Category: Kansas City Royals

Friday roundup: Blazers arena staredown escalates, haggling continues in Rays stadium standoff

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! There’s nothing in the latest batch of stadium and arena news that can quite compete with the European and North/Central American soccer federations vowing to start boycotting FIFA events as soon as this September if FIFA sells operating rights to the World Cup to Jared Kushner’s brother, but it was still a pretty eventful week:

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Hearing to get public feedback on Royals stadium shut down early after public gives too much feedback

access_time personNeil deMause

Representatives of the Kansas City Royals and the Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation held a required public hearing on their rezoning proposals for a new Royals stadium complex yesterday, and and they absolutely heard from the public:

“We already said no to a downtown baseball stadium, and here it comes back again,” said Mary Ellen Vincent, a Roanoke neighborhood resident. “[It feels like] a trick, like they went around us, and they’re going to jam this through no matter what we say.”

Roanoke neighborhood resident Olo Szylleyko, shared her concern about bypassing a public vote and raised broader economic concerns, pointing to mixed results at stadium developments in other cities.

“You have to look in other cities and you see what are the pluses and minuses of this type of enterprise and how much money they actually been spent by the taxpayers and by the owners,” he said. “We’re looking at this as an absolutely perfect success. We don’t know that.”

And:

“I think a lot of us are really excited for the development,” said Ben Lindner, board president of the San Francisco Tower Association. “We’d love to see some new life being breathed into the Crown Center area, but this plan seems to create more questions than it’s answered.”

And:

About an hour into the meeting, as the last remaining speaker was at the podium, members of the Missouri Workers Center erupted in chants of “let us vote.” The progressive labor advocacy group broke out in chants and heckled speakers….

The meeting ended about 15 minutes early. During a question-and-answer period, when presenters addressed prescreened questions from the crowd, a host announced they would end the meeting amid the ongoing outburst.

(You can see the “Let us vote!” chants here. Nobody seems to have gotten video of any heckling or the announcement to end the meeting, so it’s hard to tell how disruptive it was; KCTV did an entire lengthy report without even mentioning that the hearing ended early, though it’s always possible their reporter didn’t stay till the end.)

The Missouri Workers Center, you will recall, has collected signatures to put a vote on the stadium plan on the November public ballot, to which Royals officials have responded, pretty much, “ha ha, not if we get all the approvals first!” And whether or not the rest of the attendees approved of the chanting — “a lot of people were at the wrong meeting,” groused one local resident — the general sentiment seems to have been that Kansas Citians have multiple concerns about the project that they would like to have addressed. This should be no surprise to anyone, given that at past public hearings residents have raised questions about the public cost (unspecified as yet, but likely $1.3 billion or more) and that the city is pushing this plan forward after voters overwhelmingly rejected another public funding plan for a Royals stadium in 2024. It’s almost like people in Kansas City want some way for their opinions to be heard beyond writing down questions and having team officials pick and choose which ones to answer, hmm, there must be some provision in democracy for doing this, can’t think of what that would be right now.

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Friday roundup: Tampa council slams brakes on Rays stadium approvals, A’s find an investor (maybe sorta)

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of other news this week while we were off on Portland Trail Blazers watch:

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Royals prepare rezoning plan for new stadium district, even as $1.35B in public money remains up in air

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Royals execs have submitted a rezoning plan for their proposed new stadium development at Crown Center, which Fox4KC, citing the team’s application, describes as “a vibrant mixed-use destination that supports a wide variety of year-round activities – including professional sporting events, concerts, festivals, community gatherings, private events, sponsorship activations and other programmed experiences.” Or as that looks in an overhead schematic:

That is definitely a baseball stadium — with center field pointing just west of north, making for some potentially troublesome summer sunsets in the eyes of left-handed batters — and a lot of Areas where new or renovated buildings can go. The Kansas City Star notes that “the preliminary plan does not specify exactly what new buildings could contain, noting that would be determined in final plans,” but you can be sure that whatever they are, they’ll contain gobs of exciting sponsorship activations and programmed experiences!

A public hearing of the City Plan Commission on the rezoning is set for August 19. K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas is trying to get all the elements of the Royals deal — including $1.35 billion or so in city funds and state money that he hasn’t formally requested yet — approved before November so he can forestall a possible ballot measure allowing voters to block the stadium plan.

Presumably the Royals’ professional vaportecture artists are still at work on prettier pictures; if you want examples of those, you’ll have to turn to Washington, D.C., where only nine months after the city council passed its $7 billion-ish Commanders stadium subsidy, there are finally some renderings of what the surrounding development could look like: Fall foliage! Canoes! Not a translucent parking garage in sight! Overhead schematics are probably more realistic, but realistic doesn’t get the re-socials, we’re talking about building mindshare here.

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Friday roundup: Pelicans owner seeks deal for state-funded velour, ballot measure on Royals stadium could face court fight

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, a special note of thanks to all the FoS supporters who get daily posts by email for your patience while I’ve spent the last week or two figuring out how to make the formatting more readable on mobile devices. (The actual code took just a few minutes to write; figuring out where to insert it in the convoluted system that sends out notices as soon as posts are published was a much longer saga.) I hope this reduces your eyestrain, even at the risk of easier access to stadium news raising your blood pressure.

And speaking of stoking ire, here’s the rest of this week’s news items that didn’t make the daily cut:

  • New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is reportedly working on a lease extension with the state of Louisiana to be signed by the end of this year, which could be a 10-year deal with additional five-year options like Benson’s Saints got. No one’s saying a word about the important stuff — how much the state would kick in for arena renovations as part of the deal, and whether Benson would pay any added rent or revenue sharing to help repay the state’s costs — but given that the Pelicans owner has previously said she wants more luxury suites with crushed velour furniture in order to boost the team’s profits, which are currently only about $77 million a year, don’t hold your breath on this “public-private partnership” including a ton of private.
  • A Kansas City labor organization has succeeded in getting enough signatures to put a vote on the November ballot on whether to use city money to fund a new Royals stadium. Mayor Quinton Lucas has declared “the train’s already left the station” and threatened to get the deal signed off on before November, to preclude the public from having a say; the group Missouri Workers Power has threatened to sue to block Lucas from doing so, citing legal precedents where courts struck down legislative actions taken on issues where voter initiatives were pending.
  • North Carolina house speaker Destin Hall is not so crazy about the idea of setting aside a pile of state money to build a Raleigh-area baseball stadium for a proposed MLB expansion team, saying, “Private companies should pay for their own facilities instead of relying on the General Assembly. However, if someone presents a proposal showing that North Carolina taxpayers would get a strong return on the investment, I am willing to consider it.” State senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his primary by 23 votes in March, has been the main advocate of a stadium funding bill; both Hall and Berger are Republicans, while Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said this week, “We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it.”
  • Some Illinois state legislators don’t seem inclined to revisit tax subsidies for a Chicago Bears stadium no matter what Gov. JB Pritzker says: Comments this week (all from Pritzker’s fellow Democrats) included, “What the Bears wanted was a blank check We not only said no but, excuse my language, hell no,” “If you come to the table in Springfield and you are a liar, it doesn’t bode well for you,” and “The big issue that came about was, Are we going to give billionaires more taxpayer dollars?”
  • A Cuyahoga County councilmember is suggesting using part of the proceeds of a 0.25% sales tax surcharge meant to cover building a new jail and repairing a courthouse to instead pay for repairs and upgrades to the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, because surely there’s nothing else the county could use that money for. Just not paying for unlimited upgrades ad infinitum and daring the team owners to give up their sweetheart leases — or even threatening to do so in order to get the team owners to agree to a compromise solution — remains an option, guys.
  • Neighborhood leaders around the Chicago Fire‘s proposed stadium at the The 78 site say if the city is going to devote tax money to parking garages for the stadium, it should also kick in for a community benefits agreement to provide funding for transit access, affordable housing, anti-displacement protections, public infrastructure, and support for local businesses. Whether to view this as a vital instrument of democracy to ensure that regular citizens can get dealt into public spending priorities or just a way for developers to buy off local community leaders by cutting them in on the deal is, as always, a reasonable question.
  • Most of the news coverage of the economic impact of the World Cup has disappeared as coverage of the games themselves has taken over, but Seattle’s KUOW did check in on local businesses this week and found that food outlets near the stadium that sell drinks or quick grab-and-go food items are doing great while businesses farther away or those that sell things fans may not crave before or after a soccer match (Vietnamese cookies, vintage clothing) are having a miserable time of it. Yup, checks out!
  • Buffalo Bills ticket prices are too damn high, clearly we need to reduce red tape so the Bills can build more seats.
  • Yes, that Crain’s Chicago Business article claiming Bears tax subsidies weren’t public money was real bad, but as Geoffrey Propheter reminds us, it’s still no Bridge Detroit.
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Two months after Royals stadium deal proposed, KC mayor still hasn’t asked for state funds

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been two months since Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas announced plans for a new Kansas City Royals stadium development in the downtown Crown Center, using $600 million in city property tax kickbacks, $350 million or more in state money, and $400 million or more in additional tax exemptions, and we still don’t know much about how that all would work. In fact, it turns out Lucas hasn’t even formally asked the state for money from its Show-Me Sports Investment Act tax slush fund established last year.

It’s okay, though, says Mayor Lucas, because he has his reasons:

“This is not an absence of engagement,” said Lucas, who said stadium construction would need to begin this year. “I think it’s instead — how does everybody make sure that they’re in a real cohesive approach to how the deal is delivered?”

Okay, so city and state (and team?) officials are engaged, they just aren’t cohesive — that’s another way of saying they haven’t been able to come to an agreement, right? “We look forward to the continued partnership with the State and the Kansas City Royals,” added spokesperson Lane Johnson in a statement to the Kansas City Star, which is very much the sort of thing one says when one is still at the negotiating table with no idea if talks will end up going anywhere.

According to the Star, qualifying for the Show-Me money shouldn’t be hard: The Royals deal is a sports project that will seat at least 30,000 people and will cost at least $500 million, the state is being asked for less than 50% of the total cost, and the city will be putting in money. How much the city can ask for could be an issue, though — the state will have to estimate exactly how much in sales, income, and other taxes Royals employees paid last year, and that’s likely only around $15-17 million, which would only be enough to cover about $250 million, less than Lucas is asking Missouri to kick in.

Once all the financial details are worked out, the whole deal still needs to go back to the city council for final signoff. And it could require a vote of the public as well, if the labor activist group the Missouri Workers Center has its way: An affiliate of the group submitted more than 4,500 petition signatures on Friday to force a public ballot on the Royals plan. Lucas pooh-poohed any notion of resorting to democracy, saying, “the deal is likely to be done before you would actually have a public vote on the deal itself,” which would either be in November or April of next year. Lucas says he hopes to have all the stadium paperwork signed off by the end of the summer — he may have to, if he wants to avoid giving voters a say in how their tax money is spent.

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Friday roundup: Manfred’s funny Rays poll numbers, Chiefs sales tax fight, MLS wants even more Big O money

access_time personNeil deMause

You probably noticed, but it’s Friday! Which brings us, with no further ado, to the rest of the week’s news:

  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said that he’s “hopeful” that a Tampa Bay Rays stadium in Tampa will win final approval, given that “we think the polling runs about 60-40 in favor of the stadium.” Actual polling shows that residents would like a new stadium in the abstract by a 58-29% margin, but oppose the Rays’ funding scheme by 59-34%; congrats to Manfred, I guess, on figuring out how to dispense with the actual asking-people-questions business and pioneer vibe polling.
  • Meanwhile, the Tampa Sports Authority has issued a letter saying the Buccaneers should get first dibs over the Rays on any available public stadium money, which isn’t going to make any easier the already difficult road to approval of the couple billion dollars in stadium subsidies Rays owner Patrick Zalupski is seeking from the city, county, and state.
  • People in Wyandotte County is worried that the state of Kansas may try to bigfoot it into expanding its STAR district to redirect more county sales taxes to a Chiefs stadium; in other news, Wyandotte County included a poison pill in the STAR district legislation that if the state tries to expand it, the county automatically rescinds it. It looks like at the very least the county would have to go back and revote on a larger tax district, at which point hopefully residents would re-up their concerns like whether siphoning off more county sales taxes could force the county to, say, raise property taxes to make up for any resulting budget gap.
  • The province of Quebec is already spending $870 million (Canadian) to put a new roof on Montreal’s Olympic Stadium because it’s too big to tear down, but MLS commissioner Don Garber wants even more public money to make it a “best-in-class experience” for CF Montréal. The MLS team mostly doesn’t play at the Big O — it occupies the 18-year-old open-air Stade Saputo for all but big matches like the home opener and playoff games — but may need to more once MLS switches to a fall-to-spring schedule next year, plus Garber says the smaller stadium is “an MLS 1.0 stadium” and the team needs “an MLS 3.0 stadium.” Why any of this is Quebec’s problem to solve, Garber didn’t say, beyond insisting that CF Montréal’s owners are committed to staying in town but need to “have a best-in-class facility to be able to drive revenue,” hint hint.
  • Records obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business show that Bears attorneys called or met six times with their city counterparts in April, even as team officials insisted that remaining in Chicago was off the table by then. The team says these calls were all about their current lease at Soldier Field; a city source told Crain’s their lawyers wouldn’t have taken six calls on that. This all matters because Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is still holding out hope for keeping the Bears in Chicago while team execs insist they won’t consider it — if nothing else, it’s going to make for an even more complicated decision by team owner George McCaskey in coming weeks about whether to pull the trigger on a move to Indiana or keep pushing for public funding for a stadium somewhere in Illinois.
  • The start of the men’s World Cup is only a week away, and already fans are excited to maybe have to cross a picket line if they want to go to games or at least dodge flaming naked mannequins and certainly not be allowed to bring in water bottles during the peak of North American summer! It’s not great! At least a member of the L.A. Host Committee has described the deal U.S. cities got from FIFA as a “very tough, one-sided agreement,” and … oh, he means one-sided that way. Welp.
  • “Portland’s own study said the Moda Center needed $500M in repairs — so why are the Trail Blazers asking for more?” asks the Oregonian, and the answer appears to be that the $500 million figure was just to “maintain the building in its current configuration in good working order,” while $600 million is to conduct a “transformative renovation” that can “support the power, technology, and production demands of tomorrow’s largest concerts and events.” In exchange for which, Blazers owner Tom Dundon has agreed to extend his lease on the newly transformed arena by … oh, he hasn’t said how long, or agreed to a new lease yet at all? Welp.
  • And if even after all those bullet points you still want more stadium content for your weekend, I was interviewed this week by Heartland Labor Forum’s podcast about the Kansas City Royals stadium plans, check it out here.
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KC mayor says new sales taxes will help pay off Royals stadium, but he can’t say how much or he’ll have to kill you

access_time personNeil deMause

And in the latest sign that George Orwell is our national showrunner this season:

Mayor Quinton Lucas told reporters that the city has projections for how much tax revenue a new stadium could generate based on what Kauffman Stadium in the Truman Sports Complex produces now — which city officials say is roughly $5 million a year.

But he has not specified what those projections are, and city staff isn’t giving them up just yet. When asked by The [Kansas City] Star for the information, Lucas’ office directed the question to city staff, who said the information is private because of active negotiations with Royals officials…

The city also declined The Star’s open records request for information related to the projections, citing state law that seals negotiated contracts until they are executed.

That is what’s technically known as some BS, maybe even some total BS, we’ll have to wait for the forensic linguistic analysis to be complete. While the state’s share of stadium funding is limited to what the team and its players and employees paid in income, sales, and other taxes in 2025 — a number that no one claims to have, though it’s been estimated as around $15-17 million — the city can kick in whatever it want, based on whatever it claims the stadium is “generating” in sales tax revenue. The scare quotes are because much of that money, around $5 million a year currently, is currently being paid into city coffers already by the Royals, who would simply be moving their spending to a different part of town. something that a city finance official readily admitted to the Star:

Jordan Berger, a spokesperson for the city’s finance department, said the city estimates Kauffman Stadium generates between $4.5 and $5.5 million annually. He said that figure does not include the revenue generated by the 1% earnings tax paid by visiting ballplayers nor indirect tourism revenue, like hotel taxes. Currently, that revenue is used to fund various general fund expenditures, like public safety, mass transit, and capital improvement.

No worries, though: Even though this is $5 million a year that is currently being used for other things that would instead be paid annually to the Royals, the city wouldn’t really be losing anything, because of something about isosceles triangles. Also, if the Royals were to move out of the city, they wouldn’t pay taxes on any of that money — try not think about whether locals would instead spend it on other things, that’s for economics nutjobs — and so it really isn’t costing city residents anything! Ned Balter must be so proud.

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Friday roundup: Rays execs propose “squishy” MOU to unlock stadium vote; Bears tax hike proponent crushed in reelection bid

access_time personNeil deMause

Now that the Tampa Bay Rays stadium push has been pushed back to beyond the end of this legislative session, maybe we can get on with looking at some of the week’s news from other cities. Though wait: Could the Rays actually be on the verge of agreeing to an actual MOU with the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County, which might be voted on as early as next week? Or maybe: Is this just a vague outline of an agreement, not even looked at yet by actual city councilmembers or county commissioners, meant to convince the state legislature that it should move ahead with its own Rays funding? But what about: OLEICAT?

Okay, fine: There is a draft MOU, and it is this. Its very first word is “NON-BINDING,” and it changes some stuff around from the last proposed MOU. Instead of this public funding plan from the city and county:

  • $272 million from the county’s Community Investment Tax 0.5% sales tax surcharge that was passed by voters after promises it wouldn’t be used for stadiums
  • $268 million from county hotel taxes
  • $132 million from county cash reserves
  • $30 million from the county disaster relief funds
  • $224 million from the city of Tampa via the Drew Park TIF district
  • $74 million from reply hazy, ask again later

It would now be this:

  • $360 million from the county Community Investment Tax
  • $263 million from county hotel taxes
  • $40 million from more county hotel taxes
  • $30 million from county stormwater infrastructure funds
  • $100 million from the city of Tampa via the Drew Park TIF district
  • $80 million from the city Community Investment Tax
  • $103 million in county money from reply hazy, ask again later

The first set of numbers totaled $1 billion and the second one is $976 million, meaning the total public cost has gone down very slightly! Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would still keep all revenues from the county-owned stadium; he appears to have dropped his demand for a $10/year rent for now, with the MOU only saying that a lease agreement with the county will be negotiated at a later date.

Rays CEO Ken Babby issued a statement boasting that the new MOU “protects all public funding currently allocated for police, fire, emergency management or response functions,” which is true inasmuch as it doesn’t dip into those particular budget pockets, but not true inasmuch as city and county governments with $975 million less in overall tax money than it would otherwise will find it harder to fund those things.

The new MOU was negotiated with city and county staff, not legislators, so this still has to get voted on by the Tampa city council and Hillsborough County commission — and then, since it’s nonbinding, presumably voted on again at some later date once all those blank spaces in the budget are filled in. (Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin described this MOU as “on the squishy side.”) In the meantime, this stopgap measure is intended to convince the state legislature to move ahead with approving its share of the deal while Zalupski’s buddy Ron DeSantis is still governor. It’s all a lot of balls to keep in the air, but if it all works out, the Rays’ stadium plan could at least live to fight another day.

Okay, now the rest of the news:

  • Add another casualty to the list of elected officials who have been voted out of office and/or shot in the butt for their support of taxpayer-funded sports subsidies: Porter County council president Andy Vasquez got stomped in his Republican primary to stand for reelection, and one reason may be that he supported a 1% county food and beverage tax surcharge for a Bears stadium in Hammond, whereas his opponent opposed it. (Hammond is in Lake County, not in Porter County, but the Bears are seeking tax money from both.) The counties aren’t set to vote on the tax subsidies until after a deal is struck to bring the Bears to Indiana, which seems like it would be the dumbest kind of throwing good money after bad possible, but hey, all the kids are doing it!
  • In tax subsidy news on the other side of the Illinois-Indiana Bears border war: Amanda Kass of Good Jobs First, who earlier this week worried that the Illinois megaprojects bill that the Chicago Bears owners want so they can get up to $2 billion in tax breaks on an Arlington Heights stadium would turn the state’s property tax base into “swiss cheese,” has penned an analysis of the bill along with Kristan Wong Karinen of Good Jobs First and Rita Jefferson of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy for Crain’s Chicago Business and concluded that it would result in “a direct property tax cut for corporations that other residents will pay for.” And since any projects costing at least $100 million would be eligible for the tax breaks, it would be down to individual municipalities to decide — which is especially worrying, they write, given that “billionaire developers come to the table with sophisticated financial models and experienced attorneys. Communities don’t.”
  • The Missouri legislature snuck $80 million into this year’s state budget for “wastewater, stormwater, and water infrastructure,” and some legislators are concerned it could be a stealth attempt to set aside money for a Kansas City Royals stadium project. “This is the stuff that makes me sick,” said state senator Maggie Nurrenbern, who noted that other programs received budget cuts even as this potential stadium slush fund was created.
  • “Vancouver city council could approve a deal by July with a potential ownership group in pursuit of a Major League Baseball team,” reports Business in Vancouver, before further reporting that “so far, no ownership group has publicly shown an interest.” But if some billionaire shows up wanting to get an MLB expansion franchise, and if they can come up with a way of building a stadium, and if MLB actually decides to expand, then Vancouver is willing to get in line along with Sacramento and anyone else.
  • No, the Atlanta Braves Battery project really doesn’t turn a profit for Cobb County, that’s not how math works.
  • Buffalo Bills fans have noticed that the new stadium they’re paying for with their state and county tax money so that team owners can make more money is charging more money for tickets, and now they’re unhappy.
  • The New York/New Jersey World Cup host committee has rented school buses to provide 18,000 rides to this summer’s soccer matches for only $20, providing a relief to fans but potentially undercutting New Jersey’s attempts to recoup its World Cup expenses by gouging on train fares. New York state taxpayers will be footing $6 million of the bus cost, courtesy of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
  • What do you get when you combine AI slop with clickbait vaportecture? The nightmare fuel that is “Ballparks Reimagined: If Every MLB Team Built a Stadium From Its Soul,” which is if anything even slightly more horrifying than the YouTube version three years ago.
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Friday roundup: County tells Rays no stadium approval by June 1, Blazers and Wild get pushback on subsidy demands as well

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to any new readers who are joining us for the first time this week in the wake of all the news craziness about the Kansas City Royals and Chicago Bears stadium deals. It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a speed run through stadium and arena news items that were otherwise overlooked this week. But first, one city has seen developments in its stadium wrangle that deserve attention at a bit more length:

One of the standard ploys in the sports stadium demand playbook is what in Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes we called the “two-minute warning”: Setting a deadline, arbitrary if necessary, and using it to get elected officials scrambling to determine how to fund a new sports venue with public dollars without taking time to think about whether to do so. But playing chicken, obviously, comes with the risk that your opponent won’t blink first, and that’s what appears to be happening to Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski, who has been informed that Hillsborough County will not be meeting his June 1 deadline for signing off on a stadium deal that could total anywhere from $2 billion to a lot more in public costs:

That deadline, the team has said, is necessary not only for the ballpark to open in time for the 2029 Major League Baseball season, but for the deal to be feasible at all.

On Thursday, the county attorney’s office informed the team that meeting such a deadline is improbable, according to a memorandum obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

A timeline, the memo reads, “cannot be reasonably considered” until all involved parties reach an agreement on the terms. After a preliminary agreement is reached, “it would likely take at least 60-90 days” to negotiate the deal’s development and funding obligations.

That’s perfectly reasonable, given that the county’s memorandum of understanding for the stadium still includes a lot of open questions and there is no MOU yet at all for the rest of the development that Zalupski says he wants to build atop what’s currently Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus. But it also messes with Zalupski’s timetable — not just that he wants to open a new stadium by spring 2029 (probably overly optimistic anyway, given that stadiums take three years to build and he’d have to tear down part of the college campus before he could begin construction) but that he desperately wants to get the deal approved this legislative session, before his pal Ron DeSantis is term-limited out of the governor’s office at the end of 2026.

Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby has already warned the county that “we would have no choice but to evaluate alternatives” if the June 1 deadline isn’t met, but Zalupski’s options are limited there: He’s not likely to be able to negotiate and push through a stadium plan in another city (Orlando has a big sign! Greensboro exists!) by June 1, so he’s going to be left having to work out a deal without the hammer of having Florida’s governor in his corner.

One alternative would be for the Rays owner to walk back some of his demands in Tampa. Leading Rays stadium deal critic county commissioner Joshua Wostal has said he’d consider approving just $268 million in hotel tax money, saying, “Start acting like a serious bidder. The offer is out there.” Of course, $268 million is a whole hell of a lot less than the $1 billion in city and county money that Zalupski wants, but maybe he’d be happy to take his $1 billion or so in state-gifted tax-exempt land and run with it, and give up on shaking down Tampa and Hillsborough County quite so hard? The only way to find out is to ask, and kudos to Hillsborough County officials for seemingly understanding that it’s both their right and their responsibility to haggle, and not being bullied into rushing into a deal.

Anyway, sorry for the Tampa-specific digression, on to the bullet points now:

  • Also in no hurry to rubber-stamp a rushed sports venue deal: The Portland city council, whose members are balking at signing a nondisclosure agreement to engage in Trail Blazers arena funding talks or sign a letter to the NBA supporting an arena deal. “If you want the public to support using public money to remodel a stadium, then you need to make the case to them in public about why using those funds is better than some alternative,” councilmember Mitch Green wrote on Bluesky. Blazers owner and renowned cheapskate Tom Dundon has already landed $365 million in state money toward arena renovations, but it looks like the remaining $235 million in city and county money could be a slightly harder lift.
  • And in yet another pushback to a sports subsidy demand, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has said that while he personally would be fine with giving the Wild $200 million in state money for arena renovations, “it’s going to be a tough lift in a non-budget year to be able to get that done.” Okay, that sounds less like “no” and more like “come talk to us in 2027,” and given that Wild owner’s Craig Leipold’s lease doesn’t expire until 2035 he can afford to wait, but it still counts as a kind of pushback.
  • Kansas News Service has done a deeper dive into Missouri’s potential funding for a new Kansas City Royals stadium at Crown Center, and found that it could be less than advertised: Last year’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act limits state funding to whatever sales and income tax revenue a team paid in the year before a stadium deal is agreed to, and for the Royals at Kauffman Stadium in 2025 that was likely in the $15-17 million range. That would only cover around $250 million in stadium bonds, a fair bit less than the “at least $350 million” to $900 million numbers that have previously been floated. If the state coughs up less, it could bring the public stadium subsidy down to $1.3 billion — unless the city’s $600 million that has yet to be negotiated turns out to be more than $600 million counting things like a repair fund, in which case it’d be more again. It’s becoming ever clearer that this whole thing is barely penciled out, let alone inked, but headline writers gonna headline write.
  • Whenever a sports team owner or elected official points to the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery stadium district as an example of a sports development project paying for itself, I make a point of linking to Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury’s paper on how no it di’n’t. But even academics know that nobody likes to read academic papers, so Bradbury has penned an essay for The Conversation — titled “Sorry, Tampa Bay, mixed‑use districts don’t reverse the dismal economics of sports venues” — that lays out exactly what did and didn’t happen in Cobb County, Georgia: The Braves owners are bringing in an extra $97 million a year from the Battery, while the county is running a loss of about $15 million a year. If it seems crazy that this sea of red ink is being held up as the kind of success story that other cities should emulate, such is the magical power of being a sports team owner in a country where journalism has long since given up fact-checking the press releases of rich dudes.
  • The wandering Athletics just released a new promo video for premium seating at their under-construction-and-they-swear-they’ll-finish-it Las Vegas stadium, and it is a hilarious supercut of what SF Gate describes as “AI-generated scenes of AI-generated people walking through the AI-generated models of what the club sections of the park might look like.” I’m not sure whether my favorite bit is how the AI fans are all wearing what appear to be A’s jerseys with the A’s logo removed or the multiple extreme closeups of wine glasses, but I can agree with Oakland sportswriter Dan Moore’s comment that “when I close my eyes and think ‘baseball’ I literally think the exact opposite of this.” SFGate further reports that they reached out to A’s officials to ask how much if any of this represented what a Vegas A’s stadium might actually look like as opposed to just AI hallucinations, but “an A’s spokesperson initially asked for a deadline extension to respond and then later came back and declined to comment,” LOLAthletics.
  • In less encouraging modern journalism news, WKYC reports “Cavaliers‘ impending playoff run already boosting business for downtown Cleveland bars,” citing precisely one owner of a bar a block from the arena who is “expecting steady traffic throughout the day,” which isn’t the same thing as “already boosting” at all. Bar owners more than one block from the arena were presumably unavailable for comment on whether they anticipated empty barstools while everyone was off watching the Cavs.
  • Friends don’t let friends who are concerned about being constantly surveilled and possibly targeted for being associated with people on New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan’s enemies list go to Madison Square Garden.
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Field of Schemes