Category: Kansas City Royals

Monday roundup: Royals stadium could cut into KC police budget, leave old site “blighted”

access_time personNeil deMause

Like I promised you, posts at unexpected times! Let’s kick off the week with the news of last week, extended:

  • The Kansas City council has approved plans to use sales tax money for a new Royals stadium that would normally be set aside for public safety expenses, which could end up cutting into avaible public funding for things like a new jail and police body cameras. “For us to divert those revenues to pay for a for-profit business,” said councilmember Johnathan Duncan, one of two councilmembers to vote against the measure, “is a concern. And I wish it were more of a concern to the mayor and my colleagues.”
  • With both the Royals and Chiefs apparently headed for new homes, a Truman Sports Complex Task Force has released renderings of what the site of their old homes could be redeveloped as, including what looks like a scaled-down Arrowhead Stadium, no Kauffman Stadium at all, “scenic trails” adjacent to a parking lot, and, sure, throw a Ferris wheel in there for good measure. No indication of how much all this would cost or who would want to pay for it, but “if we don’t do something with that area, it will stay in disrepair and it will be a blight,” said Jackson County Executive Phil LeVota, maybe somebody should have thought of that before offering to move the Royals to a new stadium?
  • The Athletic’s Portland sportswriter Jason Quick is officially done with new Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon already after he’s kept hinting at the possibility of moving the team if he doesn’t get every penny he wants for arena upgrades. It’s likely an idle threat, writes Quick: “A member of the St. Louis sports authority said the city has no interest in the Trail Blazers, and the appetite among citizens to build an arena is at an all-time low. Same thing for Raleigh, N.C., where Dundon’s Carolina Hurricanes play. And Nashville is not currently interested in taking on an NBA team and too close to another NBA market. City officials from Kansas City and Austin didn’t return calls. So I’m not sure where Dundon could take his circus next.”
  • Los Angeles Rams and Angels owner Stan Kroenke won a get-out-of-environmental-oversight-free card from the California state legislature for a planned San Diego arena project; the San Diego city council still need to approve the deal.
  • Here’s a rundown of the $5 million in campaign donations made by donors with ties to the Tampa Bay Rays this election cycle, including up to $25,000 apiece to Hillsborough County commissioners who voted for the team’s $2 billion stadium subsidy, and $48,000 to a commissioner who voted against it, more evidence that campaign donations don’t buy votes so much as they buy access.
  • Meanwhile, for anyone wondering how the Rays owners landed on Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry campus as the site of their new stadium, turns out it was local copier company CEO Dan Doyle Jr. who spotted it on an aerial map while visiting a local developer’s office: “I told them, ‘Let’s get in the car,’ and we all drove there. I said, ‘Guys, this is your site.’ And they loved it.” Nobody even needed to get in a helicopter!
  • Adding a roof to D.C. United‘s stadium would allow it to host an additional 65 events annually, according to a consulting report by CSL, LOL.
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New clown document claims Royals stadium will generate $1.4B in vapordollars

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City released a consulting report it commissioned on a new Royals stadium yesterday, with the intent of showing how it will pay off about $1.4 billion in taxpayer costs while team owner John Sherman is on the hook for less than $600 million. Let’s see how it compares to the typical clown documents:

Questionable authorship? The report is unsigned, so we don’t know exactly who at Chicago-based real estate consultants Hunden Partners actually wrote it. But company president Rob Hunden is a former real estate exec with a bachelor’s degree in finance and music while executive vice-president of consulting Bethanie DeRose has a bachelor’s in media studies and political science, so there doesn’t look to be a lot of economics firepower behind it. Hunden also boasts that he worked in the Indianapolis mayor’s office from 1996 to 1998, which may not be as much as a flex as he thinks given that this was the heyday of Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who never met a sports giveaway he didn’t like.

Opaque methodology? Most of the numbers are cited only to “Source: Hunden Partners,” which is not the footnoting style they should be teaching in finance and music school.

Fancy charts with big bold-faced numbers that don’t mean much? Absolutely. The key slide is this, which shows Hunden’s calculations of how much more money will be spent in the five-square-mile stadium district where sales, income, and hotel taxes will be siphoned off to pay for city stadium costs:

This projects that the “impact area” of the stadium will see an increase of sales of $880 million over 30 years, if you believe the big number at left, or an $80 million increase in its first year scaling up to $590 million in year 30 — and okay, those numbers can’t both be right, since the latter would add up to way more than $880 million over 30 years, even discounted for present value.

Not that it really matters, though, because Hunden appears to have only looked at impact on sales in the stadium district, not impact on sales in the city as a whole — so moving spending from in and around the Royals’ current stadium to a new one across town is counted as a net plus, even if it’s the same people spending the same money in a different part of the city.

Then there’s the following slide:

So $880 million in new spending around the stadium is somehow going to result in $687 million in new tax revenues for the city. That still isn’t enough to get to $1.4 billion, but don’t worry, there will also be another $462 million in tax money from “stadium” (?) and $120 million in restaurant taxes (separate from the restaurant taxes from the impact district?) and other stuff, according to [no source given, not even “Hunden Partners” this time].

Vaportecture with fireworks? Check:

The more I stare at this stuff, the less sense it makes. But then, I don’t have an economics or even a music degree, let’s see what a professional makes of it:

The Kansas City Star, to its credit, contacted University of Colorado-Denver sports economist Geoffrey Propheter, citing him as “skeptical” and “cast[ing] doubt on the district looping in businesses that could be miles away from the stadium and calls for incentives that align more closely with the footprint of the stadium itself.” According to Propheter, though, this isn’t quite what he said:

In short: There may be some actual information somewhere in this consulting report by underqualified professional sports hype masters, but we’d need a lot more background information, and probably some extreme rose-colored glasses, to see it. It all resulted in headlines saying “$1.4B in revenue,” though, so mission accomplished! Bats are giant bugs, film at 11.

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Friday roundup: Goodell meets with IL leaders on Bears, KC okays public vote it says won’t apply to Royals

access_time personNeil deMause

Slow news week, busy Friday roundup, as the saying goes. (I didn’t say it was an old saying.)

  • Roger Goodell and a Chicago Bears minority owner met this week with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative officials, and if you want to take that as a sign that the league and team want a better option than moving to Indiana, go for it. If you want to take it as a sign that they’re trying to create leverage on Indiana counties to approve all the requested tax subsidies, that works too. Could be both! It’s always important to have a backup plan.
  • The Kansas City council has scheduled an April ballot measure on whether future sports stadiums and arena funding will subsequently require ballot measures, prompting an immediate debate on what “future” and “subsequently” will mean for the Royals stadium plans. Missouri Workers Power says a yes vote would apply to a Royals project, Mayor Quinton Lucas says nuh-uh, this seems destined to be resolved by the robot lawyers.
  • Buffalo Bills execs say they’re listening to fan complaints about obstructed views and not being allowed to bring in water bottles to refill at their new taxpayer-funded stadium. “We anticipated it would be a bit of a learning process,” said Bills president of business operations Pete Guelli, who never could have expected fans would want to see the game or drink water, these kids today are so coddled.
  • Athletics owner John Fisher still hasn’t tapped the $380 million in state money he’s been promised for a Las Vegas stadium, after spending $700 million of his own money and money borrowed from Goldman Sachs and with $1.4 billion still to go. Why? Fisher hasn’t said, but it doesn’t really matter whose dollars get spent first, unless bond rates keep soaring and Nevada ends up having to finance the more expensive part of the stadium debt, that’d be bad.
  • MLB is looking at building a temporary stadium in a national park oh never mind they’re not now.
  • Sedgwick County, Kansas has run out of sales tax surcharge money to pay for upkeep of Wichita’s arena, leading local officials to try to find other money to avoid dipping into property tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund. (The county does collect some arena profits and naming rights money, but not enough to cover maintenance costs.) And since any money that the county spends on the arena is money that could have gone into the general fund, the current plan appears to be hitting up the city for the cash, on the grounds that the county “built the arena as a favor to Wichita,” sure, sure.
  • “Cities keep shelling out taxpayer money for sports stadiums, yet the economics almost never makes sense.” Accurate! Most of the Conversation essay by University of Tampa economic professors Abigail Hall and Aaron D. Wood will be familiar to regular readers of this site, but it’s worth bookmarking, if only for all the useful links to studies it contains on everything from how little positive economic impact sports venues have to how most sports spending is by local residents who would spend that money elsewhere nearby anyway.
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Royals mega-TIF district to divert taxes from much of downtown KC to pay for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City has revealed the dimensions of the mega-TIF district where all increases in sales and income tax receipts, and half of all increases in hotel tax receipts, would be siphoned off and given to Royals owner John Sherman to pay off a new stadium, and it looks like this:

The city didn’t provide an exact size for the district, but it looks to be a little over five square miles of downtown Kansas City. That means that, as the Kansas City Business Journal puts it, redirected taxes could “range from utilities selling power to new East Side homes to customers buying tacos along Southwest Boulevard, a roughly two-mile drive from the Royals’ site.”

On the face of it, that’s not as egregious as the Chiefs‘ plan to grab sales taxes from a 293-square-mile swath of northeast Kansas — though given that downtown K.C. is a lot more thickly settled than Wyandotte County, it could be close. The tax district is expected to generate $710 million in funds — over what time period hasn’t been reported — to help pay off $560 million in city stadium bonds, up from $510 million previously because reasons.

That’s a lot of tax revenue to give to the team, so how did Sherman and Mayor Quinton Lucas’ office justify it? By rebranding the TIF district as a “stadium impact area,” in the hopes that people will focus less on handing over sales taxes collected far from a new Royals stadium and more on how a Royals stadium will (somehow) create new economic impact miles away. That’s pretty bald-faced, and even K.C.’s legendarily credulous local news media couldn’t possibly—

Restaurants like Brick House and Martin City Pizza’s Crossroads location fall within the draft boundaries, and both said they are ready for the boost.

Deep, soul-rattling existential sigh. Much of my gripes on Friday about the glacially slow pace of change in the world of sports grifting were more musings from fatigue than anything — I didn’t really expect one book, or even many, to turn around a public policy that is creating so much in profits for such powerful people, like Silent Spring or something — but if journalists reporting on it could be just slightly less gullible, that’d be a nice start.

 

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium sticks Tampa students in trailers, Wyden wants Blazers owner to accept arena money or else

access_time personNeil deMause

After a summer where the owners of the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Rays each landed, in quick succession, about $2 billion apiece in public stadium funding despite widespread public opposition, I’ve been thinking even more than usual about what this site is hoping to accomplish. To report on and analyze sports subsidy shenanigans, obviously, but to what end? Over the years, the implicit objective has gradually shifted from “expose the scam so that people are empowered to stop it” to “inform people so that if ever there comes an opportunity to make change, they can take action” to “reassure people boggling that this is still going on that we’re not crazy.” And while the earlier goals are still around at least aspirationally, it’s becoming pretty obvious that, as the old Straight Dope tagline had it, this is going to take longer than we thought.

When Joanna Cagan and I set out in late 1995 to research the first article that ultimately became Field of Schemes, I could not have conceived that I would still be writing about sports subsidies 31 years later; I couldn’t have conceived that the public-money-for-private-stadium-profits game would still remain largely unchanged 31 years later. It still needs writing about — now more than ever, probably — but any hopes that calling out the emperor’s new clothes would result in prompt reforms are fading just a bit. Maybe the publication of J.C. Bradbury’s This One Will Be Different next month will be what it finally takes to shift the balance; probably not, given [waves generally at all of history], but sometimes things do get better, even if seemingly not lately.

Where am I going with all this? Venting, mostly: Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for better results may not always be crazy, but beating your head against the same wall does lose some of its charm after a while. But also thanks to those of you who continue to read and support this site, and to debate where all this is going and what it means for both sports and society in general. Hopefully someone somewhere is learning something useful enough to make a difference eventually, even if progress seems elusive much of the time.

Or maybe it’ll just let us laugh to keep from crying until the idiot robots kill us all. Either works!

  • Hillsborough College students are just now finding out they’re going to have to start holding classes in temporary trailers so the Tampa Bay Rays can demolish much of their campus for a stadium, and they are not pleased. “It’s kind of strange that we got to be in a trailer for classes,” said one student who claimed not to have received any word from the community college about the plan. “I’d say that’s definitely not really ideal for college students paying a lot of money to come to college.”
  • U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden is reportedly threatening to get Congress to consider rescinding federal tax-exempt bonds for sports projects unless NBA owners talk Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon into sitting down by the end of the year to negotiate how many hundreds of millions of dollars in public money he’ll accept for arena renovations. Given that Wyden is supposed to be acting on behalf of the American people at large and using tax-exempt bonds for sports venues is of zero benefit to the nation as a whole, if he has the power to get rid of them, he probably should just do it; if he just wants to get to keep meeting former Blazers players courtside, though, you do you, Ron.
  • What the headline says: “Chiefs’ stadium move already showing impact on real estate in Wyandotte County.” What the article says: One local real estate agent says one (unnamed) client got an offer on a property (unspecified) he’d been trying to sell for years after the Kansas City Chiefs stadium was announced. Surely a commercial realtor would have no reason to try to goose the market by inventing fake anecdotes, so I guess we’re all fact-checked here!
  • The Kansas City council is fine with holding a public vote in April on the Royals stadium funding plan, so long as it doesn’t actually affect anything. Construction is slated to have already begun by then, but ballot measure sponsor Missouri Workers Power says the vote could impact further city actions needed for the project.
  • I don’t know if “Ohio Democratic state minority tells the Republican gubernatorial candidate to fund his ineffective and regressive gas tax holiday scheme by using the money that would otherwise go to a Cleveland Browns stadium” is serious or a troll, but even if it’s the latter it’s a pretty funny one.
  • Jacksonville Armada F.C., a former NASL minor-league soccer franchise that’s been “on hiatus” since 2018 but is supposed to join the MLS Next Pro minor league next year, has failed to build a new stadium (likely having something to do with the previous clause in this sentence) on land it got from Jacksonville for $1, and now the city would like to be paid for the land, please. This is a pretty minimal ask — the land is likely valued at less than $1 million — but if this is a week for appreciating baby steps, at least it’s something.
  • The public park built next to the new Yankee Stadium to make up for the new Yankee Stadium being built atop a public park is falling apart, and it’s up to the city to find $54 million to fix it. “Everyone was excited about a new additional park in the community but no one thought about how expensive it is to have and maintain,” remarked city councilmember Althea Stevens, who may not be remembering quite right.
  • Las Vegas could build yet another arena for an NBA expansion team, because the umpteen it already has aren’t shiny enough.
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Friday roundup: Cleveland, Nashville keep throwing good stadium money after bad

access_time personNeil deMause

Running late today, let’s do a speed round:

  • Upkeep costs for the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena continue to climb, with one estimate placing them at $261 million, and the county-run Gateway Economic Development Corp. still doesn’t have money identified to pay for them. “We need to figure this out,” said Gateway board chair Virginia “GiGi” Benjamin; given that the Guardians’ and Cavs’ leases only run though 2036 and 2034 respectively, Gateway could always just not spend the money and dare the teams to break their leases a few years early, or at least ask the team owners to kick in a bit more if they don’t want Gateway to default, but still nobody seems to be considering that option, or at least pricing out whether it would be cheaper than spending $261 million.
  • The Tennessee Titans owners are seeking another $75 million for a pedestrian bridge to their new stadium on top of $1.26 billion to build the stadium itself, part of $700 million in public spending set aside for the stadium area, move over, Indiana, there may be a new grift-that-keeps-on-giving champion.
  • Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s lawsuit to get the city of Inglewood to repay him for about $400 million in roads, sidewalks, utilities, and other “public services” for his otherwise privately funded stadium has ended in a judge confirming that the agreement for Inglewood to cover those costs was nullified in a previous court ruling, so sucks to be you, Stan Kroenke. Expect an appeal, and for the two sides to try to settle out of court for a smaller amount.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver said it is his “hope and belief that the Trail Blazers can be successful in Portland, Oregon” but that they “need a state-of-the-art arena” but that he’s talked to Blazers owner Tom Dundon and wants to “lower the temperature bit in these negotiations,” all of which are very Adam Silver things to say. It seems like Silver would like for Dundon to find a way to accept a very large taxpayer check while also ensuring that the check is as large as possible, which is why the owners pay him the big bucks.
  • The Kansas City Star says the key difference between K.C. giving Royals owner $600 million toward a new stadium and giving Current owners Angie and Chris Long $185 million toward an expanded stadium is that the Longs are the ones selling the bonds instead of the city, which will “protect the city in the case of shortfalls.” Except that the Longs will get to repay their bonds with city sales tax revenues, so if there’s no shortfall in those, city residents are still on the hook for $185 million. Maybe all of Kansas City journalists need remedial economics lessons?
  • The Washington Commanders parking garages are no longer set to be translucent, now they will just be set in a featureless void or way far in the distance instead.
  • Longshot recidivist Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson (not that one) says he would resolve the Bears stadium battle by paying to build a dome atop Soldier Field and sell the Bears owners land for a new practice facility and give the team (and nearby homeowners) property tax breaks, at a cost of nobody has asked him, the media are just reprinting his campaign glurge, this is fine.
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KCUR gets Royals stadium math all wrong (again)

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City NPR station KCUR, which has a pretty bad record of trying to explain stadium financing, set out to do an explainer today on the city’s plan to spend $600 million toward a new Royals stadium, and how’d that go?

The plan to pay the $600 million Kansas City plans to borrow for or spend on the downtown Royals stadium relies on tax revenue that wouldn’t exist without the new ballpark.

Ooh, not great! Most of the $600 million would be paid off with tax revenue that wouldn’t exist at the ballpark — the money would come from increased sales and income tax revenues in the stadium district — but it could very well just be substituting for money that would no longer be spent at the Royals’ current stadium, or at restaurants elsewhere in the city, say. As J.C. Bradbury writes in his new book This One Will Be Different, in a quote that deserves to become as well-known as Allen Sanderson’s about the helicopter, crediting spending at a new stadium as all increased revenue for your city is “like moving a $100 bill from your right hand to your left, and then declaring that the money in your once-empty hand represents a financial windfall of $100.”

If revenue projections come up short, the city still has to cover the bonds through alternative means since the Royals have “no obligation to repay” those bonds.

That’s true as far as it goes: Kansas City is on the hook to cover the whole $600 million, regardless of whether it receives enough tax revenue from the assortment of proposed tax sources (there’s also a 1% sales tax surcharge in the stadium district and some other city money) to cover the principal and interest. But the implication that so long as tax revenues meet projections, K.C. taxpayers are fine, is not true — if some of this is tax revenue that would have been received at Kauffman Stadium if the Royals stayed put and would have gone into the general city treasury, then that’s money the city could have used for other public services, but now won’t have access to because it’ll be earmarked for the Royals.

In total, the stadium project costs $2.05 billion, with the team covering $911 million.

That’s only true if you don’t take into account the roughly $350 million in property tax breaks Royals owner John Sherman is in line for, or the benefits of getting to use the stadium for just $1 a year in rent. In reality, the public will be covering closer to three-quarters of a Royals stadium cost than one-half.

Friends don’t let friends read KCUR for their stadium news, I guess. It would be nice if more journalists would care about reporting the actual facts rather than what’s in the press release, but that’s been a problem for a long while now.

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Friday roundup: Vegas stadium board approves Raiders cash after “fastest meeting in the history of $75m giveaways”

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the end of another programming week, one that was way busier than you’d expect for the dregs of summer. Let’s get through the rest of the week’s news and get you out of here for the long weekend:

  • Also eager to get out of town for the long weekend, apparently: The Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which voted unanimously Wednesday to give $75 million from a “waterfall” reserve fund of hotel tax money to the Raiders, to be used mostly toward a $158 million upgrade of an entry plaza. The authority took this action after just two public comments and none from the authority board members themselves, in what local podcaster Dayvid Figler called “the fastest meeting in the history of $75 million giveaways.” Board chair Steve Hill presented the plan as in response to the “need to keep driving all those great results that Jeremy presented,” referring to Jeremy Aguero, the paid sports team consultant and hotel management degree holder who for some reason gets to do all the economic analyses of sports projects in Nevada. (Hill, of course, is an unregistered sports team lobbyist too, Las Vegas is truly a growth coalition at its finest.)
  • The Kansas City council put off a rezoning vote for a new Royals stadium district again, because they want to wait first to get all the city’s mega-TIF districts finalized first. The council could have waited to figure out how it’s going to pay for its $1.1 billion share of the project before approving the money, but there was democracy afoot, had to nip that in the bud.
  • The Royals deal is still facing not only a potential April public vote — plus a likely lawsuit over whether the city can move ahead regardless of the results since it already approved the Royals deal — but a lawsuit charging that the state money being used for the project was passed illegally; the Missouri state supreme court is currently mulling whether that suit can move forward.
  • Chicago Bears officials are finally getting around to asking fans if they would still buy tickets if the team moved to Indiana, and are they taking the opportunity to sell fans on a “surrounded by restaurants, entertainment, and green space, creating a true gameday destination” with “one of the most robust gameday tailgating environments in the NFL”? You bet they are!
  • New Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski says his new $2.3 billion stadium, built with the aid of $2 billion in public money, will enable him to move the team’s payroll into the top 10 to 15 in MLB, after years at the bottom. That’s never really happened before with past MLB stadiums — there are some lovely charts showing this in J.C. Bradbury’s new book, wait for it — but there’s a first time for everything.
  • Speaking of Bradbury, he has a nice article over at The Conversation analyzing why we’re seeing so many new NFL stadiums being built with public money right now when economists and taxpayers alike think they’re a bad idea. Tl;dr: It’s the leases, stupid (and the stupid leases).
  • The NHL’s attempts to pit Houston and Austin against each other to compete for a expansion franchise have at least started to pay off, with Houston Mayor John Whitmire saying this week that “We’ll definitely be a better location than Austin” and “If you talk to the sports franchises in town, I think they’d tell you we’re great partners.” Still no word on what kind of money Houston (or Austin) might offer toward a new hockey arena, but you know that’s what Gary Bettman is waiting to hear.

 

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Friday roundup: Tampa council approves plan to give $2B in public money to Rays stadium, says it’s not really public money

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa city council spent all day meeting yesterday about the Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, but honestly they could have saved time and just voted first thing in the morning. Public speakers were split in their opinions — public speakers are always split — and as for councilmembers themselves, there was little actual discussion for most of the day, with elected officials mostly talking past each other, knowing that everyone’s vote was already decided going in. The only reason you drop a half-finished bill on legislators’ desks less than a week before the vote is to avoid robust public debate, waiting till you know you have a slim majority then calling a snap vote while you know you have a W. The final vote was 4-3 in favor, same as had been since councilmember Bill Carlson used the leverage of his being a swing vote to win effectively no concessions whatsoever while patting himself on the back for doing so.

(WUSF claimed that the swing vote was councilmember Naya Young, but she’d already voted yes to the deal the first time it came up for a vote, leaving open the question of whether the NPR station doesn’t know what a swing vote is or just can’t remember as far back as March. The Tampa Bay Times, meanwhile, parroted Carlson’s line that Rays owner Patrick Zalupski will “cover” $100 million that previously would have come from city property taxes, even though Zalupski’s loan will still be repaid with city property taxes. This has not been a banner week for Tampa area journalism.)

The closest the council came to open debate was at the tail end of the meeting, whcn councilmembers took turns giving statements. I didn’t listen to all of it, but did hear councilmember Luis Viera claim that two-thirds of the stadium is being privately paid for because it’s “revenues from the project” — notwithstanding that it’s tax revenues that anyone other than Zalupski would be paying to the city treasury if they built such a project, but that instead will be kicked back to pay for the stadium costs; if that’s your criterion, everyone should get to write their yearly IRS checks to themselves, on that grounds that it’s tax money that “wouldn’t exist” without them. Councilmember Lynn Hurtak countered that the deal — what we know of it so far, given the many documents that remain unresolved — would put Tampa taxpayers on the hook for an unknown amount of future upgrade costs and called on councilmembers to “show we’re the smart city”; Carlson and council chair Alan Clendenin (yep, this guy) then mansplained at her to read the stadium funding agreement, something she’d already made plainly clear she had done, in detail.

There’s still a Hillsborough County Commission vote today, and while anything can happen, the council was universally seen as the higher hurdle here. For now, Tampa elected officials just voted to approve at least $180 million in future city property tax money plus $400 million or so in future city property tax breaks plus unknown amounts of future property tax kickbacks for additional upgrades, plus $1.5 billion or more in county and state subsidies, all to build a stadium for a billionaire team owner with no other offers on the table from other cities, after hardly any debate and before all the documents have been finalized. If there’s any upside, it’s that the interminable Rays stadium saga appears to be nearing an end, at least for the next couple of decades until the team’s lease at the new place gets close to running out; the cost is only the most expensive taxpayer stadium subsidy in MLB history.

Will other cities be the smart city? Let’s see how stadium and arena matters are going elsewhere:

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’s explanation for spending an extra $7 million a year on bond payments for a Royals stadium is that it’s not just to get around a public vote, it’s also that the more expensive bonds would be easier for the city to default on. With a sales pitch like that, the city may end up having to offer an even higher interest rate than 5.725% to get anyone to buy their stadium bonds.
  • The Beacon News, meanwhile, says that even though Royals owner John Sherman will only be putting up $55 million for a community benefits agreement against $600 million in city funding, that’s fair because tithing one-tenth of your income to private charity is a Christian tradition. That’s not even true, but it wouldn’t make any more sense if it were, just let it go, it’s been a bad week for journalism all around.
  • NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said he has talked to some Illinois legislators about getting a Chicago Bears stadium done in that state. “We want to make sure that Arlington Heights and Illinois have an opportunity, as well as Indiana, to put their best foot forward,” said Goodell, presumably because “The bidding is now open!” would sound too crass.
  • The Alpharetta City Council approved zoning changes that could lead to an NHL arena in Atlanta’s far northern suburbs, if Atlanta’s far northern suburbs got an NHL team, which nobody is predicting will actually happen.
  • There could be a bidding war for the Oakland Arena between arena management titans Legends Global and Oak View Group, though both parties appear to be offering roughly the same amount of money (roughly $100 million), instead competing on which company can provide better “long-term stewardship” for the venue.
  • Sports teams are really expensive when you’re bidding against billionaires, film at 11.
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KC to spend extra $7m a year on paying off Royals bonds just to avoid public vote

access_time personNeil deMause

The Beacon ran a long article late last week about the Kansas City Royals stadium proposal that includes a bunch of worthwhile analysis of the deal, including why using taxes from in and around the stadium isn’t really the project “paying for itself.” (“Some ballgame attendees might be going to a Crown Center restaurant instead of a Waldo restaurant that day. That shift in economic activity within Kansas City is a net neutral from a tax revenue perspective.”) But the most interesting part is buried many paragraphs down, in a discussion of the type of bonds the city plans to use to borrow $600 million for stadium costs and why:

Kansas City intends to issue these Royals bonds as “special obligation bonds,” as opposed to revenue bonds or general obligation bonds. That means that the city is essentially promising to pay back a certain amount of money every year…

If the city wanted to get a lower interest rate, it would have needed to take the stadium proposal to a public vote — either for a sales tax as Jackson County did or for general obligation bonds, using property taxes.

The going interest rate for K.C.’s special obligation bonds, reports the Beacon, is 5.725%, compared to 4.25% for general obligation bonds. Applied to a $600 million loan, this means that Kansas City is going to be spending about $7 million a year extra on stadium bond payments in order to avoid a public vote. That’s money that, if it were used to finance other city spending, could cover about $117 million in different public needs, if the city had gone the voter-approval route for the Royals project. But you can’t put a price on not letting the people vote, or rather you can, and that price is $117 million.

In other evading-democracy news, meanwhile, Mayor Quinton Lucas’s rush to get a Royals deal down on paper before anyone could try to force a public vote seems to have run afoul of another small matter: the residents of a 33-story apartment building adjacent to the stadium site who say the project would be infringe on their property rights, and who are now suing to block part of it.

According to the lawsuit filed Monday in the Jackson County Circuit Court, the [San Francisco Tower] condominium’s association is seeking a temporary restraining order and an injunction against three defendants — the city of Kansas City, the Royals and Crown Center — for protections over its longtime easements and property rights.

Some of the property rights include:

  • An approximate 0.835-acre central mechanical plant and maintenance shop;
  • A transformer and primary switchgear rooms;
  • Utility tunnels, including a 24-foot-wide tunnel under Grand Boulevard;
  • A pedestrian bridge;
  • A 400-space parking garage
  • A passage over San Francisco Garden.

The association states that plans for 68-acre ballpark district show the tower surrounded, as well as the stadium approximately 100 feet from the condo’s entrance.

All this building infrastructure is on Crown Center property, but the condo association says it has easements in place guaranteeing it the right to use the property for this stuff. The residents say they’ve been trying to negotiate with Royals execs, the Crown Center, and the city since May, to no avail, and so are seeking a restraining order and injunctions against the part of the project that would infringe on their rights, though they’re not seeking to stop the project overall.

This is all pretty embarrassing for Mayor Quinton Lucas not to have addressed sooner, but then, crossing all his t’s in a timely fashion doesn’t really seem like one of his core strengths. Lucas said yesterday that he “will support all parties in reaching an amicable resolution whether through the Court’s declaration of rights outside the stadium footprint, as sought here, or through alternative dispute resolution.” No word yet on whether an injunction might have any impact on the inevitable lawsuit over whether a public ballot measure will be ruled to come too late to overturn the stadium plan, assuming voters give it a thumbs-down; governance is too important to be left to the masses, which is why we instead leave it to bond financiers and city lawyers, apparently.

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