Category: Kansas City Royals

Friday roundup: Rays to play 2025 in Tampa, and other things to make people mad

access_time personNeil deMause

The verdict is in for where the Tampa Bay Rays will play the 2025 season while waiting for their roof to be (probably) repaired, and the answer is: Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, spring-training home of the New York Yankees and rest-of-the-time home of the Tampa Tarpons. I’m going to go ahead and call this a fine enough decision: The stadium holds 11,000 people, not too far off of the Rays’ average 2024 attendance of 16,515; as a spring training site, it has major-league amenities; and it’s still in the Tampa Bay region, so Rays fans won’t have to drive across the state or the country to get to games. Plus, there are multiple fields on the site, so there’s no worry about schedule conflicts, since the Tarpons can just play on one of the back fields while the Rays take over the main one.

Of course, it’s also not in Pinellas County, which is already ticking off Pinellas County commissioners who already held up a vote on approving bonds for a new Rays stadium last month amid concern that the team might play elsewhere for a season or three. Commissioner Chris Latvala, who voted against the stadium deal in July, called the decision “unfortunate,” saying, “there’s going to be over $1 billion public funds dedicated from Pinellas residents to the Tampa Bay Rays, and the thank you that the Rays gave them was to play the games across the bridge in Hillsborough County.” Commissioner Rene Flowers, meanwhile, who voted for the deal in July, told the Tampa Bay Times she’s now not sure if she’ll change her vote, saying, “I’m waiting to see how it looks for us financially” — spoilers, Rene, it still looks just as bad as it did then.

And then there’s this tidbit:

The Yankees will receive about $15 million in revenue for hosting the Rays, a person familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because that detail was not announced. The money won’t come from Tampa Bay but from other sources, such as insurance.

Um, Associated Press, you drunk posting? First off, “Tampa Bay” is not a government entity, it’s a collection of disparate municipalities and counties, so who isn’t the money coming from, exactly? And “such as insurance” is both awfully vague and puzzlingly specific, as the only insurance policy that’s been discussed is that held by the city of St. Petersburg, which is already committed to paying for a chunk of the estimated $55 million cost of repairing the Tropicana Field roof.

Still many questions, in other words. Anyone else want to chime in?

“I’ll be excited to set a record for rain delays in a season,” Rays reliever and union player rep Pete Fairbanks said.

And as for the week’s other news:

  • Orlando’s stadium formerly known as the Citrus Bowl is set to get $400 million in county-funded renovations, something that Orlando mayor-for-life Buddy Dyer first proposed last year and which the county gave preliminary approval to back in January. The money would come from the “tourist development tax” — the same pool of hotel-tax money that Pinellas County is currently debating whether to hand over to the Rays — which according to the authorizing legislation can be used for building stadiums, or building auditoriums, or funding aquariums or museums or zoos or beaches or advertising tourism or a whole lot of other things, so long as the purpose is to get more tourists coming to your county. It’s actually somewhat difficult to argue that renovating a stadium that hosts a handful of college football games each year in order to make it “fully symmetrical” is what’s needed in order to encourage tourists to go to freaking Orlando, but this is what the county commission is being asked to vote on in the next couple of weeks, with a straight face.
  • A report by consultant Econsult Solutions Inc. commissioned by the city of Cleveland claims that the Browns leaving downtown would cost the city $30 million in annual economic activity and $11 million in annual tax revenue, which on the face of it doesn’t make any sense since Cleveland doesn’t have any taxes that are at 36.7%. A quick look at the report itself doesn’t reveal any more methodological details, except that Econsult apparently calculated its estimate that Cleveland would lose 29% of Browns-related spending by dividing the population of the city by the population of Cuyahoga County, LOLconsultants.
  • Personal seat license prices at the new Tennessee Titans stadium are in some cases going up from $750 per seat to $10,000 a seat, and season ticket holders are not pleased. But at least the PSL money will help pay off the public’s $1.2 billion share of the construction — oh, what’s that, the seat license money is entirely going to pay off team owner Amy Adams Strunk’s share of the costs? The Hog Mollies didn’t mention that part!
  • The city of Oakland’s sale of its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to private developers is on hold, apparently because Alameda County is dragging its feet on the transfer of its half of the site which it had previously sold to A’s owner John Fisher. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either, it looks to involve a lawsuit in progress charging that the sale violates the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that public land first be offered up for development as affordable housing — similar objections were raised about the Los Angeles Angels deal, you may remember, but that fell apart before it was ever resolved, so who knows what’ll happen here.
  • One long-rumored stadium site the Kansas City Royals definitely won’t be moving to is the old K.C. Star building, because it’s being converted into an “AI innovation facility.” A local wine bar owner called this “not the most exciting thing for the neighborhood” but at least a plan that wouldn’t require displacing local businesses, which is probably about right.
  • Diamond Sports Group, aka Bally Sports aka FanDuel Sports, has emerged from bankruptcy reorganization, with lots of consequences for the MLB, NBA, and NHL teams it formerly provided cable broadcasts of. ESPN has a rundown, but the main takeaway is that a bunch of teams are going to getting less TV money than they expected, which will effect everything from their player budgets to the relative importance of market size in terms of team profitability, while fans will get some new options including the ability to do pay-per-view of single games for a mere (?) $7 a pop. More on this as more dominoes fall, maybe, or check Marc Normandin’s Marvin Miller’s Mustache newsletter later this morning, if I know him he’ll be weighing in on this.
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Royals execs are going to keep throwing stadium sites at the wall until one sticks

access_time personNeil deMause

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman is reportedly exploring new stadium sites, including some across the state line in Kansas:

“The Royals are in real and advanced discussions with the state of Kansas to potentially build their new stadium in Johnson County,” [sports radio host Bob] Fescoe said on his show Tuesday morning, citing multiple sources. “It’s going to move fast and a lot of quickly.”

A lot of quickly, eh? Fescoe went on to say a potential announcement (of a site? of how a stadium would be paid for there? he didn’t specify) could come before the MLB Winter Meetings that start on December 8. The two sites mentioned by Fescoe are a former Sprint campus in Overland Park about six miles south of downtown Kansas City and two miles from the state line, and another a couple of miles northwest of there.

This represents the first real flareup of Kansas move threats since June, when that state’s legislature gave approval for secretary of commerce David Toland and eight legislative leaders from both parties to unilaterally approve selling upwards of $700 million in bonds apiece for new stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs, with the debt to be paid off with money from state sales tax receipts and state lottery proceeds. At the time, it wasn’t clear if Sherman and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt were serious about a Kansas move or just trying to nudge officials in Missouri to up their own ante — but since the latter has mostly fizzled for now, kicking the tires on Kansas makes sense as the next move, whether the team owners are serious about a move or just seeking to poke the embers on a bidding war.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, at least, seems game, saying “the border war that [the Kansas STAR bond plan] has reignited is unhelpful” and then in the next breath that “I think Kansas City and the state of Missouri are in an active position.” Lucas said he spoke to Sherman as recently as last week about stadium plans on his side of the border, though he didn’t divulge any details about a site or what kind of public money could be used now that voters there rejected a sales tax hike to pay for one.

If all this is reminding you of the Chicago Bears‘ eternal parade of potential stadium sites, it should, because it’s the same strategy: Keep dropping hints about different locations until one either sticks or shakes loose money from a different government body afraid of being left out when the music stops. For the Bears it’s been a matter of trying (unsuccessfully so far) to pit Chicago and its suburbs against each other; the Royals already attempted that last year with Kansas City and North Kansas City, but getting Kansas involved as well gives Sherman more options, for threats if nothing else.

Not that it’s much of a stick: If you don’t give us stadium money we’ll go across the border and let somebody else pay for it only works as a threat if the potential economic gains from hosting the Royals are greater than the public construction cost, and there’s almost no chance of that happening. But all you need is for one set of elected officials to bite, so expect Sherman — and the Bears owners, and the Cleveland Browns owners, and pretty much any other sports owners with two local jurisdictions that can be played off each other — to keep up the move threat gambit as long as is necessary to shake loose some government cash from somewhere.

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Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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County kills Chiefs stadium sales-tax vote planned for November, because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m being punished for not posting anything to the site yesterday by all the news happening today, right? Anyway, so this also happened:

There will be no vote this fall on a Chiefs-only sales tax measure. By a vote of 5 to 4, Jackson County legislators on Monday defeated an ordinance that would have put a quarter-cent sales tax measure on the November general election ballot.

If you’re scoring at home, that’s the revised sales-tax measure that Kansas City councilmember Manny Abarca introduced last week to fund about $300 million worth of a Chiefs stadium renovation. The vote then was 5-4 in favor, and yesterday it was 5-4 opposed, and the application of advanced mathematics allows me to determine that somebody switched sides in the interim, but the Kansas City Star coverage doesn’t report on who that was. It does report that the Chiefs owners did not support the ballot measure proposal, which seems bizarre, but maybe they think they have a better shot at getting approval for stadium subsidies that don’t require a public vote? Come on, somebody allegedly in the business of journalism, can you share some hints? KCUR? KMBC? No? Well, fine then.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas did post on Facebook:

The Chiefs will be playing in Kansas City, Missouri for a generation to come.

The Royals will be playing in Kansas City, Missouri for a generation to come.

Don’t get distracted by the day-to-day sausage making. Good work is getting done to ensure a positive future for all.

Sure, maybe? Not getting distracted by political posturing is always a good plan, but Lucas here is clearly doing political posturing of his own, so who knows. A generation from now we’ll look back at this time and think either “Wow, remember when people thought the Royals and Chiefs were really going to move if they didn’t get some crazy amount of public money from K.C.?” or “Wow, remember when people thought that the Royals and Chiefs might not get some crazy amount of public money from K.C.?” or “That Quinton Lucas guy had as bad a crystal ball as that 1970s Montreal mayor.” My bet, based on past history, would probably be on Door #2, but past performance is no guarantee of future results, though sometimes it rhymes.

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County readies re-vote on tax hike, this time just for Chiefs stadium, to see if voters hate that any less

access_time personNeil deMause

It looks like Jackson County, Missouri is going to go ahead and follow up the resounding April defeat of a referendum on raising sales taxes to fund new Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadiums by holding a redo of the vote, only this time just for the Chiefs. The new ballot measure would raise the county’s sales tax by 0.25% for 20 years instead of 0.375% for 40 years, and would leave out the baseball team — presumably because Royals owner John Sherman’s stated desire to build a new $2 billion stadium on top of an existing neighborhood with no guarantees of any aid for residents and businesses that would have been displaced was seen as too great a liability.

Whether Jackson County residents would really vote in November to approve a trimmed-down version of what they overwhelmingly rejected in April is another story. If the quick back-of-the-envelope math I just did is right, the present-value cost of skimming off those future tax revenues would go from around $600 million for the two teams combined in the April plan to around $300 million for the Chiefs alone in the new plan — which is better but not really that much better, since it would still leave the Royals to be dealt with. And while $300 million might seem cheap compared to some other recent NFL upgrades I could name, there’s no guarantee that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt wouldn’t try to wrangle state or city funding on top of a county sales-tax surcharge.

Of course, whether a re-vote can actually work may be less important to county officials than looking like they’re at least doing something in response to Kansas’ offer of potentially billions of dollars in state money: Jackson County legislator and new-stadium stan Manny Abarca told KMBC, “I think it’s about having folks at the table truly negotiating in good faith and not just sitting there,” which is an impressive bit of saying the quiet part loud. After voting 5-4 this week to amend the referendum proposal, the county legislature must hold a final vote on it next week to get it on the November ballot. If that goes through, we can let the shouting re-commence!

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Friday roundup: Royals float stadium atop public park, A’s financial plan may not be ready until December

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we come to the end of another programming week, one that at least managed to avoid having anyone propose building a new privately used stadium in a public park — oh, wait!

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has revealed that Royals owner John Sherman is considering other downtown stadium sites after there was so much opposition to his plan to build one atop the Crossroads neighborhood, and naturally one site is on top of a public park, that will go over so much better. Also, Washington Square Park and the adjacent site that would be used for the stadium only total 11.6 acres, which isn’t really enough for a modern MLB stadium and certainly not for one plus a whole entertainment district like Sherman wants. (The Crossroads site would have been 17.3 acres.) Can’t wait to see how the eventual renderings avoid explaining this!
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s financing plan for a Las Vegas stadium is “rounding third and heading home,” according to Nevada authority chair and unregistered A’s lobbyist Steve Hill, which is another way of saying it may not be ready until early December. Yesterday’s stadium authority meeting did include a bunch of lease details, like Fisher committing to keep the team in Vegas for 30 years but having the option to extend it to 99 years if he wants, and Fisher having the option to buy the stadium for its appraised value at the end of each lease term, and if there’s anything Nevada taxpayers get out of the lease other than $600 million in debt and tax expenditures, the news coverage didn’t mention it.
  • Cleveland.com has noticed that $461 million in city spending on Browns stadium renovations over 30 years isn’t the same as $461 million now, good work, gang. (Their estimate of the present value of Mayor Justin Bibb’s offer is about $234 million, mine was $240 million, reasonable people can disagree.) They also note that it’s not clear in Bibb’s plan who would sell the stadium bonds — Bibb’s office sent a terse text: “City will not bond. Some other public entity” — or how they would be paid off if alcohol or cigarette taxes fell short — Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam didn’t text “Not us. Taxpayers somehow,” but they really didn’t have to.
  • Speaking of the Browns, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has entered the chat.
  • The California state legislature is auditing the Los Angeles Angels lease extension that was approved in 2019 by Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu while he was in the midst of negotiating a new stadium deal in exchange for (allegedly) demanding $1 million in campaign contributions. There was previously some talk on the Anaheim city council about voiding the lease on the grounds that the whole deal was covered in slime; we’ll see where this audit leads, if anywhere.
  • WUSA-TV reported this week that the Washington Wizards and Capitals arena renovation deal with D.C. still hasn’t been finalized despite passing a July deadline, and I’m still waiting for any other news outlets to think this is worthwhile news and not just haggling over the fine print, but keep one eye on it nonetheless.
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project lives! No matter how dumb an idea it is!
  • This has nothing to do with stadiums, but if you think I’m going to pass up an article that begins “Billionaire Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio has allegedly been stealing sand from an exclusive Southern California beach,” you don’t know this site at all.
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Kansas official: Multibillion-dollar bidding war for Chiefs and Royals is “gross” but still “the right thing to do”

access_time personNeil deMause

The Missouri Independent ran a long article on Friday about the current border war between Missouri and Kansas over the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, much of which is about how throwing money at sports teams to move to your state is pointless, which you can probably skip if you already read this website. What’s more interesting, to me anyway, is what it says about how and why elected officials in both states are totally chill about engaging in a bidding war despite agreeing to a binding ban on interstate bidding wars just five years ago:

“I do not like this. It feels gross,” Kansas state Rep. Jason Probst said during a caucus meeting of House Democrats in June. “This whole show that’s going on feels disgusting to me. And it’s still the right thing to do.”

In an interview, Probst, who is from Hutchinson in central Kansas, said the reality of professional sports requires governments “to play the game” and offer public assistance, lest they risk losing teams altogether.

“You can stand on your principles. … But if another state isn’t playing by the same set of rules you are, then they’re going to make that investment and they’re going to take that away,” he said.

Yeah, that whole “this is bad policy, but if we don’t do it somebody else will” thing is precisely why development subsidy watchdogs have been saying there’s a need for cross-border nonaggression pacts for almost 30 years now. And Kansas and Missouri did just that in 2019, but unfortunately it only seems to have applied to Kansas’s payroll-tax-kickback program, not the sales-tax kickback program it plans to dip into for $1.4 billion or more of state stadium spending, so oh well! Also, apparently legislators back in 2019 forgot to say out loud that they were including an unstated “sports teams don’t count” clause:

“The sports teams are sort of in a special category of their own. I don’t think that’s what that legislation really was meant for,” [Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan] Patterson said of the truce.

The article also includes some dirt on the STAR bonds program that Kansas has approved for use on new Chiefs and Royals stadiums, noting that it is “often-criticized” and has mostly “failed at its goal of increasing tourism” and has even led to defaults on one project’s bonds when sales tax revenue came in slower than expected. Kansas officials point out that since these are revenue bonds, the state can just let the bondholders swing in the breeze if the bonds default; University of Colorado-Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter counters that that’s never going to happen:

“In the real world, there’s a huge risk to Kansas state taxpayers,” he said. “They’re going to have to decide to either bail out the project or do nothing. And if they do nothing, their credit, the state’s credit worthiness, will take a hit. And that will make all future borrowing more expensive.”

All of this is an excellent example of why relying on states and cities to agree to stop raiding each others’ businesses is a hopeless cause: As the 1995 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis paper cited above notes, there have been lots of attempts at interstate nonaggression pacts, and they’ve always ended up being broken by one state or another. The only solution is for Congress to step in — which U.S. Rep. David Minge tried to get it to do back in 1999 by taxing local level subsidies out of existence, only to find that his colleagues in the House had no interest in even giving it a committee hearing, doubtless because business leaders in their states wanted to keep those subsidies flowing.

The next best hope is that local officials on one side of the state border or the other decide to say “too rich for our blood” and let the neighboring state “win” the team and all the stadium costs that go with it, knowing that those can never be paid off by whatever small bump results in local tax revenue. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like anyone made this point in the Independent article, but hang on, I’m not to the end yet, oh look:

But this sort of jockeying between states only benefits team owners, said Neil deMause, a journalist who has written a book about stadium subsidies. Taxpayers and fans, he said, stand to gain little, especially if game tickets become more expensive at new facilities.

“All the economists I know say the best thing you could do is reject it for your state and have the stadiums get built in the other state,” deMause said. “You still get to go drive across the border and see the games the same way as you would otherwise … but you don’t have to pay for building the thing.”

What that guy said.

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Friday roundup: St. Pete okays $1B+ Rays stadium subsidy, A’s Vegas $ remains a mystery, Bears’ $2B ask still a no-go

access_time personNeil deMause

Was it only two weeks ago that I skipped the Friday roundup entirely on the grounds that nothing was happening? What Berenstain Bears universe was that? The stadium and arena news firehose is back on in full force, so let’s get to it:

  • The St. Petersburg city council indeed voted 5-3 to grant final approval to a $1.3 billion Tampa Bay Rays stadium that will come with between $1 billion and $1.4 billion in public subsidies, bringing almost to an end (the county commission still has to vote on July 30) one of the longest-running stadium battles in sports. “We are St. Pete!” shouted city chief equity officer Carl Lavender following the vote, either overcome with emotion or just reading the wallpaper. Rays owner Stu Sternberg declared, “I think, how it was put today, it was just the right time in the right place, and most importantly, the right people,” which is another way of saying that if a sports owner takes enough swings enough times, even a 15-year stadium losing streak can end up with them holding a ten-figure check from the public.
  • After the development agreement between the Oakland A’s and the Las Vegas Stadium Authority released yesterday revealed nothing specific about the team’s stadium funding plans, team board member Sandy Dean gave the authority more nonspecifics, saying owner John Fisher is in “good shape” raising money but providing no details of where it could come from other than that it would use $300 million in debt and $850 million in private equity and that “it would be a positive to have outside investors,” something A’s execs are “going to talk with folks about” in “the coming months.” (Who’s going to invest $850 million in a team that has an estimated value of $1.2 billion, plays in the smallest market in MLB, and starts out with $300 million in debt? Reply hazy, ask again later.) Dean also said that Fisher would only use $350 million of the $380 million in public funding approved last year, because reasons.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred did reveal this week that the artificial turf at the A’s broiling Sacramento stadium will be cooled by “a hydration element,” and if anyone knows what that means — sprinklers? underground cooling pipes? misters attached to the light poles? — please let me know in comments.
  • Also Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times asked a bunch of MLB players who grew up in Las Vegas what they thought of the A’s moving there, and replies included “it’s a terrible idea” (Paul Sewald), “I don’t see it in Vegas” (Bryce Harper), “as soon as they get a good team, they start trading guys before they get too expensive” (Tyler Anderson), and “the whole thing, I fear, is going to be an abject disaster” (Sewald again). On the other hand, Tommy Pham said, “They said the same thing about the Golden Knights: Would this be a hockey town? … Everybody wears Golden Knights stuff in Vegas now.” Opinions differ!
  • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker met with Chicago Bears officials this week to discuss their $2 billion state funding request for a new stadium, and Pritzker still hates it, with his press spokesperson saying afterwards “the governor’s position has not changed” from May, when he called the plan “a nonstarter.” Maybe Bears execs need to threaten to move to Indiana, that usually seems to work.
  • Jackson County probably isn’t going to hold another vote on Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium funding this year, but it could next year. Gov. Mike Parson will be out of office then, and the people running to replace him won’t be known until the results of an August 6 primary, so this could still go a lot of ways.
  • Paris cultural sites are preparing for next week’s start of the 2024 Summer Olympics by anticipating massive dropoffs in customers. In London during the 2012 games, visits to museums, movie theaters, zoos, and the like “dropped by a staggering 30 percent” as non-sports tourists steered the hell clear of the city, and Paris is expecting the same. “We’re the big losers of the Olympic Games,” said independent theater chain operator Pierre-Édouard Vasseur — though maybe he’ll rethink that once athletes start collapsing and dying from the heat.
  • NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says his league would consider expanding to Las Vegas once its new TV deal is finalized and arena developers have contacted the league for specs on building NBA-ready venues. Las Vegas, at last count, has as least three arenas that could host NBA games, but sure, building a fourth arena just for the NBA to host the fourth big-league sports team in the nation’s 40th-largest TV market makes total sense.
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Three months after losing sales tax referendum, Royals and Chiefs owners ready another one, this time with gun to voters’ heads

access_time personNeil deMause

When you’re the owners of a pair of sports teams and have your heads handed to you in a voter referendum to have the public pay for your stadium projects, what’s the next step? Why, wait a few months and then try, try again, of course:

“I do think before all this is said and done, Jackson County is going to have another vote,” said [House Majority Leader Jonathan] Patterson, the presumptive next House speaker.

What’s changed since Jackson County voters rejected a sales tax hike for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals by a margin of 58-42% on April 2, of course, is that now there’s the threat of the teams moving from one Kansas City to the other. Now that the state of Kansas has approved using state sales tax money to pay for 70% of new stadium projects, with no upward limit, the hope is presumably that the fear of having to cross state lines to see games can flip 9% of county voters to approve what three months ago they rejected. Patterson straight-up said as much yesterday: “I think now with the Kansas option staring us, staring us right in the face, I think that changed the dynamic, and it would be a different vote next time around.”

This gets us to one of the reasons it’s been so hard to get any lasting wins in the now nearly four-decade-old battle against public stadium subsidies: Team owners can absorb as many defeats as they have to, so long as they eventually get one victory. If they’re rejected by city officials, they can go to the state; if by the state, they can turn to the county. If a referendum fails, they can seek to have elected officials just override the results. Or they can just wait three months and call a do-over of the exact same referendum, this time with less carrot and more stick, and see if the results are any different.

(Or, yes, they could dip into the $400 million a year in league TV and sponsorship revenues they collect before selling a ticket. But that would be crazy talk.)

There’s still lots to work out about any new public ballot measure, including when it would be held, whether the terms of the sales-tax hike and how it would be spent would be the same as last time, and whether Royals owner John Sherman even wants to go that route again after his extreme personal anti-charisma helped torpedo the last measure. (Sherman still has a backup plan in North Kansas City in Clay County, Missouri, and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has met with officials there to discuss that possibility.) All options are on the table, really, which is kind of remarkable just 98 days after one of the more decisive anti-stadium-subsidy votes in recent memory — but apparently the lesson of 21st century democracy is if you have enough money and pull with local government, if you don’t like the election results, just wait a few minutes and try again.

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Friday roundup: Missouri gov vows bidding war for Chiefs and Royals, Coyotes (?) owner (??) throws in towel

access_time personNeil deMause

Has there ever been a week before this where two cities dropped a combined $1.425 billion on sports stadium subsidies? Actually, yeah, there was that week in April 2022 when Maryland approved $1.8 billion in stadium subsidies one day after New York approved $1 billion in stadium subsidies, which is honestly going to be tough to beat. Part of this is just how state legislative calendars work, with elected officials typically racing to get potentially unpopular bills passed super-quick at the end of sessions before anyone notices, but it can still feel alarming in the same way a couple of sports subsidy plans getting defeated in quick succession can feel encouraging. “Don’t get distracted by small sample sizes” is probably the best guidance, though “Whoever has the gold makes the rules” isn’t bad either.

Anyway, it’s Friday, so you know what that means! Let’s see what else has been happening:

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