Category: Milwaukee Brewers

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has finally hinted at how he plans to pay for Milwaukee Brewers stadium upgrades in place of the $290 million from the state budget plus $70 million from a state stadium renovation fund that Gov. Tony Evers wants to spend, and it is thus:

GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos says it’s unlikely his caucus will back dedicating state money to the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium beyond income and sales taxes already generated from the team being in Wisconsin…

He noted, for example, the $11 million annually in sales tax revenue generated by activity at the stadium as well as the $12 million in income taxes from players’ salaries, including those from visiting teams who play in American Family Field.

“Those are some numbers that we’re looking at to be able to make sure people understand if the Brewers leave, it’s not like it’s free,” Vos said. “There’s an economic impact to the state of Wisconsin.”

That’s not at all how economic impact calculations work, thanks to the fact that even if the Brewers were to leave Wisconsin, they wouldn’t take Brewers fans and their spending money with them, but no matter. Vos is drawing a hard line in the sand here — no cash for the Brewers owners like that spendthrift (checks party affiliation) Democrat governor, just good old taxes that will be reimbursed because these things are like an isosceles triangle, go ask Felix Unger. And how does kicking back sales taxes to the team owners — and income taxes, which aren’t even “back” to the team owners since they never paid them in the first place — add up? Let’s do some basic math:

• Vos’s proposed $23 million a year in tax rebates over 30 years, in present value = $353 million
• Evers’ proposed $360 million in upfront cash = $360 million

As I have noted here before, I am not an economist, but I am fairly confident those two figures differ by a very small amount. And both are very large numbers for a stadium that cost less than $400 million to build in the first place, especially when Brewers owner Mark Attanasio would only have to sign a 13-year lease extension to earn the boodle, after which he could still threaten to move out of Milwaukee and leave it bereft of all those hot dog sales taxes and outfielder payroll deductions. Anyway, thanks to the United States’ two-party system Wisconsinites have a choice between whether to spend $360 million or $353 million on the local sports team owners — well, not a choice, really, since they won’t be voting on it directly, the people they voted into office will be (spoiler: Vos will probably get his way, since he usually does), but it’s like a choice, except for the actual choosing part. Anyway, supporters of both parties will be able to argue that its nine-figure subsidy was and/or would have been better than the opposing parties’ one, this is fine.

Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio was asked yesterday about Wisconin Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to give him $290 million in stadium renovation money in exchange for a 13-year lease extension, and responded with lines straight out of the stadium playbook:

“I think the fans deserve a facility like this and I think one of the reasons they come out is the ballpark experience,” Attanasio said Monday before the Brewers’ home opener with the New York Mets. “So we really just want to continue to maintain that. And look, I want the team to be here forever. So, we want this to be forever a special place.” …

“Other stadiums of similar vintage, they’re talking about needing brand-new ballparks, and here we just want to continue to maintain this,” Attanasio said.

The first bit first: “Look, I want the team to be here forever” is a classic idle move threat, not to mention a direct riff on the Monty Python army protection racket sketch. The Brewers don’t currently have any other cities bidding for their services, and while it wouldn’t be hard to find another market Milwaukee’s size, that’s not the same as finding one willing to build you a stadium with a retractable roof like the Brewers have now. On top of which, it takes a lot of damn gall to say “I want the team to be here forever” while offering to sign only a 13-year lease extension that would put you in great shape to demand even more renovation money — or a brand-new ballpark — as we get closer to 2043.

When it comes to gall, though, let’s check in on that statement that “Other stadiums of similar vintage, they’re talking about needing brand-new ballparks.” The Brewers’ stadium opened in 2001; here is the list of other MLB stadiums that opened between 1999 and 2003:

• T-Mobile Park, Seattle, 1999: Team not seeking replacement or renovations.
• Comerica Park, Detroit, 2000: Team not seeking replacement or renovations.
• Minute Maid Park, Houston, 2000: Team not seeking replacement or renovations.
• Oracle Park, San Francisco, 2000: Team not seeking replacement or renovations.
• PNC Park, Pittsburgh, 2001: Team not seeking replacement or renovations.
• Great American Ball Park, 2003: Team not seeking replacement or renovations.

Uh-huh. The stadium of the most recent vintage where team owners are even considering demanding a new one is the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ Chase Field, which opened in 1998; the Cleveland Guardians (Progressive Field, 1994) and Baltimore Orioles (Camden Yards, 1992) are both getting or seeking money for upgrades comparable to what Attanasio wants. “All the other kids are doing it” is never a good argument for demanding stadium subsidies, but in this case, none of the other kids with similarly aged stadiums are doing it, making Attanasio’s statement an outright lie.

(Attanasio also took time out to complain about how little money he’s spending on player salaries compared to the rest of the league, calling it “just the reality,” which was either an epic self-own or a sign of gall reserves the size of Lake Michigan.)

Little details like facts aren’t the point at this stage in the stadium game, though: It’s more about creating momentum and a sense that something has gotta be done, at which point you’re just haggling over how much needs to be done and who’ll pay for it. Given that he already has Democratic and Republican state officials debating whether to fund stadium renovations in cash now or wait to pay them down later, and now he has Attanasio has to be pretty happy about how his Overton window is going.

Big news, everybody! Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to spend $360 million in state money on stadium renovations for the Milwaukee Brewers in exchange for the team owners signing a 13-year-lease extension is “dead” in the state legislature, according to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. “I think the deal that he cut is not a very good one for the taxpayer,” declared Vos yesterday, vowing that he would not … oh, not that kind of dead:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he hoped Republicans could devise a better deal that would look for a commitment from the team to remain in Milwaukee longer and not rely as heavily on money from a one-time budget surplus.

The first part of that, at least, is promising: Getting Brewers owner Mark Attanasio to agree to extend his lease beyond 2043 (it currently expires in 2030) would at least push back the date some at which point the team could come back to the state to demand more money for more renovations or a whole new stadium or a second stadium for emergencies or who knows what. The second part is just weird, since spending money from a budget surplus at least means you don’t have to pay bond financing costs to borrow the money and then pay it off later, so using money from some other state source wouldn’t necessarily save taxpayers anything. Maybe Vos means he wants to spend less money overall, or maybe he just wants to spend it from a different pot of money — he didn’t say, beyond “I think there has to be a different deal put together” and “I don’t want to get into all the details.”

In case you couldn’t guess, Vos and Evers are from different political parties — Vos is a Republican, Evers a Democrat — so some of this is likely just “No, you don’t get to be the one to give a giant pile of money to the local sports team owner, I’m going to be the one to give a giant pile of money to the local sports team owner.” We’ll know more once Vos actually talks to the rest of the legislature about his plans, maybe; he said yesterday he hasn’t spoken to either other Republican state senate leaders or leaders of the Democratic- Republican-controlled state house.

As for why everyone is scrambling to throw money at the local rich guy, it’s so the team doesn’t move, silly! Sure, Attanasio hasn’t breathed a word about moving, but you can tell it’s to keep the team from moving because there’s a new coalition of political and business leaders that says it is:

“The Milwaukee Brewers are a point of pride for Wisconsin and it’s important that we do what is needed to ensure Major League Baseball is preserved in our state for the next generation,” [Milwaukee-area restaurateur/developer Omar] Shaikh said in a statement. “Through our collective efforts, the Home Crew Coalition aims to deliver that message statewide and ensure the Brewers can call American Family Field their home for years to come.”…

Other members of the coalition announced Wednesday include Mike Grebe, a retired attorney and former chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin; Dan Kapanke, a former Republican state senator and owner of the La Crosse Loggers baseball team; Ashok Rai, president and chief executive officer of Prevea Health; Peggy Smith, president and CEO of VISIT Milwaukee; Andrew Disch, political director of North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters; Tracy Johnson, president of the Commercial Association of REALTORS Wisconsin; Jim Villa, CEO of NAIOP Wisconsin, an organization of real estate developers; and Rob Zerjav, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers.

Developers, realtors, tourism officials, construction unions, and other sports team owners — yep, that pretty much runs the gamut of society, no need to hear from anyone else. And it’s led by a Republican lobbyist, Brandon Scholz, which could possibly help get Vos and the state senate on board.

What everyone agrees, anyway, is that the Brewers need almost $400 million to spend on renovation work. Well, not everyone: A state report in 2019, Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy reminded us last month, found that the stadium will need about $86 million in work between now and 2040, but Attanasio then commissioned his own report saying the stadium actually needed five times that. At which point the state hired an auditor to look over Attanasio’s numbers and … it was CAA Icon, best known for their terrible study justifying giving the Buffalo Bills owner a ton of money for a new stadium on the grounds that people would stop going to Sabres games otherwise. CAA Icon promptly said the real Brewers renovation cost would between $540 million and $604 million, and now $360 million sounds cheap, doesn’t it? Ah, anchoring, where would people looking to overcharge for things be without you?

Some updates on yesterday’s news about Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers proposing giving $290 million in state money to the Milwaukee Brewers for stadium upgrades:

• While the new transfer of state funds would indeed amount to $290 million, which would be taken out of Wisconsin’s current budget surplus, there’s still $70 million sitting in the team’s old stadium reserve fund, which was funded 70% by regional sales taxes and 30% by the team. So if Evers’ plan goes through, the Brewers will have access to a whopping $360 million to play with for renovating their 22-year-old stadium.
• The funds will actually go to the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District, which owns the stadium and leases it to the Brewers. But team owner Mark Attanasio will be able to tap into it for “needs ranging from boiler work and safety compliance to new scoreboards or broadcast renovations,” according to the Wisconsin State Journal, which apparently is unaware of both how much boilers actually cost and how false ranges work.

Exactly what Attanasio intends to do with his stadium slush fund is a mystery, but it would have to be something pretty huge: Typical past upgrade spends have been a few million here, a few million there, even for the public stadium district’s biggest expense, the retractable roof.

The one caveat to all this: The Brewers do have a dread state-of-the-art lease clause requiring that they get anything needed to keep their stadium “on a par [with] at least 75 percent” of other MLB stadiums. And while that clause expires with the current lease in 2030, Attanasio has an option to extend it to 2040, so he could continue to drain that reserve fund for another 17 years, and the state would need to come up with money to replenish it.

There’s a caveat to the caveat, though, which is that Attanasio’s only recourse if the state didn’t pay for all the new gewgaws that the guy down the road has would be to break his lease — which would only be useful if he had another place to go. So we’re down to the usual game of chicken, where a sports team owner is using the (typically idle) threat of leaving town to bully government officials into ladling money onto him, and said government officials are giving in because that’s just what they do.

This is the familiar tale of how new stadiums become gifts that keep on giving, as the public provides money to build a new stadium to ensure the team stays in town, only to have the team owner turn around and demand more money a few years later, or else he’ll bolt anyway. Elected officials who foolishly agree to state-of-the-art clauses are in part to blame for this — okay, in large part — but it’s now an essential part of the stadium grift that funnels billions of dollars a year from public treasuries to the pockets of billionaires. The only two real solutions are some sort of national legislation to outlaw these kinds of corporate subsidies, or electing local leaders who will respond to sports subsidy demands with “Just because we’re sports fans doesn’t mean you get a blank check anytime you want.” Neither of those looks to be happening anytime soon, but either is possible, in a better world.

 

Of all the MLB teams with 20something-year-old stadiums, the Milwaukee Brewers (opening year of current stadium: 2001) haven’t exactly been at the forefront of upgrade demands: There was talk of the team owners tapping around $90 million in a stadium district reserve fund early last year, and in June one Milwaukee County official proposed building a ballpark district around the Brewers’ stadium and kicking back property taxes to the team. But mostly all has been quiet on the midwestern front, no reason to believe there’ll be any massive public subsidies coming down the—

Governor Tony Evers would allocate $290 million from the state’s surplus towards upgrades to American Family Field in exchange for the Milwaukee Brewers extending their lease at the stadium through 2043, 13 more years…

“As governor, and also someone who also happens to be a lifelong Brewers fan, I’m so excited about the historic opportunity we have today to keep Major League Baseball here in Milwaukee for another twenty years and to usher in a new generation of Brewers fans in Wisconsin who can grow up rooting for the home team just like I did,” said Evers in a statement announcing the plan.

Evers’ proposed largesse appears to have been prompted by, honestly, nothing: The Brewers’ lease has another seven years left to run with another ten-year lease option after that, there has been zero talk about the team relocating, and no one with the Brewers has breathed even a word about wanting a nine-figure payout. If anything, it looks like Evers noticed that the state is sitting on a $6.6 billion surplus thanks to a flood of federal pandemic cash, and figured this was a good time to give some of it to the local not-quite-billionaire.

The most rose-colored interpretation is that Evers is looking to use the budget surplus to ward off any threat of a Brewers move come 2030 and instead push it off until 2043. Even then, though, $290 million is a high price to pay for locking a team down for just 13 more years: At $22.3 million a year, that would be the biggest per-year MLB lease subsidy in history, and until recently would have been second only to the Indiana Pacers‘ $23 million a year for the more generous in all of sports, though the New Orleans Saints and Baltimore Ravens have surged past that record since then.

The state legislature still needs to approve Evers’ proposed Brewers stadium spending. Assembly speaker Robin Vos tweeted disparagingly this morning that Evers had “drop[ped] this bomb in the budget” without working with the legislature, then immediately followed up by saying “I look forward to working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to insure that the Brewers stay in WI,” so this is surely going to go well.

I wrote here 10 days ago:

The owners of the Milwaukee Brewers have commissioned a study of their stadium “needs” through 2040, even though their lease only runs through 2030. … Nobody seems to be suggesting that the public stadium district just inform the Brewers that if they want a new lease after 2030, they’ll have to pay for their own damn stadium upgrades, whoops, looks like I just did!

One thing I neglected to do at the time was to check on the Brewers’ lease — as the article I was citing also failed to do — to see what it says about future upgrade costs. And as it turns out, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the team’s original stadium deal contains a state-of-the-art clause (termed a “keeping up with the Joneses” clause by the Journal Sentinel) that requires Wisconsin’s stadium district to pay for any improvements that “can reasonably be said to fall within the ‘top’ twenty-five percent (25%) of all such facilities, when such facilities are ranked or rated according to the quality with which they are repaired and improved.”

This kind of clause was all the rage in the late ’90s, and is best remembered for the Cincinnati Bengals‘ clause requiring the public to install holographic replay systems, if they’re ever invented. A similar clause ended up allowing the St. Louis Rams to break their lease and move to Los Angeles, after a ruling that the city would have to spend $700 million on stadium upgrades to keep the then 18-year-old stadium “first class”; and the Tennessee Titans owners are currently seeking $300 million in public cash on the basis of a similar clause.

The Brewers owners’ ask is still being calculated: A March 2019 study by a team-hired construction firm identified $71.7 million in expenses over the next 20 years, but Brewers president of business operations Rick Schlesinger has said that the total cost could be more than the $87 million remaining in the public stadium district’s reserve fund. And while 2039 is past the time that the Brewers’ lease expires in 2030, the team has a 10-year lease extension option in its pocket — so rather than having to negotiate for fresh subsidies in exchange for extending their lease, the team owners can just re-up for a decade and say, “Keep the taxpayer checks flowing, please.”

The lesson, as always: If you are a public official working on a stadium deal, do not sign state-of-the-art clauses, they are a recipe for having to throw good money after bad. You have to wonder why Wisconsin officials agreed to this deal in the first place — though given that the deal was struck at 5 a.m. when Gov. Tommy Thompson personally arm-twisted a state senator into changing his vote, maybe you don’t have to wonder all that hard.