Category: Kansas City Royals

Friday roundup: Kansas-Missouri stadium border war gets hot, yet another non-economist cited as economics expert

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy heat dome Friday! Hope those of you in the parts of the U.S. that are broiling are staying inside watching soccer tournaments and cranking the air-conditioning and … okay, maybe that isn’t the best plan. We’ll try to come up with a better one before the Paris Olympics, which will once again provide athletes from around the world with the opportunity to compete for medals and maybe die of heatstroke. (Or mutant sharks. But more likely heatstroke.)

Where was I? Oh, right, stadium and arena scams, plenty of those to go around while we wait for the world to boil:

  • Missouri elected officials are up in arms over Kansas elected officials’ passage of legislation to allow selling billions of dollars of tax-funded bonds to lure the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals across state lines, and are also prepared to work on their own stadium subsidy legislation in response. “Today’s vote regrettably restarts the Missouri-Kansas incentive border war, ” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, adding, “We remain in the first quarter of the Kansas City stadium discussion.” Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson, calling the Kansas stadium bond legislation “a wakeup call to Missouri,” said he expects his state to put together its own legislation later this year. It’s all going according to plan!
  • Meanwhile, some developer dude took it upon himself to hire an architecture firm to design a rendering of a Royals stadium on the Kansas-Missouri border, with most of the stadium in Kansas but the right field wall in Missouri, that wouldn’t cause any problems figuring out which state would collect sales taxes to then kick back to team owner John Sherman. Lots of nice fireworks and people flinging their hands in the air, though.
  • WTOP reported Wednesday: “The projected benefits of a new Washington Commanders stadium being built in D.C., which were detailed in a report the city released last week, are largely honest and reasonable, according to a University of Maryland economist who reviewed it.” Unfortunately, three sentences later the radio news station revealed that Michael Faulkender is actually a finance professor, not economics, which is not the same thing at all. The University of Maryland does have an economist who’s an expert in stadium deals, but WTOP didn’t ask him for his opinion, they must have wandered into the wrong classroom building, that probably happens a lot.
  • Facing a vote on whether or not to commit to spending $775 million in public money on upgrades to Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s stadium, the Jacksonville city council yesterday pushed back — on spending $94 million on affordable housing and homelessness prevention as part of an accompanying “community benefits” package. The council says it’ll still come up with the money after taking “some time this summer to work on this,” and it doesn’t affect the $150 million from Khan for community benefits (over 30 years, so really only worth about half that amount), so nothing to worry about, elected officials never go back on their promises!
  • Charlotte was apparently “working on [a Carolina Panthers stadium] deal for a year and a half” before letting the public in on the details, yeah, that might be a story.
  • I personally prefer not to get my news in video form, as you’ve no doubt noticed from the endless scroll of plain text that is this website, but if you do, this report from More Perfect Union on “How Sports Team Owners Scam Communities Out of Billions”  is worth checking out: It has me in it, and also an A’s fan organizer saying “we’re all about kicking John Fisher in the nuts,” what’s not to like?
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Kansas approves “blank check” bill for Royals and Chiefs stadiums, leaves final spending decision up to handful of politicians

access_time personNeil deMause

Yesterday, after only a few hours of discussion and zero public hearings, the Kansas state house voted 84-38 to approve a bill to pay for up to 70% of the cost of new stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs; the state senate voted 27-8 to approve the measure shortly afterward.

As discussed yesterday, the bill authorizes the sale of bonds starting at $700 million for each stadium project, and with no upward limit, to be repaid with a combination of sales tax kickbacks and state lottery money. Additional details include:

  • Once Gov. Laura Kelly allows the bill to become law, either by signing it or by declining to veto it, the decision of where to build a stadium and how much to pay for it will be up to one state official, Kansas secretary of commerce David Toland (who is also the lieutenant governor). He would then have to get it approved not by the full legislature, but only by an eight-person Legislative Coordinating Council that includes House and Senate leaders from both parties. And the council would be able to debate the stadium projects entirely in private before voting publicly.
  • The bill would allow a STAR tax-kickback district to be created around any team facility, meaning if the Chiefs move their practice facility to Kansas as well, there could be as many as three districts where all new sales taxes are redirected back to the team owners.
  • Some state legislators wondered if the Chiefs and Royals would be able to apply for additional subsidies as well, such as PEAK, which kicks back payroll taxes to businesses that relocate to the state. “We don’t have all the details of this,” said state Rep. Henry Helgerson.
  • The Kansas City Star, in an otherwise good article, included asides that “the vote represents a major bet by Kansas that both teams and their sports will remain popular, economically viable enterprises into the second half of the 21st century” and that “the broad support for the plan reflected a clear desire to ensure the Chiefs and the Royals don’t leave the Kansas City region,” neither of which exactly makes any sense: Kansas can lose tons of money on this deal even if the teams remain popular, and neither the Chiefs nor Royals have discussed leaving the Kansas City region.
  • Speaking of not making sense: “Sen. Rob Olson, an Olathe Republican, predicted that a new stadium would host a Super Bowl within a few years. Discussing the potential revenue the event would bring in, he called the proposal a ‘gold mine for Kansas.’ ‘We owe it to the Kansas City Chiefs if they want to come to Kansas,’ Olson said.” Um, no.

Both Chiefs owner Clark Hunt and Royals owner John Sherman were noncommittal after the vote about taking Kansas up on its stadium offers, and it seems very likely that this will be just the beginning of a cross-border bidding war. (Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson said any counteroffer will likely wait until after the August primaries, because “before the primary, there would be a lot of politics involved,” which is a polite way of saying “we don’t want people holding us responsible for our stadium vote on election day.”) This would be in apparent violation of a truce agreed to in 2019 by Kelly and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to stop poaching each other’s businesses with tax breaks — that agreement is supposed to be legally binding, though it also expires next year, so Kansas may just have to wait a few months to make an actual offer to the team owners.

Tl;dr: Kansas elected officials just dropped a $2.45-billion-and-up subsidy package on the table to lure the Chiefs and Royals across the border, with no public debate, despite it being against the law. There’s a lot to be said here, but suffice to say that predictions the national tide was turning against giant stadium subsidies following the defeat of the Royals/Chiefs sales tax referendum and the Virginia arena proposal may have been just slightly premature.

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Kansas legislature proposes “blank check for billionaires” bill to lure Chiefs, Royals across state line

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas legislators introduced a bill yesterday to provide public funding for new stadiums to lure the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals across state lines, and while we knew this was coming, we didn’t know how much taxpayer money would be at stake. That’s now coming into focus, and it looks like the public price tag is going to be a whole lot more than was previously revealed:

  • While Kansas is already permitted to sell so-called STAR (Sales Tax And Revenue) bonds to fund up to 50% of private development projects, the new legislation would raise that limit to 75% for projects costing over $1 billion.
  • As was the plan when Kansas stadium funding was first discussed back in April, the state would kick back all new sales tax receipts from in and around the stadiums to pay for construction — which, assuming that the stadiums were built on currently unused land, would mean all sales taxes from the stadium districts, with no apparent limit on how wide a circle could be drawn to siphon off taxes from.
  • The bill would kick back 100% of taxes on alcohol sales in the district, even if the current site already generates some of these.
  • The proposal would make permanent additional payments from state lottery proceeds into a fund the state is considering tapping for stadium costs, which could provide an additional $10-25 million a year, or around $150-400 million in total present value. As the Kansas City Star notes, “If a project encountered difficulty making bond payments on time, lawmakers would likely face pressure to increase the amount of Lottery revenue sent into the fund, which would reduce the amount of Lottery revenue available to fund the state government.”

How much all this would add up to is unknowable, but if you’re talking two $1-billion-plus stadiums, 75% of that would be anywhere from $1.5 billion to who knows, leading economist Geoffrey Propheter to call the bill “a blank check for billionaires.” In layman’s terms, it would be a buttload of money to shell out in exchange for having two pro teams play on your side of the state line — something Kansas would never recoup through new state tax revenues, and which would just contribute to the ever-worsening war between the states to see who’ll exempt corporate titans from the most taxes, leaving the tax burden on other residents and business owners.

The Kansas legislature is set to start a special session today that will likely largely focus on stadium funding, but state legislators kicked things off last night by meeting at a local steakhouse with what the Kansas Reflector summed up as “lobbyists, a Royals executive and representatives of organized labor,” all of whom were seeking to convince them to rubber-stamp the plan. If that happens, Gov. Laura Kelly has already indicated she’s likely to go along with whatever the legislature votes for, so this could get approved fairly quickly.

With so much still in flux, including how much the stadiums would cost and where they would go, we’re looking at a two-stage process: first the passage of the bill authorizing stadium bonds, then actually figuring out what number to fill in on that blank check. Twitter is already calling out Missouri for getting pwned, and economist Twitter is clapping back that getting to watch Chiefs games while the state next door pays for the stadium seems like a pretty good deal for Missourians. To see which carries more weight with legislators, head to your local steakhouse and ask to be seated in the smoke-filled room.

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Kansas City Royals threaten to move to Kansas City for tax kickbacks

access_time personNeil deMause

We already saw Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt use the “explore all our options” line after April’s defeat of a sales-tax hike to fund stadium upgrades, hinting about moving the team if he doesn’t get what he wants in the K.C. area, and now it’s Royals owner John Sherman’s turn:

In a statement made Saturday, the Royals said for the first time that STAR bonds are on the table for them. They also reiterated that they started “evaluating all options,” after the stadium sales tax extension failed just over two months ago, and have said so all along.

“As we’ve said since April 2, we must evaluate all options that may be available to us with respect to a new stadium. The Royals need a place to play baseball in the near future and the recent STAR bond discussions in Kansas provide a path for us to explore.”

I mean, I guess it’s the first time Royals management has said that STAR bonds — aka sales tax increment financing, aka kicking back sales taxes from in and around a stadium to pay off construction costs — are an option for a Kansas stadium. But the Kansas legislature was already considering STAR bond legislation for new stadiums for both teams back in April, before deciding not to pursue it (for the moment at least), and also the numbers show sales tax kickbacks almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to pay for new stadiums for both teams, so more money would be needed from somewhere else as well.

Regardless, the owners of the two teams seem to be trying to set up a bidding war between officials of the two states:

State officials have even gotten involved in the struggle, with Governor Mike Parson saying he will “do everything we can” to keep the Chiefs and Royals in Missouri. On the Kansas side, Rep. Sean Tarwater thinks Kansas and its STAR bonds will “be better than anything Missouri can offer.”

This makes total sense for the team owners, as it’s the only real leverage they have without trying to threaten to move to Greensboro or San Antonio or wherever: Get two local jurisdictions fighting over bragging rights for who gets to host the team. (We already saw Sherman try this with Jackson and Clay counties in Missouri.) Unfortunately, given the dollar amounts at stake, these would be awfully expensive bragging rights — there’s no possible way either state could ever come close to earning back the hundreds of millions of dollars Hunt and Sherman will be demanding, solely from the benefit of having sports fans spending money on their side of the border. In this case, even the largely mythical benefit of having your city’s name mentioned on the telly doesn’t apply, because it would still be the same city name, even if not the same city, thanks to there being two Kansas Cities because historical reasons.

As of now, the state of Kansas STAR bonds remains in limbo, with top legislative leaders supporting them while Gov. Laura Kelly seems less enthused. (Kansas has a Republican-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor.) The legislature is set to start a special session on June 18 to focus on tax cuts for Kansas residents, and I guess this would sort of qualify, except that Sherman lives part-time in Missouri and part-time in Florida, and Hunt lives in Texas, but “tax cuts for state residents and for very rich people who live somewhere else but really want them” would be a little wordy for the press release. Anyway, stay tuned.

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Friday roundup: St. Pete council says loud parts quiet on Rays stadium, A’s Vegas plans get even murkier

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week has run its course, but before we get to the remaining news tidbits, we have one new news item to attend to:

The St. Petersburg city council took up its discussion of a Tampa Bay Rays stadium project yesterday, and team execs led by releasing a pile of new renderings, no doubt figuring correctly that even if they don’t show much more than the old renderings — we still don’t see the inside of the stadium, for one thing — they’d still dominate the news coverage. Rays execs still had to answer questions at the council “workshop,” though, and questions there sure were, including about guarantees that affordable housing will be built, why the city should be on the hook for $142 million in infrastructure costs, whether the community benefits agreement could provide more community benefits, and whether the projected tax revenues to pay for the whole mess depend on monkeys flying out of J.C. Bradbury’s butt.

Nobody on the council appears to have asked the “$1.5 billion in public subsidies, really?” question, though. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, who’s staked out a position as a critical-but-not-too-critical advocate for the deal, called this “refreshing” because “no one attacked it as a nonsensical corporate giveaway.” (Karla Correa of the St. Pete Tenant Union did say “We desperately need public housing, we don’t need more of these public, private partnerships” and “we should not be giving away upwards of a billion dollars of our taxpayer’s dollars,” but she said it at a protest outside the council hearing, so she doesn’t count, I guess.) One of the more critical councilmembers, Richie Floyd, when asked if there were enough votes on the council to kill the deal, said “no,” so it sounds like the council debate will mostly be nibbling around the edges; there’ll be another workshop session next month, which may shed more light on the likely endgame.

Okay, now the news tidbits:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher may have selected the site of the old Tropicana hotel for a new Las Vegas stadium, but it turns out he and landowner Bally’s still don’t know which part of the site the stadium would go on, and NBC Sports has the explanation: “because the project’s master plan has yet to be completed.” That’s, uh, not actually an explanation, it’s just saying the same thing a different way? Anyway, add “Where exactly will it go?” to “How will it fit?” and “Who will pay for it?” and “Will the public money approved so far get overturned by referendum or lawsuit?” on the list of unanswered questions about the soon-to-be officially cityless Athletics franchise’s future stadium plans.
  • Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens says he’s against giving $600 million in state money toward $1.2 billion in public funding for a $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, because “we don’t have $600 million to give” and “it’s really easy to not support it when you don’t have it.” Then Stephens said he would prefer to raise the money by selling bonds, which suggests he either isn’t really against it or doesn’t understand that bonds have to be repaid somehow — apply Hanlon’s Razor as you see fit.
  • DaRon McGee, the Jackson County legislator who introduced the sales tax hike plan to funnel $500 million or so to the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs for stadium projects before it was trounced in a public vote, turns out to have asked the Royals’ stadium front man and team owner John Sherman’s personal assistant for box seats to a game in the run-up to negotiations. McGee says it’s all cool, he paid for the tickets now that somebody noticed, get off his case, okay?
  • The Richmond city council voted to issue $170 million in bonds to build a new stadium for the Double-A Flying Squirrels, to be repaid by hotel and restaurant tax surcharges in the stadium district. The plan was immediately met by a lawsuit from local attorney Paul Goldman saying the bonds should have gone to a voter referendum; Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney dismissed Goldman as a “gadfly,” which is at least better than the time Goldman successfully sued to block a casino project and got called “a white Jew with a background of Judas,” so, progress?
  • Albany and New York state officials are talking about building a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium as part of a $300 million downtown redevelopment, to be paid for by “still unknown.” Gov. Kathy Hochul is involved in the talks, though, so we can probably guess what direction this is headed.
  • The Atlantic ran an overview this week of the state of stadium subsidies, and while I could nitpick a couple of things — crediting Camden Yards for the new-stadium boom leaves out the earlier formative effects of Toronto’s Skydome and Chicago’s New Comiskey Park, and shutting off the supply of federally tax-exempt bonds wouldn’t really be the most effective way to eliminate the problem — but I get quoted saying, “Teams need a place to play, and if local governments told them to pay a fair rent or go pound sand, owners would have little choice but to go along,” so I wholeheartedly endorse it.
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Friday roundup: KC pol seeks to revive sales tax hike for Chiefs only, A’s stadium plans still extremely ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a week, for a lot of reasons as well as my trip yesterday to an unseasonably hot Philadelphia to talk with city council staff and community members about the 76ers‘ much-unloved arena plans, so I’m declaring editorial privilege to go straight to an abbreviated news roundup:

That’s all I have in me today — if I missed anything, feel free to bring it up in comments. Have a good weekend, and try to stay cool!

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Kansas legislators’ plan to funnel $2B+ in sales taxes to Chiefs, Royals stadiums is dead — for now

access_time personNeil deMause

At last word last night, the Kansas legislature was set to vote on a bill to provide $2-3 billion in sales tax kickbacks toward potentially two new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. How did that work out?

Renderings from Manica Architecture show a potential domed-stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs

Thanks, don’t really want to see renderings right now. Did the bill pass or not?

Stadium architect shares renderings hoping to bring Chiefs to KCK

The funding bill. What happened to the funding bill?

Here’s what a Chiefs stadium in Kansas could look like, and some necessary context

Didn’t anybody go to the last night of the legislative session? ESPN, whatcha got?

An effort to help the Super Bowl champion Chiefs and the Royals finance new stadiums in the state fizzled over concerns about how it might look to taxpayers.

Okay then!

The failed bill was what’s called in Kansas a STAR bond, but is broadly known as a STIF, or sales tax increment financing. The idea would be that all new sales tax revenue from in and around each stadium would be kicked back to pay the teams’ construction costs. Crucially, the state of Kansas can issue STAR bonds without a public referendum, so the legislature could have approved it without any risk of it failing at the ballot box like happened across the border in Jackson County, Missouri.

How would the math have worked out on raising $2-3 billion just from new sales tax revenues? Really, really badly, according to University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter:

Expanding all those abbreviations: If Kansas spent $4 billion on stadiums including infrastructure, the state’s annual debt service on bonds with a 4.5% interest rate would be $250 million a year. For the state’s sales and use tax to cover those debt payments, each and every Royals fan who showed up in a given year would have to spend $700 on taxable goods; each Chiefs fan, because they sell fewer tickets per year, would have to spend $2,100. And, Propheter notes, that might not even include tickets, since there’s been no indication of whether sports tickets would be exempted from the sales tax, or other lease details like whether the teams would pay rent.

But anyway, the legislature has now adjourned for the year without voting on the stadium bill, so we don’t have to worry about — oh, what now?

Lawmakers expect [Democratic Gov. Laura] Kelly to call a special session of the Legislature to try to get lawmakers to pass a tax plan that she will accept — and they could consider the stadium financing proposal then.

“We just need a little time on it. We’ll be OK,” said Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita Republican. “I mean, we’re serious about trying to incentivize the Chiefs to come our direction.”

Masterson later said he didn’t call for a vote on the bill because of “concern” about not passing income, sales, and property tax cuts for Kansas residents before “what appears to be corporate welfare,” showing an admirable ability to say the quiet part loud.

So, we know nothing just yet, other than that a plan to funnel as much as $3 billion to Chiefs and Royals stadiums remains on the table, or in legislators’ pockets, or somewhere in the state halls of power. Fine, let’s look at some renderings:

I mean, that looks like a football stadium, yes. Not sure why everyone in the stadium thinks that they need to put the flashes on for their phones while taking pictures of a game hundreds of feet away in broad daylight under a translucent roof, but then, this is a rendering drawn by an architect not connected in any way with the Chiefs, so it means even less than the usual vaportecture. Hey, maybe we could adapt that term for bills that haven’t been voted on and don’t have real details: vaporslation? Gotta workshop that to be ready for the Kansas special session.

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Friday roundup: More Bears $2.6B stadium subsidy fallout, plus Indianapolis switches soccer horses

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news: I hope that those of you who enjoy using dark mode are enjoying the new dark mode plugin I installed this week (DarkMySite, if anyone cares), which seems, unlike the old one, to actually mostly work. If you haven’t tried it out and want to, click the little moon symbol at bottom right and take a load off your eyes!

Also, a special shoutout to a couple of FoS readers (unnamed, but you know who you are) who either sent in a large lump sum of cash or upped their monthly Patreon pledge for no reason at all in the last week. As I forget if I explicitly mentioned, I quit my previous day job last month, which should give me more time to devote to this site; and while I do have a new regular gig that seems promising, every step towards making this site self-sustaining is hugely helpful, so a huge thanks to all you supporters, at any level. (And for those who haven’t yet taken the plunge: There are still about a dozen more Vaportecture art prints, get ’em before they’re gone!)

Okay, enough of that, time’s a-wasting and there’s a whole week of news remainders to dig through:

  • The fallout continues from the Chicago Bears owners’ $2.6 billion stadium subsidy demand (see the updates for the math behind the updated figure), with so much more today that we’re going to have to break out the second level of bullet points:
    • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says it’s no contradiction that he said during his mayoral race that the city shouldn’t spend billions of dollars on a Bears stadium when there were “dozens of other urgent needs” and now thinks this is a great idea, on the grounds that he, a “middle child” from a “working-class family,” got to talk to billionaires and make sure they put some “skin in the game” and also the stadium will be “transformational” and “the Bears are staying in Chicago” and “the type of economic development this project brings” and “14 more acres of space for our children in the city of Chicago to benefit from.” Is all that the best use of $2.6 billion? I’m sorry, we’re out of time for questions, thank you for coming.
    • The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board did get a chance to ask Bears CEO Kevin Warren what would happen if the team got its $1.225 billion in taxpayer money for the stadium and nobody came up with another $1.175 billion to build new underground garages and park space, and Warren replied: “I’m not going to think negatively about that now. … If that’s the conclusion that … you want to reach now, then you can say that. I’m being positive about it … and being very transparent as far as what we need from the different three phases with this stadium project.” So, optional when projecting the city’s costs, not optional in the sense that you don’t want to go there in terms of what happens if the city doesn’t come up with another billion-plus dollars, got it.
    • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reiterated yesterday that he’s agin’ the whole kit and kaboodle, saying: “I’m skeptical of the proposal that was put forward and I’m even more skeptical of the ability to get enough votes for it in the General Assembly.”
    • Chicago Sun-Times columnist David Roeder suggests that if the Bears (and White Sox) want public money, they should give the public a cut of ownership of the team, though some stick-in-the-mud (okay, it’s me) points out that sports leagues love nothing more than to head off the possibility of public ownership, even blocking one-time San Diego Padres owner Joan Kroc from gifting her team to the city of San Diego on the grounds that that just isn’t done.
  • Way back in 2019, the Indiana state legislature approved giving $112 million toward a new soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team, provided owner Ersal Ozdemir got his team promoted from the USL to MLS. At the time, this seemed like an easy enough lift, since all the other kids were doing it, but it hasn’t happened yet, and now apparently Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett has gotten tired of waiting, announcing that he’s putting in a bid with another ownership group to get an MLS expansion team, using the same tax kickbacks that Ozdemir was looking to get. Ozdemir, who already broke ground on his stadium site last year, though it’s unclear if he’s actually started construction, is naturally enough extremely unhappy with this latest news, accusing Hogsett of “preparing to walk away” from “years of good-faith negotiations” and instead give the public money to some other soccer guy instead of him. Will there be lawsuits? Stay tuned!
  • A “hotel entrepreneur and former longtime Kansas City resident” got space on the Kansas City Star op-ed page to argue that Kansas Citians who voted against a tax subsidy for Royals and Chiefs stadiums missed an opportunity to become like Denver, where “the Coors Field development inspired a stunning downtown renaissance” where “dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs opened to serve crowds before and after the 81 hometown games each year.” I once again wish that I still had a copy of the chart someone once showed me that indicated that most of the development starts in Denver’s LoDo district actually preceded the construction of the Rockies stadium; if I can dig it up, I’ll post it here as an update.
  • The Arizona state senate is considering a bill to allow the state to approve “theme park districts” like the one Alex Meruelo wants for a Coyotes 2.0 arena, without city governments weighing in. (It did so by virtue of hollowing out an already-state-house-approved bill to give first responders access to treatment for PTSD and inserting theme park district language instead, which Arizona calls a “strike everything amendment” but “zombie bill” is a much better name.) This could make it easier for Meruelo to have the state levy a sales tax surcharge in his arena district that would be kicked back to him for construction costs; we’ll have to wait and see what the state senate thinks of it.
  • Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula may sell up to a quarter of their team to help raise money for their share of a new stadium, after construction costs have soared by a reported $600 million. In case you needed more evidence that many if not most stadiums are money losers that are only built so that team owners can cash subsidy checks, here’s your Exhibit A.
  • Arlington, Texas is spending $4.2 million to upgrade the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which the team moved out of after 2019 into a new publicly funded one, because, according to Arlington Mayor Jim Ross, “it’s a regional injection of all economic development.” The stadium is currently home to the XFL Arlington Renegades and occasional concerts.
  • What more could happen to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium after costing $1 billion to build and hundreds of millions more to fix the roof on and now $870 million to fix the roof on again? How about catching fire and needing $40 million to fix the damage? You gotta wonder if the Big Owe is just trying to put itself out of its misery at this point, but Montreal officials aren’t getting the message.
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Was defeat of Royals/Chiefs stadium tax hike Frank White’s fault, or to Frank White’s credit?

access_time personNeil deMause

While we await Chicago Bears stadium plan details, let’s kill some time reading Monday’s Kansas City Star article on “what went wrong in Jackson County” that led to the overwhelming April 2 vote against a 0.375% sales-tax hike to funnel money to Royals and Chiefs stadium projects.

(And yes, “what went wrong” is very much a leading framing, since it implies that Jackson County residents expressing their opinion that they didn’t want to kick back $500 million in sales taxes en route to well over a billion dollars in public stadium is a bad outcome. But let’s not hold the article responsible for the headline’s crimes, and just see where it goes.)

Kansas City Manager Brian Platt offered reassurance last week as the teams consider next steps. The city will take a lead role from here on in trying to keep the teams happy, by learning from others’ mistakes…

“We were largely on the sidelines, on the city side, for a lot of this,” Platt said. “And we are going to take a much more active and proactive role in making sure that whatever comes next, we are a big part of it. And that we’re listening to all the voices that need to be heard.”

Not a great start: “Reassurance” implies that KC residents want a different jurisdiction to take over that isn’t as skeptical of the teams’ demands, which doesn’t appear to be what the voting results show at all.

Emails obtained by the Star between the county and the team reveal what was said behind the scenes, and ultimately how the talks broke down.

Internal emails! Now we’re talking.

Let’s see, blah blah, Platt “re-enforced the narrative” that Jackson County executive and former Royals second baseman Frank White “bargained in bad faith” — no, that’s you re-enforcing the narrative, and also it’s actually “reinforcing” — and “the teams cast White as a villain.” Where are these emails already? “The blame game will go on.” This article sure does!

Okay, now we’re talking:

The Star has obtained correspondence between the Royals and White’s administration that shows the arc of the negotiations…

[In May 2023,] two Clay County commissioners and the mayor of North Kansas City posted an open letter on X, formerly Twitter, saying that not only were they willing to make an offer for the team, but that the Royals were interested.

White saw that as an insult to Jackson County taxpayers and fired off a letter to Sherman that day. … “Given today’s unfortunate developments, I urge the Royals to publicly reaffirm their commitment to Jackson County until at least 2031 and voice their intention to continue calling Jackson County home for decades beyond.”

Ignoring White’s ultimatum, the Royals issued a public statement saying that the team had not yet decided where it was headed but “continue(d) to be actively engaged” in talks with Jackson County, as well as others.

Not really news that this is how it went down, but it’s at least new documents. Tell us more!

Brooks Sherman, the [Royals] president of business operations, said the team envisioned that the cost of building a new ballpark would be shared by county taxpayers, the team, Kansas City and the state of Missouri, but left out a crucial detail. What it didn’t say was exactly how much the $1 billion-plus ballpark was expected to cost, or how much each party would be expected to contribute to the project.

Again, this isn’t news, as it had been clear for months before that that Royals owner John Sherman didn’t want to specify how his stadium was going to be paid for, except that the first $250 million or so would come from the sales tax hike. But sure, here’s an email showing that team execs were saying the same thing privately as publicly.

[Jackson County counselor Bryan] Covinsky said the county needed more information before face-to-face talks began, such as how much money the team expected to receive from the city and state, as well as any tax incentives the Royals might pursue on the commercial ballpark village development the team proposed building around a new ballpark.

Okay, let’s skip ahead: Is there anything in these emails that we didn’t already know from public statements? And what does it all have to do with the role of Frank White, as promised by the lede? We have White requesting only a 20-year sales tax hike instead of 40 years, which we also knew already, and Royals execs saying nope nope, and more talks, and Sherman agreeing to at least cover property and casualty insurance on their new stadium, and finally both teams saying they’re going ahead with the April 2 vote regardless of what White wanted. And then got their heads handed to them at the ballot box.

The only thing new here, then, is the framing: Both White and the team owners are presented as having screwed up by failing to get a deal agreed on before sending it to a public vote, which then led to referendum being defeated.

But there is another way of looking at this, which is that White stood his ground in refusing to give in to the teams’ demands (though he did offer up as much as $300 million in public money for each stadium, and didn’t rule out city and state money being used as well so long as it wasn’t coming out of his jurisdiction’s pocket), and the teams tried to get what they wanted by going around him directly to county voters, who likewise told them to kick rocks. That’s not a failure so much as tough negotiating — and if the teams now come back with reduced subsidy demands, it’s a success.

Of course, stories like this one in the Star that cast responsible governance as “getting things done” when the things are making it a spending priority to meet the wish lists of local sports billionaires only make it harder to negotiate toughly, since it throws shade on elected officials who do so. The Star has generally done pretty good reporting on the whole Kansas City stadium saga so far; if Platt is indeed taking the lead in talks, let’s see how the newspaper portrays his role, and if they chide him if he gives in too far to the owners, or only if he doesn’t give in enough.

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Friday roundup: Nevada legislator says she voted for A’s stadium because she didn’t understand it, and other great moments in U.S. politics

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the week’s news roundup, a couple of programming notes. First off, my apologies for the ads that have kept appearing in the middle of posts on this site — I keep telling Google Ads not to put them there, and it keeps ignoring me. I think I may have finally succeeded in turning those off, but do let me know if they reappear for you. I may end up dropping Google as this site’s ad provider if it keeps this up — that is, if I don’t drop Google anyway for firing workers upset that it successfully created Project Nimbus from the famous science fiction novel Don’t Create Project Nimbus.

Second, I know that the Dark Mode function is pretty broken again, often displaying dark gray type on a black background. I’m in discussions with the plugin provider about bug fixes, and also once again looking for alternatives that work more consistently. In the meantime, you can sometimes get it working by refreshing your browser; if that doesn’t work, just don’t use Dark Mode for now, and hopefully everything will be back in working order before your eyeballs explode from the screen glare.

And now for the news:

  • Nevada assemblymember Danielle Gallant tried, despite a very unhappy dog in the background, to explain her vote last summer for $600 million in public money for a new stadium to bring the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas, and ended up having to apologize for not understanding how the financing worked at all. “I hope future errors you make are met with more kindness than some of the responses I received,” tweeted Gallant, presumably inviting those among you who haven’t accidentally given $600 million to a billionaire sports owner to cast the first stone.
  • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who previously praised Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s proposed stadium development that would require $2 billion in public subsidies and said “everything is on the table here,” now says that some things are off the table: “I’ve always said that ownership has to put some skin in the game,” Johnson told reporters this week, adding that he opposes kickbacks of city ticket taxes to Reinsdorf to help fund the project.
  • If you’re a Buffalo Bills fan outraged that the team is charging as much as $50,000 for personal seat licenses before you can even buy tickets to their new stadium that is being built with over $1 billion in your tax money, good news: Now you can instead be upset about the fact that Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to make the PSLs exempt from sales tax, costing you and your fellow New Yorkers around another $25 million. Or I suppose you can be upset about both, but life is short, you have to pick your priorities.
  • Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, who previously defended spending $1.5 billion in public money on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium on the grounds of “collective pride,” is now back with a list of other ways it would allegedly be a good deal: extending the Rays’ lease will keep the team in town longer, their development partner is “the real deal,” they’re using stadium designers who’ve designed stadiums before, owner Stu Sternberg has an “astute front office,” and … that’s all he’s got so far, stay tuned for “Economists may say Rays stadium is a boondoggle, but aren’t puppies great?”
  • Meanwhile, if you ask St. Petersburg residents if $1.9 billion is too much to spend on a Rays stadium, they say yes, and if you ask them if a new stadium would be a good idea in the abstract without telling them how much it would cost, they also say yes! The truth must lie somewhere in the middle!
  • Where will the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs owners turn for stadium money now that voters told them where to stick their sales tax hike? “It’s not something that’s going to just kind of be thrown up into the ether out of nowhere,” says Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas of city funding, and a spokesperson for Gov. Mike Parson says there’s no state money in the works either. Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte says he hasn’t heard from Royals execs lately, and there’s no talk of fresh funding from Jackson County after the sales-tax plan failed, which leaves only … the team owners’ pockets? KMBC-TV for some reason doesn’t mention this option in their article, the internet must have run out of bits before they got to it. The Kansas City Star, meanwhile, reported on noted sports business expert George Brett’s thoughts on whether the teams will now move out of town, it’s truly not a great week for Kansas City journalism.
  • Now that the Arizona Coyotes are moving to Salt Lake City in the fall, everyone wants to know what the team will be called, and new owner Ryan Smith confirms that it will “start with Utah.” No word yet on what it will rhyme with or how many syllables, but presumably Smith will reveal that eventually — just maybe not this fall, don’t want to rush into things, “Utah Professional Hockey Club” sure has a nice temporary ring to it.
  • Tempe city councilmember Randy Keating has complained that the reason the Coyotes are leaving town is because team execs “ran a terribly inept campaign” for arena subsidies. Better luck next time finding ways to overcome massive public opposition, Randy, there’s got to be a way around this whole “democracy” thing.
  • A’s concessionaire Aramark threatened to fire stadium workers who openly criticize the team’s coming move out of Oakland, which turns out to be a violation of labor law, who could have known?
  • This Ringer article on fan opposition to the A’s departure is really long for anyone who already knows the basics, but its deep dive into the history of fan protest movements does quote Field of Schemes and also includes the priceless quote from Oakland activist Bryan Johansen that his goal is “to fucking haunt John Fisher for all of eternity,” so it’s worth it if you have the time.
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Field of Schemes