Category: Milwaukee Brewers

Wisconsin pols, pundits agree: We need to give $400m to Brewers owner, just a matter of which $400m

access_time personNeil deMause

The Milwaukee Brewers stadium subsidy story so far:

That’s where things stand now: Everybody in the state of Wisconsin, it seems, wants to funnel around $400 million in public money to the Brewers’ near-billionaire owner in exchange for a mere 13-year lease renewal, they just can’t agree on which $400 million. And as Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy reports, the ultimate decision may come down to which elected officials can strongarm the others into getting their way:

Milwaukee Alderman Bob Bauman says he is hearing that “it’s going to be crammed down our throats” by the Legislature regardless of how the Common Council or county board votes. “The funding would just be taken out of our state shared revenue.”

That may not be as easy to do as it sounds. Such a dictate would destroy the relationship that Republican legislators have recently cemented with Crowley and Johnson. It would also be opposed by Democratic legislators, and the Republicans may need some of their votes, because the gerrymandered Assembly has many radical conservatives who may oppose any subsidy. (The Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity group opposes any “bailout” for the Brewers.)

That’s a lot of horse trading and vote counting, and Murphy still isn’t done: Evers, he notes, can always veto any plan Vos and the legislature comes up with and propose another dip into the next state budget surplus next year.

All this sounds like a recipe for gridlock, and that’s indeed where things stand now. But counting on political infighting to ward off a massive giveaway of public money is seldom a good strategy — Attanasio still has that expiring lease as a hammer (even if moving from a 20-something-year-old stadium in Milwaukee to a similar-sized market like Nashville with no stadium at all isn’t really much of a threat) and lobbyists who can knock politician heads together until they agree on which pool of public funds to tap. And, of course, it’s only 2023, so there’s plenty of time before the Brewers’ lease expires, even if maybe not an infinite number of massive budget surpluses in the state’s future.

And if nothing else, the throwdown among legislators has successfully shifted the Brewers debate from “Should we give $400 million to the local wealthy sports owner?” to “Which $400 million should we give to the local wealthy sports owner?” Check out, for example, this radio conversation among the owner of the La Crosse Loggers amateur team, an economist from the pro-business Tax Foundation, and the local radio guy on the subject of how to “solve the Brewers stadium” situation, which discusses every possible source of revenue except the Brewers themselves. (Loggers owner Dan Kapanke says that’s off the table because Attanasio doesn’t own the stadium, which is yet another reason why sports team owners try to make sure they don’t own their buildings, just all the revenues that come from them.)

Host Rick Solem does suggest that it might be cheaper for a state to just buy its teams and avoid these constant subsidy demands every couple of decades, at which point Tax Foundation economist Adam Hoffer points out that leagues would never allow that because it would preclude them getting constant subsidies. “That makes sense,” replies Solem, before going on to suggest selling the stadium to the Brewers for a dollar, which is similarly shot down on the grounds that Attanasio wouldn’t like that, since it wouldn’t end up with him pocketing $400 million. Strangely, when you go into a discussion with the premise “How can we make a rich guy richer without it costing him anything?,” the solutions on tap seldom end up being good for the general public.

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Friday roundup: SF mayor really wants to build a stadium for some soccer team, just not sure which one

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time this morning, so let’s dive right in for a quick tour through this week’s remaining news:

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Newspaper says Brewers could move without stadium subsidy, according to nobody in particular

access_time personNeil deMause

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dropped a bombshell on Friday:

The Milwaukee Brewers could start looking for a new home this fall if state and local officials fail to reach agreement by then on a taxpayer-funded package to fund improvements to American Family Field required in the team’s lease with the state

Huge if true! Sure, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred had hinted at a move threat for the Brewers previously, but for team execs to actually openly say that the team could relocate without stadium subsidies is — hang on, there was something more to that sentence:

The Milwaukee Brewers could start looking for a new home this fall if state and local officials fail to reach agreement by then on a taxpayer-funded package to fund improvements to American Family Field required in the team’s lease with the state, sources say

Excuse me? This entire article — which also specifically suggests the Brewers could move to “the boomtowns of Charlotte, North Carolina or Nashville, Tennessee,” more on that in a second — turns out to be based entirely on statements by unnamed people, identified only as “sources with knowledge of the dynamic” and “a source familiar with negotiations,” with no one going on the record about a move threat at all. This is, in newspaper lingo, fucked up, and a clear, if sadly not uncommon, violation of ethical standards.

For those of you unfamiliar with the planet Earth and its journalism, the use of unnamed sources is a way for news outlets to report on things even when the people feeding them the information don’t want to go public because they, say, might get fired if they did. The danger is that sources might also hide behind anonymity to use journalists’ desire for a scoop to plant fake news, or at least their spin on real news, in stories without anyone being able to verify it, because everyone involved can publicly deny having said anything.

And so, there are supposed to be guardrails to stop the abuse of unnamed sourcing. For example, the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics policy states:

If the only way to publish a story that is of importance to the audience is to use anonymous sources, the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible…

When someone asks to provide information off the record, be sure the reason is not to boost her own position by undermining someone else’s, to even the score with a rival, to attack an opponent or to push a personal agenda.

The Journal-Sentinel clearly doesn’t do the former here: The paper didn’t even indicate whether the source was on the team side of negotiations or the government side, meaning there’s no way for readers to decide for themselves if this might be, on the one hand, the Brewers’ owners trying to rattle a move-threat saber, or on the other, state officials trying to justify a subsidy deal that now could be as high as $430 million on the grounds that “we had to do it, or they were going to move to Charlotte.” As for the latter, there’s no way to tell from the article whether the Journal-Sentinel’s sources are pushing a personal agenda, and indeed plenty of reason to suspect that the move threat was leaked in order to gin up fear among Brewers fans that the team might leave.

All we know for now, then, is that someone, presumably someone in the state of Wisconsin, says that relocation is on the table for the Brewers, or at least that they’re trying to create leverage by asserting that it is. The one direct quote from the paper’s unnamed source — “The Brewers genuinely want to stay, it is only a question of whether they’ll be able to with the [stadium] district broke” — suggests a subsidy advocate either with the team or in state government who is trying to paint the team as the good guys, who genuinely don’t want any paratroopers to be set on fire, but things break, don’t they?

As for the extremely specific threat that the Brewers could move to Charlotte or Nashville, that’s completely unsupported in the article, not even cited to unnamed sources. Charlotte, at least, is genuinely fast-growing, increasing in population at the fourth-fastest rate in the country between 2010 and 2020, jumping all the way to 15th-largest city in the U.S. Nashville has been growing at a somewhat slower rate, though is still doing better than Milwaukee, which has been shrinking in population in recent decades.

That’s all in terms of the population of the cities proper, though. In terms of metro area, which is far more important to selling both tickets and TV subscriptions, Milwaukee’s is growing at about 0.5% a year, compared to Charlotte’s 5% a year and Nashville’s 2.5%. Charlotte currently sits 21st in TV market size, Nashville 27th, and Milwaukee 38th, so there’s at least some argument that a move by the Brewers to one of those two cities wouldn’t be entirely crazy.

There’s one other important factor, though, that isn’t even mentioned by the Journal-Sentinel article: Neither Charlotte nor Nashville has a major-league baseball stadium, not even one unfathomably ancient like Milwaukee’s, which opened way back in 2001. So moving to one of those cities would require Brewers owner Mark Attanasio to first come up with a billion or so dollars to erect a new stadium — certainly something that Nashville might be willing to help with, given past recent performance, but still not clearly a financial upgrade over staying put even if Wisconsin were to contribute something less than $430 million in renovations.

None of this is unusual in the stadium game, of course — there’s a reason the non-threat threat is one of the key items in the standard stadium playbook as listed in Field of Schemes the book. But it is at least a little alarming, if not entirely surprising, to see a major newspaper playing along with the threat without questioning it in the slightest, let alone without following journalistic ethical principles by saying, “Yeah, if you want to throw that allegation out there, you’re going to have to be willing to say it by name, what do we look like, stooges willing to turn over our news coverage to anyone in a position of power who wants to get something into the headlines? Maybe don’t answer that.”

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Brewers tax subsidy could rise to $430m in sales tax shuffle, as team turns up lobbying pressure

access_time personNeil deMause

Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio’s demand for $360 million in stadium renovation money has been mostly stalled since March thanks to a stalemate between Wisconsin’s Democratic governor and Republican assembly speaker over whether to give the team owner cash now or tax breaks later, but there are some signs of movement. Starting with:

A spokesperson for Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley confirmed Monday his office is seeking more flexibility in how the county can use money generated by a recently enacted sales tax increase. That change would then free up other dollars the county could put toward extensive renovations at American Family Field.

“Flexibility” here means that county officials want to be able to take the proceeds from a 0.4% sales tax hike, which is supposed to be used to avoid cuts to the county parks and transit budgets, and instead use it to pay down pension debt. That would then allow the county to take the money it was planning to put toward pensions and use it on Brewers stadium renovations — though Crowley’s communications director, Brandon Weathersby, said, “We aren’t proactively trying to find a local contribution” for a stadium, just proactively asking for a way to find more money for, oh, something. Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise!

The Rube Goldberging would actually go beyond funneling sales tax money cover stadium costs, according to a report from WisPolitics, which said Crowley is also seeking to do things like have the state take over patrolling highways in Milwaukee County from the county sheriff’s department.

Weathersby said that his boss was prompted to make this move at the request of Democratic leadership in the state legislature, which makes this report all the more interesting:

The Milwaukee Brewers spent more on lobbying in the first half of the year than any other organization in Wisconsin, an investigation by The Badger Project has found.

The ballclub reported spending $575,000 from January through June, according to state lobbying records.

It still seems very likely that Attanasio will get his pile of public cash from somewhere: Even if the county board sticks to its guns about not spending its own money, and even if assembly speaker Robin Vos keeps shooting down any ideas put forward by Democrats (his chief of staff called Crowley’s proposals “preposterous”), top state leaders in both parties agree that they want to throw money at the Brewers, they just can’t decide which money or who’ll get to take the credit for it. (Or, you know, blame.) And the state has a massive budget surplus, which, no, isn’t an especially good reason to peel off a few hundred-million-dollar bills and hand them to the local billionaire so he can buy new field chillers, but state officials tend to feel flusher when they have a surplus than a deficit, even if every dollar you spend in either good or bad times is a dollar you can’t spend on something else.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that the county sales-tax shuffle is part of a bill that state Rep. Rob Brooks (a Republican) plans to introduce in coming weeks that would provide an additional $5 million a year toward Brewers renovations, on top of the $23 million a year that Vos wants to spend. WisPolitics calls this a $698 million, but that’s if you add up all the payments over time and count them as present-day dollars, which isn’t accurate — $28 million a year would actually pay for about $430 million in upfront costs. In exchange for just a 13-year lease extension, that would amount to $33 million in public outlay for every additional year of Brewers lease, which would be the second-highest per-year cost in sports history. For now, anyway; records are made to be broken, sports subsidy records doubly so, it appears.

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium could erode beach sand funds, Oakland mayor sends message to MLB owners on A’s-to-Vegas

access_time personNeil deMause

I published four posts in the first four days of this week despite a router (finally replaced last night) that was doling out packets with an eyedropper, and now the internet itself isn’t letting me consistently load the site, so you’ll forgive me if the Friday roundup is a bit perfunctory or late, won’t you?

On with the news, typed out for now in a Notes file:

  • Sports subsidy advocates like to argue that spending tourist tax money on stadiums doesn’t really cost local governments anything because it can only be spent on tourism projects anyway, but what then of news that a Tampa Bay Rays stadium in St. Petersburg could eat up all the county hotel tax money that is needed to replenish the county’s beaches?
  • The New York Times’ new non-union sports department has an interview with Oakland mayor Sheng Thao about how she met with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred after he claimed there was no stadium offer in Oakland for the A’s to present him with 31 copies (one for him and one for each MLB owner) of her city’s stadium offer. Thao said she wanted “to ensure that the [relocation] committee understands all of our deal points” and also said that “absolutely” she would consider improving her offer. All of which could just be covering all her bases so she can say she tried, but also could be playing to the crowd of MLB owners who’ll be voting on the A’s-to-Vegas move, in hopes that at least eight of them are fearful enough of trading a top TV market for MLB’s smallest, or just hate John Fisher enough, to vote “no,” either of which is certainly possible.
  • Baltimore Orioles execs have started lobbying Congress for federal money for “revitalization efforts” in the Camden Yards area, according to disclosure forms uncovered by Politico. How much money they want isn’t the kind of thing listed on lobbyist disclosures, but it’s definitely fresh territory in terms of public funding asks, albeit expected once Joe Biden announced a ton of federal infrastructure spending and sports teams smelled blood in the water.
  • Milwaukee Brewers business operations president Rick Schlesinger has provided a list of some of the reasons team execs want about $350 million in state money to renovate the stadium, and they include: 22-year old boilers, obsolete field chillers (?), and TV wiring that needs to be upgraded to fiber optics. Damn, I should have kept renting — under sports logic, I apparently could have demanded that my landlord pay for my new router…
  • Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles says spending $120 million on a new tennis center is about “creating jobs in this community” WFAE’s race and equity desk asked if that’s really so, but didn’t ask any actual economists who might be able to answer the question, so gotta give this a B-minus at best.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver says the league will consider both Seattle and Las Vegas for expansion teams once the league signs a new TV rights deal in 2025. Both cities have new arenas already, so maybe they can get away without building even newer ones, though I dunno, Climate Pledge Arena will be five years old by then, who knows how the field chillers will be holding up.

Okay, I can access the site again, going to hit publish on this before Mercury goes back into retrograde. Stay cool, and see you Monday!

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Wisconsin legislators propose saving money on $360m Brewers subsidy by using installment plan, smdh

access_time personNeil deMause

Feeling all cheery about the state of Nevada (for now, at least) rejecting the Oakland A’s owner’s demand for $500 million toward a Las Vegas stadium? Let’s turn that smile upside down by paying a visit to Wisconsin, where state legislative leader say they have a great idea for saving money on a $360 million Milwaukee Brewers stadium renovation plan: Pay for it later instead of now.

The lawmakers are considering funding the payments, in part, through income tax revenue from professional baseball players instead of from the state’s near $7 billion state surplus like Evers proposed, according to Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu.

“If we’re going to make steady payments to keep them here until 2050 or whatever the lease amount period ends up being, just paying for it over the long run when salaries continue to rise, that works as well,” LeMahieu said.

Hoo boy, where to begin? First off, that is not how money works: As anyone who has taken out a home mortgage can tell you, pushing payments into the future doesn’t actually save you money, it just lets you spread out your costs if you don’t have the cash on hand to pay the whole thing up front. (Presumably any plan to spread out stadium subsidies over 27 years, as LeMahieu et al. are proposing, would need to cover interest payments on renovation debt, just like a home mortgage would.) But Wisconsin has the cash on hand — Republican legislative leaders just don’t want to use it because they’re in a pissing match with the Democratic governor — so the entire “let’s put it on an installment plan!” plan is just a bookkeeping gimmick.

Secondly, saying that baseball player income taxes will “fund” the annual payments is extremely dodgy, for all the reasons we covered when this was used as an excuse for providing public funding for a Milwaukee Bucks arena: Professional athletes don’t actually pay all that much in income taxes since they live much of the year out of state, much of those income taxes would redirect to other local residents if the team moved and people spend their entertainment dollars on something else, if the team wasn’t really going to move you’d just end up cannibalizing tax money the state otherwise could keep and spend on other needs, etc.

It’s not clear where LeMahieu’s plan will go: Right now it’s just a “bipartisan group of Wisconsin legislative leaders” that is “considering” it, which basically makes it a press release in search of traction. That all sides in the Brewers legislative standoff seem to agree that shoveling $360 million at the local sports billionaire to renovate a 22-year-old stadium so he won’t move the team to an undisclosed location for another 13 years, during which time he can keep on demanding even more stadium upgrades thanks to his lease’s state-of-the-art clause, isn’t really very promising: All that’s left, it seems, is to identify an appropriate guy behind the tree, though I suppose stadium deals have fallen apart over smaller things.

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Friday roundup: Scottsdale not keen on Coyotes, MLB takes over Padres broadcasts, still no Vegas A’s stadium bill vote

access_time personNeil deMause

Yes, there was stadium and arena news this week that was not related to Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s attempt to get $500 million in tax kickbacks for a stadium in Las Vegas. (Still no sign of a vote on that, btw, with the legislative session set to end on Monday. [UPDATE: Gov. Lombardo vetoed the state budget bill late last night after it looked like there was an agreement, so everything may now be on hold until a special session in July.]) Let’s take a spin through what else is happening:

  • The Arizona Coyotes! How are things going with the Arizona Coyotes? Are city officials in Scottsdale, where the Coyotes practice at the city’s Ice Den, interested in giving them a full-time home? They’re kind of meh on that! Are other East Valley cities interested in being the team’s new home? Nobody from the team has talked to them! This could still change, obviously, but it doesn’t seem like Alex Meruelo had a lot of Plan B’s lined up in case he lost his arena referendum in Tempe.
  • Speaking of the state of Arizona, it just announced it will stop issuing new permits for some development around Phoenix, because the state is fast running out of water. This isn’t the long-predicted death knell of the Southwest thanks to climate change, but it certainly may be the first step in reversing the area’s explosive growth, which one would think sports teams and leagues would take into consideration before deciding where to locate teams, but long-term thinking has never been their forte.
  • The first cable sports domino has fallen, with Diamond Sports Group officially using its bankruptcy filing to walk away from its San Diego Padres contract, leaving MLB.tv to produce and carry the games going forward. Right now Padres games will be available for $19.99 a month — yes, separate from any MLB.tv subscription for out-of-market games — as well as carried on local cable systems under new deals with no blackout provisions. While it hasn’t been made public exactly what the Padres owners will get from the new deal, it’s been indicated that the bulk of the proceeds will go to the team and not the league, so the potential NFLization of baseball move threats has likely been forestalled, at least.
  • Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio’s request for $360 million in public stadium renovation funds may be spinning its wheels currently, but the business coalition backing it just added a brewery president, a bank VP, and a former sheriff, that’ll show ’em.
  • Okay, there’s some A’s news: Oakland has updated its FAQ on the Howard Terminal project, noting that “with a willing negotiating partner equally committed to working collaboratively to find and implement ‘win-win’ solutions, Oakland’s leadership remains confident that a new Waterfront Ballpark District at Howard Terminal is well within reach,” which is a clear dig at Fisher for not being a “willing negotiating partner,” but also leaves the door open a crack if the Vegas stadium bill is rejected. Or maybe even a backhanded call for somebody else to buy the A’s and reopen talks, given that the FAQ then advises that “interested parties” should contact the city’s project lead, whose email address and phone number it then provides.
  • Elsewhere in fallback plans, the head of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council says that if the A’s Vegas stadium bill doesn’t pass, Sacramento offers a “better financial deal” and can begin construction on a stadium almost immediately, which are big words from an unelected official in a city without even the beginnings of a stadium plan, but just saying stuff and not worrying ahout whether it’s true is very much the flavor of the month.
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Friday roundup: Milwaukee County votes no on Brewers subsidy, Coyotes predicted to be moving everywhere and nowhere at once

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy May 26, the last day for stadium legislation to be introduced in the Nevada legislature, unless of course they wait till tomorrow. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any bills popping up, but in the meantime there’s lots of other news to occupy us:

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Manfred threatens Milwaukee, Vegas, everybody: Send stadium money or we’ll shoot your team

access_time personNeil deMause

A big part of a modern sports league commissioner’s job is to show up to a city to make threats for what will happen if the local populace doesn’t serve up stadium cash. And while MLB commissioner Rob Manfred may not have a way with words, he showed yesterday that he absolutely will go there, using an appearance in Milwaukee to threaten two cities at once:

Oakland’s local government officials “made some unfortunate decisions not to maintain the ballpark in the way that it needed to be maintained,” Manfred told reporters Thursday.

“It resulted in a decline in the attendance which had an impact on the quality of the product that the team could afford to put on the field,” he said.

“This ballpark is an asset,” Manfred said about American Family Field.

“I think the Brewers are interested in a long-term relationship and an extension of the lease that’ll keep them here,” he said.

We all see what you did there, Rob: By pointing to the A’s possible move to Las Vegas, and to Oakland’s failure to maintain the Coliseum — which is actually partly the team’s responsibility — and the resulting decline in attendance and quality of the product — and the lousy product actually came before the lousy attendance, but don’t stop him, he’s on a roll — Manfred painted a clear picture … well, a picture … well, he left the general impression that if Wisconsin doesn’t agree to the $360 million in stadium renovation funding that Brewers owner Mark Attanasio wants, well, you don’t wanna know what’ll happen!

And then Manfred held out a carrot to go along with the non-threat threat stick:

“I remain confident that the Brewers are a great asset for the fans here in Milwaukee and that the governmental entities are going to find a way to fund the obligation that they agreed to when this ballpark was built, and they’re going to do it because it’s good business,” Manfred told reporters during a press conference at the stadium Thursday.

“Obligation” here refers to this state-of-the-art clause requiring the state to provide any “major repairs” that 25% of other MLB stadiums have, however that’s defined; if not, Attanasio could break his lease and move the Brewers. Of course, he could do that in 2030 anyway when his lease expires: The $360 million would only buy a lease extension until 2043, and the major repairs clause would presumably stay in place, meaning Wisconsin would have to keep on coughing up another 20 years’ worth of repair money or the Brewers could leave anyway.

If you’re wondering why Manfred and Attanasio are playing hardball right this moment, there are a couple of things in play. First off, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers decided a state budget surplus was a good time to throw some money Attanasio’s way, and then state assembly speaker Robin Vos said he wanted to use different public money, and it’s been a stalemate ever since. If bringing the commissioner to town to throw some threats around helps break the logjam, that’s why you’re paying him the big bucks.

Under normal circumstances, a team owner could just hang out and wait out political squabbles, content that there’s another legislative session next year, especially when your stadium is only 22 years old to begin with. But MLB owners are starting to jones for expansion fee money, and Manfred has promised not to expand to more cities until the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays have finished using wannabe MLB cities as threats to extract their own stadiums. So if Attanasio doesn’t grab his stadium cash now, he’ll likely have to wait till after expansion to stage a stadium shakedown, and that could take a few years, and he’s money-hungry now.

Manfred, meanwhile, didn’t pass up the opportunity to also send a message to Las Vegas officials considering $375 million or so in taxpayer stadium money for the A’s:

“It’s possible that a relocation vote could happen as early as June,” Manfred said Thursday at Milwaukee during his tour of major league stadiums to speak with players. “It’s very difficult to have a timeline for Oakland until there’s actually a deal to be considered. There is a relocation process internally they need to go through, and we haven’t even started that process.” …

Manfred was asked whether he believes the door is completely closed on the possibility of the Athletics remaining in Oakland, where the team has played since 1968.

“I think you’d have to ask the mayor of Oakland that,” Manfred said. “She said she had cut off negotiations after an announcement was made in Las Vegas. I don’t have a crystal ball as to where anything’s going. There’s not a definitive deal done in Las Vegas. We’ll have to see how that plays out.”

If you want to steal Oakland’s team, you need to act now, because this offer won’t last forever! Small bills only, please. Thank you for your time, I’ve got to catch a plane to (checks itinerary) Tampa, looks like, a commissioner’s work is never done.

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Brewers may not get stadium tax money until state can funnel it through county first

access_time personNeil deMause

Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio’s plan to get $360 million in state money via either a giant novelty check or years of sales and income tax kickbacks is “in limbo,” reports Wisconsin Public Radio. More in limbo than the governor and the state assembly speaker yelling at each other over which exact pile of public cash to light on fire? Let’s investigate:

On Monday, a Milwaukee County Board committee passed a resolution opposing using any county tax dollars to fund long-term renovations at the stadium.

Big news! Wait, what does the Milwaukee County Board have to do with this? Wasn’t it the state that was talking about spending money on renovations to the Brewers’ 22-year-old stadium?

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, has said he wants local money to be used in any such deal.

Well, that’s different. Last we left off, Vos was saying he would kick back $11 million a year in sales taxes from the stadium and $12 million in player income taxes. But shortly thereafter, Vos said while the state would have “some kind of a participatory role,” “the idea of saying that the state is going to bear all of the responsibility for a local project is probably not realistic.” That’s as specific as he’s gotten, it appears, but it was enough for a committee of the Milwaukee County Board to stand up and say, uh, yeah, not us, thanks. Or verbatim: “[Milwaukee County Board member Steve] Taylor said using local funds for a stadium deal would take ‘precious resources’ away from the county.”

Taylor said at Monday’s committee meeting:

“We just were debating the fact that we don’t have enough shared revenue, we need a sales tax, and at the same time that these conversations are taking place, we’re basically being told … you’re going to be paying for this.”

“Shared revenue” has to do with how much money the state sends to local governments, and Vos hinted at this being part of Brewers subsidy negotiations, maybe:

“We’re negotiating on shared revenue first, so we haven’t really gotten to the point of getting into all the details of a Brewers deal or what it potentially would look like,” Vos said. “I think for many of my colleagues who don’t live in the southeastern Wisconsin region, the idea of writing a check out to any professional sports team in Wisconsin, is probably a nonstarter.”

With the important caveat that I am not a Wisconsin statehouse reporter, I’m going to tea-leaf-read this as: Vos (Republican) doesn’t want to agree to send state money to the city of Milwaukee or Milwaukee County (both Democratic) unless the local governments agree to spend some of it on the Brewers, because that way he gets to play the hero by saying he kept the Brewers in town — for, let’s not forget, only an additional 13 years past the expiration of its current lease — while also telling his constituents he was a prudent caretaker of their money, because he didn’t give it to the Brewers, he gave it to the county and they gave it to the Brewers.

That’s the best I’ve got, anyway. Anything else to add, WPR?

Milwaukee County Board member Ryan Clancy, who is also a state representative and a member of the socialist caucus, said he doesn’t believe public dollars should be spent for stadium improvements.

“You know legislation is bad when both the socialists and the conservatives on the board agree enough to sign onto the same resolution opposing it,” Clancy said.

Now there’s a quote! You should have led with that, and honestly so should I. Ending with it is pretty good too, though, so let’s leave it at that.

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