specified what percentage of the tax money would be siphoned off to pay for construction. Youngkin also didn’t get into how much of that tax money would actually be new and how much cannibalized from spending elsewhere in the state — a common problem with TIFs.

The big announcement from the Republican governor on Friday was that he will now agree to expand funding for the D.C.-area Metro transit system, which was a key sticking point for legislative Democrats on the arena proposal. In fact, state house appropriations chair Luke Torian said that even though he co-sponsored the bill (with state senate majority leader Scott Surovell), he still doesn’t necessarily support the project, but just introduced it in order to move negotiations ahead, as one does.

There’s still much to be resolved, sure, but all signs point to Metro-funding-for-arena-funding being the key horse trade here, with any other details to be worked out later. State Sen. Danica Roem even spelled it out as “I look it as the same way as U.S. House Republicans, ‘Well, we’re not going to give Ukraine funding unless you give border funding.’” Expect plenty of heated public hearings and the like, but whenever you have bipartisan agreement on a sports subsidy deal, it’s awfully tough to undo it, no matter how many billions of dollars are at stake.

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Illinois school district: Are the Bears going to build new schools for everyone who’ll move to their stadium district, hmm?

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the big hidden costs of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stadium projects with big multiuse developments attached is that proponents generally count all the new benefits of development — lookit all the new taxes that will roll in! — without counting the new costs — lookit all the schools and police and fire services we’ll have to provide! This was one of the main arguments of Judith Grant Long in her book on how sports venues cost more than they claim to, and has been a point of contention in many a stadium deal since.

So it’s nice to see a mammoth development proposal — in this case the Chicago Bears‘ owners’ plan for Arlington Heights — questioned by the local governing body that could be left holding the bag — in this case the school district that would have to find seats for a flood of new students who would arrive once the Bears constructed a new $5 billion district:

Palatine School District 15 Superintendent Laurie Heinz said the team or the village should chip in to help the school district respond to the increased student population and its needs anticipated as a result of the redevelopment.

“We do not see any reason why the Chicago Bears and/or the Village of Arlington Heights cannot assist the District with a new campus or additions to existing campuses occasioned by the new Chicago Bears development,” she said.

District 15 is currently the second-largest elementary district in Illinois, reports the Pioneer Press, with around 11,500 students. Heinz suggested in a recently unearthed letters this summer to village leadership that the Bears should be required to pay an “impact fee” to cover the cost of building and operating new schools, and that Arlington Heights reject any plan to establish a tax increment financing district to kick back new property taxes to the Bears, since “locking billions of dollars of [equalized assessed value] in a TIF district for 23 years would be a real concern for our District.”

It sure would, and props to Heinz for pointing it out. But then, not getting billions of dollars in future property tax kickbacks could be a sticking point for the Bears owners, who have already expressed a desire for “property tax certainty,” which definitely sounds like “put a cap on our property taxes, ideally at whatever the current land that’s just a big racetrack and nothing else is paying.”

The Pioneer Press didn’t shed any light on Arlington Heights’ response to Heinz’s letters: Village Manager Randy Recklaus emailed a statement to the paper that “the Village has not received any requests for financial assistance from the Chicago Bears at this time, nor has the Village agreed to provide any.” As the groundwork for those discussions is laid, though, it’s important to keep in mind all the public benefits and costs of the stadium project, not just the ones that team execs want to include — so here’s hoping that Heinz and her warnings of siphoning off billions of dollars of TIF money stay on the agenda.

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A’s owners plan “privately financed” stadium that would cost Oakland $855m

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been following the agonizingly slow drip of news about the Oakland A’s plans for a new stadium at Howard Terminal on Oakland’s downtown waterfront, you may recall me wondering aloud how much city taxpayers would be on the hook for associated “infrastructure and transportation projects,” which were slated to be paid for by siphoning off future property tax revenues from the stadium district. I took a guess at a $1 billion stadium cost, and speculated that the ultimate public price tag could be $200 million or more, a figure that was later repeated by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Well, on Friday the A’s owners released their proposed term sheet for the project, and if you scroll wayyyyy down to Exhibit F, you will find this:

Project-generated revenues from the Jack London Infrastructure Financing District are estimated [to include] $360 million to be used to fund off-site infrastructure (e.g., pedestrian grade separation, vehicular grade separation, bike lanes, railroad safety improvements, sidewalk improvements and intersection improvements).

And:

Project-generated revenues from the Howard Terminal Infrastructure Financing District are estimated [to include] $495 million to be used to fund all on-site infrastructure development costs (e.g., environmental remediation, seismic improvements, backbone utilities, sea level rise improvements, sidewalks/streets, over 18 acres of parks and open space, and a Bay Trail connection.

A’s owner John Fisher, in other words, will pay for the construction costs of a baseball stadium and surrounding development — so long as the city coughs up $855 million in tax revenue to take a largely inaccessible industrial district and trick it out with new roads, underpasses and overpasses around highways and train tracks, and protect it from earthquakes and the sea level rise that is set to hit San Francisco Bay extra-hard. You know, $855 million in sundries.

This is a very large number, especially for a city that is already facing budget cuts as a result of pandemic-related revenue shortfalls, even after getting partly bailed out by the federal stimulus package. How best to distract people from that kind of an ask? Why, with even larger numbers, of course:

Okay, so: The ballpark will indeed cost more than $1 billion in private money to construct, atop all those city-funded sea-level-protection berms and surrounded by city-funded infrastructure (everybody drink!) improvements. That additional $1 billion in “general fund dollars” and $450 million in “community benefits,” though, is a mirage: Those numbers were calculated by adding up all the city revenues that will be diverted by those two new tax increment financing districts, subtracting what the A’s will use, and decreeing what’s left over to be public benefits, even though it’s, you know, public money that normally would go to the public in any case.

And while some of the property tax money will be “generated” by the A’s new development — “generated” in scare quotes, because TIFs invariably end up cannibalizing tax revenue that would exist even without the new development that they go to fund — that huge pool of cash would be created by mapping out TIF districts that are flipping ginormous, encompassing not just the new stadium development but much of the already-built-up area around Jack London Square:

To her credit, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf appears to have read the $855 million fine print, issuing a statement that “The City is willing to bring to bear its resources to help make this vision a reality; however, today’s proposal from the A’s appears to request public investment at the high end for projects of this type nationwide.” Still, that sounds more “Can’t we bring that number down a bit?” than “You’ve got to be kidding me,” in which case this project is looking at certainly hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure subsidies, even if Schaaf intends to haggle over the price.

Hundreds of millions of dollars sound smaller, though, when compared to numbers in the billions, so expect to see the A’s trying to keep the focus on how much the team would be spending, not on how much in public money it would be asking for. Already, team stadium czar Dave Kaval has already been successful on one front: all the news coverage so far has used the biggest number possible in their headlines, and that’s the $12 billion that team execs say they’ll spend on the overall development, once the stadium gets built, maybe. (The term sheet doesn’t actually require any buildings other than the stadium to be built — and the stadium needs to be built first, and most of the infrastructure would be required to be built before the stadium opens.) Misdirection is the cornerstone of all successful magic.

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Friday roundup: MLB billionaire owners cry poor, Rangers stadium reviews get worse and worse

access_time personNeil deMause

What a week! I know I say that every week, but: What. A. Week. In addition to the World Series insanity, I spent some time this week writing an article about other ways that giant monopolistic cartels screw over regular folks, but it’s not up yet* so you’ll just have to find out about it next week (or keep refreshing my personal website, or follow me on Twitter or something).

In the meantime, there’s lots of sports stadium and arena news to keep you occupied:

  • NYC F.C. may have announced progress on its new soccer stadium this week while providing no indication of actual progress, but the Washington Football Team one-upped them when team president Jason Wright earned an entire NBC Sports article about their stadium plans by saying he didn’t even have a timeline for the process. Meanwhile, the Sacramento Republic likewise issued a statement on their new stadium construction plans that amounted to nothing (“I do have a hard hat in my trunk!” said team president Ben Gumpert, by way of news). At this rate, team owners will be able to get reporting on their stadium campaigns after denying they even want one — oh wait, we’ve gone there already.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says the league now has $8.3 billion in debt, $3 billion of it accrued during 2020’s pandemic season, which doesn’t actually tell you how well baseball is doing — presumably some of it was borrowed against future revenues from TV contracts and naming-rights deals and the like — but sounds impressive when you’re about to go into union contract talks. Also, notes Marc Normandin, that’s really only a $100 million loss per team, which isn’t an unfathomably huge sum for the billionaires who own most teams; plus we have to take Manfred’s word on that debt figure, and it already doesn’t include things like teams’ ownership of regional sports networks. MLB owners, he writes, are “hoping, as they so often do, that you have no idea how anything works, and will just take them at their word. So that they can do things like, oh, I don’t know, decline the 2021 option on basically everyone with one in order to flood the free agent market with additional players they can then underbid on and underpay, claiming that this is all financially necessary because of all the debt, you see.” Or as we may start calling it soon, getting Brad Handed.
  • Philadelphia public schools lost $112 million in property tax revenues in 2019 that were siphoned off to tax breaks for developers, according to a new Good Jobs First study, nearly double their losses from just two years earlier. Good thing the 76ers‘ plan for an arena funded by siphoned-off property taxes was rejected, though there are more plans where that came from, so Philly schools should probably still hold onto their wallets.
  • One more review of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium that team owners Ray Davis and Bob Simpson got $500 million to help build because the old one lacked air-conditioning, this one from a fan who’s visited every stadium and arena in North America: “This would probably end up probably down near the bottom.” He added that the upper decks are too far from the field, the place is too dark, the scale is “ridiculous,” and on top of that fans were taking off their masks as soon as security is out of sight, which, yup.
  • Las Vegas has extended its negotiating window again for a new soccer stadium to lure an MLS team, which makes you wonder why they even bothered to set a window in the first place instead of just hanging out a shingle saying, “Have Stadium $$$, Inquire Within.”
  • Sports team owners make tons of “dark money” to political campaigns to try to get elected officials to support their interests, according to ESPN, though disappointingly their only real source is an unnamed NBA owner. But that source did say, “There’s no question,” in italics and everything, so you know they’re serious.
  • Maybe the NHL should just play games outdoors so they can allow in fans? There are dumber ideas, but they might want to figure out how to get fans to keep their damn masks on first.
  • There are some new renderings of the New York Islanders‘ luxury suites at their new arena, and I can’t stop puzzling over what that weird counter-like thing is in this one, or why the women are all wearing stiletto heels to an NHL game. I’ll never understand hockey!

*UPDATE: Now it’s up.

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Pawtucket developer slashes size of soccer stadium project, still wants same $70m in tax subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

The Covid economy has developers all over rethinking construction plans, especially office projects, since it seems pretty likely not nearly as many people will be going in to the office in our future. And so it goes with Fortuitous Partners’ soccer stadium project for a USL team in Pawtucket, which was going to involve $360 million in apartments, shops, offices, and a hotel and conference center to go along with the $40 million stadium, and which now will include something less than that:

Brett Johnson, one of the cofounders of Fortuitous told the Pawtucket City Council on Wednesday night that the project was being scaled back. The former Apex site — the centerpiece of the project due to its highway visibility — is now being eliminated.

Johnson, who is also owner of the Phoenix Rising USL team, told the Providence Journal that his new price tag was “likely in the ‘low $300 million’ range.” The pandemic, he explained, has reduced demand for office space, though he could still add more offices later if those become a thing again.

But at least if the project is slimmed down, it won’t need so much in public tax subsidies, right? Hahahahahaha, no:

The project is still looking for $70 to $90 million in public financing. The company has hired high-powered Rhode Island lobbyists to try and secure the funding.

Or as the Journal says, in a sentence that manages to contradict itself in a single clause:

Johnson said Fortuitous still intends to privately finance the project using Opportunity Zone investments aided by tax increment financing with the city and state.

Kicking back $70-million-plus in tax revenues to get a $40 million minor-league soccer stadium (and a pile of other stuff) never seemed like the best idea, but it’s singularly worrisome at a time when minor-league sports is reeling and may never fully recover. Here’s Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson back in April on Pawtucket’s USL plans:

“This is a league with 100 teams and different tiers. Minor league sports are above everything the sort of thing to get crushed by coronavirus — everything they do is about getting people into the stadium. That’s not going to be happening with this team,” said Matheson.

“And this isn’t Lucchino — this isn’t John Henry, or Bob Kraft. These are often shoestring operations. [Coronavirus] could bankrupt a reasonably large number of teams in that league and suddenly this isn’t the league it was before,” added Matheson.

The tax increment financing plan still needs to be approved — I think by the state legislature, though it already approved a Pawtucket TIF district, so maybe just the city or the governor needs to okay it, really the reporting on this has been terrible — so there’s still time for things like public hearings, if anyone believed in those anymore. Maybe I’ll see if I can ask Matheson about it when he and I join up as part of this big Zoom get-together on the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal tonight at 9:30 Eastern/6:30 Pacific. I’m told it’s going to be broadcast live on the Voice of OC’s Facebook page, so check that out if you’re interested — I anticipate being very active in the comments…

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76ers owner vows no “direct” use of tax money for new waterfront arena while lobbying for massive tax kickbacks

access_time personNeil deMause

I admit, it’s sometimes tough even for me to keep track of which stadiums and arenas are considered “new” or “old” — or “state-of-the-art” and “outmoded,” as sports team owners like to say. The Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers‘ Wells Fargo Center still feels new to me, but it’s 24 years old this month, so naturally one of those teams is already plotting how to leave for an even newer home:

The 76ers are exploring the possibility of building a new basketball arena at Penn’s Landing, and the team is lobbying local officials to get behind a plan to help finance construction with taxpayer support, The Inquirer has learned.

The proposal, sure to spark intense debate, is the latest in a long history of disputes over how to revitalize the Delaware River waterfront and where to put sports complexes in Philadelphia. The team wants to move out of the Wells Fargo Center, which it shares with the Flyers and which is owned by Comcast Spectacor, by the 2031 season, according to a planning document viewed by The Inquirer. The document is a draft of talking points for the Sixers’ lobbying efforts.

The Sixers rent from the Flyers, and have engaged in a series of squabbles over the years with their landlord, most memorably printing the arena’s corporate name in teeny tiny type because they weren’t sharing in the naming-rights cash. This, though, is the first concrete proposal for a new arena that’s been submitted to Philadelphia officials, and presumably the start of a long lobbying war by the team’s billionaire owner, Josh Harris.

More details on that “planning document,” from Philadelphia Business Journal:

A team document prepared to garner support for the project and shared with the Philadelphia Business Journal by an industry source states the franchise believes a new Penn’s Landing arena will:

  • Provide “billions of dollars in net new revenue to the city and the school for a property that currently produces no tax revenues” for the city or the state of Pennsylvania;

  • Create “thousands of new jobs, and provide significant new tax revenue” for the city and school district;

  • Include the creation of schools, parks and an African-American Museum at Penn’s Landing; and

  • Directly invest “unprecedented funds” in minority-owned businesses.

CBS Philly further reports that “the Sixers say they do not envision seeking any direct appropriation of city or state taxpayer money to support the project,” but the original Philadelphia Inquirer reports makes clear that that’s not true, unless you put a lot of weight on that adjective “direct”: Harris intended to apply for money from Pennsylvania’s Neighborhood Improvement Zone program, which siphons off future sales and income tax revenues from a large swath of land to pay off construction costs on a project — a STIF, in other words. The NIZ program was created in 2009 specifically so that Allentown could use future tax money to subsidize a new minor-league hockey arena, which ended up going massively over budget; the tax zone has been generating plenty of revenue to pay off the inflated costs, but that’s only if you count all the sales and income taxes collected anywhere near the arena to be new revenue, which it almost certainly is not.

In any case, Harris has clearly thrown down the gauntlet here, and it is one with “no new taxes!*” written on one side and “lots of new jobs!*” on the other. The opposing position has been staked out on Twitter by Philadelphia city councilmember Helen Gym:

https://twitter.com/HelenGymPHL/status/1298725255691689987

https://twitter.com/HelenGymPHL/status/1298734815412453377

To all those journalists who ask me periodically if I think the sports subsidy swindles are going to come to an end anytime soon: HELL NO. Why would billionaire sports owners stop demanding taxpayer subsidies now? It’s where the money is.

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Friday roundup: Long Island residents yell at cloud over Isles arena, Calgary forgets to include arena in arena district plan, plus a reader puzzle!

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday (again, already) and you know what that means:

  • New York State’s Empire State Development agency held a series of three public hearings on the plan to build an Islanders arena on public land near Belmont Park racetrack (which the team would be getting at as much as a $300 million discount), and the response was decidedly unenthused: Speakers at the first hearing Tuesday “opposed to the project outnumbered those in favor of the plan by about 40 to one,” reports Long Island Business News, with State Sen. Todd Kaminsky joining residents in worrying that the arena will bring waves of new auto traffic to the town of Elmont, that there’s no real plan for train service to the arena, and that there’s no provision for community benefits to neighbors. Also a member of the Floral Park Police Department worried that the need for police staffing and more crowded roads would strain emergency services. Empire State Development, which is not a public agency but a quasi-public corporation run by the state, is expected to take all of this feedback and use it to draft an environmental impact statement for the project, which if history is any guide will just include some clauses saying “yeah, it’ll be bad for traffic” without suggesting any ways to fix it. I still want to see this plan from the Long Island Rail Road for how to extend full-time train service there, since it should involve exciting new ideas about the nature of physical reality.
  • Meanwhile in Phoenix, the final of five public hearings was held on that city’s $168 million Suns renovation plan, and “out of nine public comments, three involved questions, five voiced support and one was against the deal,” according to KJZZ, so clearly public ferment isn’t quite at such a high boil there. One thing I’d missed previously: The city claims that if it doesn’t do the renovations now with some contribution ($70 million) from Suns owner Robert Sarver, an arbitrator could interpret an “obsolescence clause” in the Suns’ lease to force the city to make the renovations on its own dime. I can’t find the Suns’ actual lease, but I think this just means that Sarver can get out of his lease early if an arbitrator determines the arena is obsolete [UPDATE: a helpful reader directed me to the appropriate lease document, and that is indeed exactly what it means], and he can already opt out of his lease in 2022, it’s pretty meaningless, albeit probably more of the “information” that helps convince people this is a good deal when they hear it. (Also important breaking news: A renovated Suns arena will save puppies! Quick, somebody take a new poll.)
  • Speaking of leases, the Los Angeles Angels are expected to sign a one-year extension on theirs with Anaheim, through 2020, while they negotiate a longer-term deal. It’s sort of tempting to wish that new Anaheim mayor Harry Sidhu would have played hardball here — sign a long-term deal now or you can go play in the street when your lease runs out, like the Oakland Raiders — but I’m willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt in his negotiating plans. Though if this gives Angels owner Arte Moreno time to drum up some alternate city plans (or even vague threats a la Tustin) just in time to threaten Anaheim with them before the lease extension runs out, I reserve the right to say “I told you so.”
  • The Calgary Planning Commission issued a comprehensive plan for a new entertainment district around the site of the Flames‘ Saddledome, but forgot to include either the Saddledome or a new arena in it. No, really, they forgot, according to city councillor Evan Woolley: “It should’ve been identified in this document. It absolutely should have. Hopefully those amendments and edits will be made as they bring this forward to council.” The 244-page document (it’s not as impressive as it sounds, most of them are just full-page photos of people riding bicycles and the like) also neglects to include any financial details, beyond saying the district would be “substantially” funded by siphoning off new property taxes, “substantially” being one of those favored weasel words that can mean anything from “everything” to “some.” Hopefully that’ll be clarified as this is brought forward to council, too, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.
  • Here is a Raleigh News & Observer article reporting that the Carolina Hurricanes arena has had a $4 billion “economic impact” on the region over 20 years, citing entirely the arena authority that is seeking $200 million to $300 million in public money for upgrades to the place. No attempt to contact any other economists on whether “economic impact” is a bullshit term (it is) or even what they thought of the author of the report, UNC-Charlotte economics professor John Connaughton, who once said he “questions the sincerity” of any economist who doesn’t find a positive impact from sports venues. Actually, even that quote would have been good to include in the N&O article, so readers could have a sense of the bona fides of the guy who came up with this $4 billion figure. But why take time for journalism when you can get just as many clicks for stenography?
  • The San Francisco Giants‘ stadium has another new name, which just happens to be the same as the old new name of the basketball arena the Warriors are leaving across the bay, and I’m officially giving up on trying to keep track of any of this. Hey, Paul Lukas, when are you issuing “I’m Still Calling It Pac Bell” t-shirts?
  • Indy Eleven, the USL team that really really wants somebody to build it a new stadium so it can (maybe) join MLS, still really really wants somebody to build it a new stadium, and hotels, office and retail space, an underground parking structure, and apartments, all paid for via “[Capital Improvement Board president Melina] Kennedy wasn’t available to discuss the proposed financial structure of the project.” It would definitely involve kicking back future property taxes from the development (i.e., tax increment financing), though, so maybe Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir is hoping that by generating more property taxes that his development team then wouldn’t pay but instead use to pay off his own stadium costs, that would look better, somehow? I mean, he did promise to keep asking, so at least he’s a man of his word.
  • “At some point in time, there’s going to have to be a stadium solution,” declared the president of a pro sports team that plays in a stadium that just turned 23 years old. “If we don’t start thinking about it, we’ll wake up one day and have a stadium that’s not meeting the needs of the fans or the community.” Want to try to guess which team? “All of them” is not an acceptable answer! (Click here for this week’s puzzle solution.)
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Chicago USL stadium, music venues axed from Lincoln Yards plan by local alderman

access_time personNeil deMause

Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts will not be bringing a new USL soccer team to that city, after alderman Brian Hopkins issued an open email declaring his opposition to the planned Lincoln Yards redevelopment project including either a soccer stadium or a proposed series of Live Nation music venues:

“I have informed planning officials at Sterling Bay, the developer of the proposed Lincoln Yards project, that I am not in support of a major sports and entertainment arena within either of their two planned development districts now under consideration,” Hopkins wrote in an email to his constituents this morning. “I have further requested that the identified site of the proposed stadium . . . be repurposed as open and recreational park space.

“In addition, I have informed Sterling Bay that I will not support the proposed ‘entertainment district’ within the Planned Development that was intended to be co-owned by LiveNation and comprised of multiple venues with seating capacities ranging from 3,000 to 6,000. The Entertainment District will be eliminated from a revised plan, and replaced by restaurants, theaters, and smaller venues that will be scattered throughout the site. LiveNation will have no ownership interest in any of these venues.”

Developers Sterling Bay later confirmed that it would be removing the stadium and the Live Nation venues from the plan.

The project is set to get at least $800 million in tax increment financing — i.e., kickbacks of future property taxes — which has been outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel’s favorite subsidy scheme. (Most of it is supposed to be used for “infrastructure” work, but we’ve seen before how that can easily bleed into costs that would normally be private developers’.) The big uproar over Lincoln Yards, though, has been over the soccer stadium that nobody wants, plus all those music venues run by a single corporate entity, right on the doorstep of a bunch of famed independent bars and small clubs that feared they would be driven out of business. Hopkins clearly heard those complaints, and used his power as local alderman to put the brakes on the aspects of the plan that had the most public opposition.

There’s still a long way to go to finalize revamped plans for the development project, and that’s still a hell of a lot of TIF money to be devoting to development that arguably wouldn’t do much to improve Chicago. (There would be some affordable housing, but $800 million worth?) For the purposes of this site, though, there won’t be a stadium involved, so watch your local Chicago listings — the desiccated husk of the Chicago Reader has done excellent reporting on Chicago’s TIFs — for further news of this story as it develops.

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Friday roundup: The Case of the Dead Beer-Tap Inventor, and Other Stories

access_time personNeil deMause

This was the week that was:

  • The Denver Broncos are finding it slow going getting a new naming rights sponsor for their stadium because a used stadium name loses lots of its value, thanks to everyone still calling it by the old name. Yes, this is yet another reason why teams demand new stadiums when the old ones are barely out of the cellophane.
  • Here’s a Los Angeles Times article arguing that if rich sports team owners are granted permission to evade environmental review laws, small business owners should be too. I am not entirely sure this is the best lesson to take from this, guys.
  • Pennsylvania is preparing to legalize sports gambling, and the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates think it would be great if the state imposed a gambling fee and gave some of the money to them, the only surprising part here being that they actually said this out loud.
  • F.C. Cincinnati‘s ownership group is preparing upgrades to Nippert Stadium as the team’s temporary home while a new stadium is built, and “isn’t concerned by the cost,” according to WCPO. Yes, these are the same owners who said they couldn’t possibly build a new stadium without $63.8 million in public money. Also who said Nippert Stadium couldn’t possibly be made acceptable as an MLS venue. I’m done now.
  • Fredericksburg, Virginia has scheduled a July 10 vote on whether to build a new $35 million stadium for the single-A Potomac Nationals, and paying off the city’s costs by siphoning off property, admissions, sales, meal, personal property, and business license taxes paid at the stadium and handing them over to the team. I guess that would make it a PASMPPBLTIF?
  • And finally, a man found dead in a walk-in beer cooler in the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium turns out to have been there to install a revolutionary new fast-pour beer tap he’d invented, and no one yet knows how he died. This is going to be the best season of True Detective yet! (No, seriously, this is a tragedy for the man and his family, and I hope that everyone involved soon finds closure, at least, by determining the true facts of what happened. But also, no, I’m not going to go back and delete the joke. If this makes me a monster, at least I’m an appropriately social-media-driven monster.)
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