Category: New York Mets

Friday roundup: A’s exec says Fisher really does have Vegas stadium money (no, you can’t see it)

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the bullet points, and I know how much you all love the bullet points, there is pressing news we have to discuss first, which is that Athletics owner John Fisher has the billion-dollars-plus he needs to build a stadium in Las Vegas. Sort of. Maybe. According to a guy:

Athletics owner John Fisher and his family will invest $1 billion into the construction of a stadium in Las Vegas and U.S. Bank and Goldman Sachs will offer a $300 million loan, club executive Sandy Dean said Thursday.

Dean made his remarks to a special meeting of the Las Vegas Stadium Authority board.

Dean said four letters will be presented at the Dec. 5 authority meeting asserting construction details and financing will be in place. Final approvals are expected to be made at that meeting to allow construction of the $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat domed ballpark with a capacity for up to 33,000 fans.

So it’s official: Fisher has financing in place for his Vegas stadium … well, no, he will have financing in place by December … or he’ll have a letter (or four) stating that financing is in place?

[One] letter, Dean said, asserts the Fisher and his family have the ability to meet their financial commitment. Dean said [another] letter from U.S. Bank will show that through a review of the owner’s finances that it “concludes the Fisher family has more than sufficient resources to fund the equity investment that’s required to build the stadium.”

Except! Here’s video of Dean saying that one of the letters will be “from John Fisher indicating that his family will invest a billion dollars in support of the project here in Las Vegas.” So which is it: Is the Fisher family committing to spend $1 billion on a Vegas stadium, or just avowing that it  is worth $1 billion? We already knew the latter — Vegas convention center authority chief and unregistered A’s lobbyist Steve Hill keeps saying it, among other things — but that’s not the same as actually figuring out what the family would liquidate to pay for the stadium: the San Jose Earthquakes? The Gap?.

(Dean also said Fisher is still looking to sell minority shares of the team at inflated prices because “it would be good coming to Las Vegas to have outside partners from Las Vegas,” but not because he needs the money, oh no: “The ability to finance the stadium is independent of that.”)

The question all this keeps coming back to isn’t “Where can a billionaire find a billion dollars?” but rather “Is the Fisher family ready to throw a billion dollars of its own money down a stadium hole?” The number of stadiums that can cover their own construction costs is slim; the number that have done so that are in their leagues’ smallest market and include a pricey dome is zero. Which is why people are eager to see Fisher put actual money on the table; promises of a letter next month that will maybe describe actual money on the table is not quite the same thing.

Sorry if all that was anticlimactic. And now, this week’s bullet points:

  • Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost wants to intervene in the Cleveland Browns‘ lawsuit against the city of Cleveland seeking to block the use of the Art Modell Law to block the team from moving to a new stadium in Brook Park. Yost says the team’s claim that the law, which requires that teams be offered up for sale to local owners before being relocated from their current home city, is “unconstitutionally vague” is “wrong,” and since Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam only sued the city, he needed to file a motion to intervene on behalf of the state. Feel the excitement!
  • Philadelphia councilmember Mark Squilla may have come down in favor of letting the 76ers owners build an arena next door to Chinatown, but he has an idea for ensuring that the neighborhood isn’t disrupted: a zoning overlay to “require affordable housing, restrictions on types of businesses, and limits on the size of new storefronts to discourage chain restaurants from crowding out traditional Chinatown retail,” in the words of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Adds the Inquirer: “The precise language mandating how any of this would work has yet to be added to the bill.” This is on top of proposing a tax increment financing district to kick taxes collected in Chinatown back to local businesses to offset any rise in rents as the result of increased property values — pretty sure that would only risk encouraging landlords to increase rents more knowing businesses would be getting subsidies to help pay them, need to go back and check my Intro to Economics textbook chapter on microeconomics.
  • The World Series is over and I didn’t get around to discussing the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s claim that each Yankees and Mets home playoff game generated $20-25 million in economic activity, but suffice to say I talked to an EDC spokesperson who told me (on background, so I’m not supposed to quote them directly so I’m not) that the analysis was based off a previous model from 2022 that puts together assumptions from the city tourism board plus assumptions from the Yankees and then applies a multiplier. Also, they look at “anonymized cell phone data”? No, you and I are not allowed to see the actual model, so no further details about WTF this means will be available.
  • Spotlight on America has a piece on how Tempe, Arizona said no to funding an Arizona Coyotes arena and how other cities could follow its lead, which is all well and good until it concludes by lauding late Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen for his commitment to Seattle, when Allen actually paid the city to hold a referendum so he could get $300 million in public money for a football stadium, then refused to open his books like he promised in exchange for the money, seriously, what?
  • Perhaps you would prefer a deep dive into the toilets at the Los Angeles Clippers‘ new arena? Perhaps you would prefer I hadn’t phrased it that way? Sorry, you’re getting both!

 

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Friday roundup: Rays promise “intimate” stadium with ginormous upper deck, Cleveland running out of tax money to pay for Cavs and Guardians upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)

  • Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
  • Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
  • Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
  • I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
  • A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
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Queens residents face off over Mets owner’s parkland casino, but the real fight is yet to come

access_time personNeil deMause

On Monday night I dropped in on a gym in Corona, Queens to check out the second of three community town halls scheduled by New York state senator Jessica Ramos on New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plans to build an $8 billion casino project atop the city parkland currently in use as his team’s parking lots. After the first event back in May, Ramos had definitively pumped the brakes on state legislation that would be required to convert the parkland to another use, saying “a community discussion has been sorely lacking”; local opinion had been decidedly anti-casino at the initial meeting, so anticipation was high for the much-delayed followup.

As you can probably guess if you’ve ever been to one of these things — and don’t have to if you’re already read my article on the town hall that ran yesterday in Hell Gate — the vibes were intense from the start, especially once Ramos laid out the ground rules for what she hoped would be more workshop than shouting match:

After some brief crowd work from Ramos (“I know all the carpenters want to sit together, but that may not be possible…How was everybody’s Thanksgiving? I made waffles out of stuffing the next day!”) she laid out the ground rules for the night’s event. “We are going to roll up our sleeves today,” said the senator, and make sure “everybody understands what it would mean to build this or what it would mean for us not to build this.” To that end, two balloons had been set up at opposite ends of the gym. Those who wanted to craft a potential community benefits agreement to attach to Cohen’s plan were directed to sit by the pineapple balloon; those who wanted to work on an alternative plan, perhaps achieved by creating a community land trust, would sit by the flamingo balloon.

The crowd immediately split along ideological lines. Pineapples — many of whom wore union jackets or t-shirts from a newly formed group called the Coalition for Queens Advancement that featured Cohen’s metropolitanpark.com website printed prominently on the back — were pro-casino, hoping for new jobs and wanting mostly to ensure that they would be union ones. They outnumbered by about 2-to-1 the flamingos, who brought anti-casino signs and clutched handouts from a local anti-gentrification group called the Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance with a sketch of an alternative plan dubbed Phoenix Meadows that featured all green space and none of Cohen’s desired casinos, convention space, or even the ginormous parking garages (with solar panels on top) that the Mets owner planned to hold all the cars that would be displaced from the open-air parking lots. (The numerical disparity was possibly partly explained by the fact that FADA had decided to boycott the town hall as a casino-enabling sham and instead rally outside, with organizer Joseph Jung calling it an attempt to “socialize the community into accepting a casino just by trying to pass a community benefits agreement that can’t be enforced anyway.”)

Nobody on either side, it quickly became clear, had any intention of discussing their opposing stances with each other, or even writing down suggestions on the index cards that Ramos’s staff had dutifully provided for every folding table. The end of the meeting featured the senator grabbing a wireless mic and stalking the dwindling crowd like Phil Donahue, as flamingos argued that city parkland should be used for parks, while pineapples countered that since Cohen was granted a 99-year lease on the parking lots as part of his 2006 stadium deal, might as well try to extract some concessions like bike lanes or, as one of the younger participants requested, “solar panels so it doesn’t use oil or stuff that is bad.”

(If you’ve read this far and are wondering when I’m going to get to the potential public costs of all this: That part didn’t come up at all. As I noted the last time I wrote about this for Hell Gate, if the developers are able to build on city parkland without paying property taxes or rent or PILOTs or anything, that could amount to a huge public subsidy — but beyond the $8 billion construction price tag and the required $500 million tithe to the state for a casino license if one is approved, Cohen has steadfastly refused to discuss the finances of his plan, and nobody from his team showed up at the gym to take questions or even play with the pencils.)

All of which was fine enough, because aside from giving Ramos some talking points for her eventual faceoff with Cohen, nothing that was said on the evening is likely to matter much. FADA’s intimations that she’s a casino quisling aside, Ramos clearly seems intent on finding a third way that will transform the parking lots without simply swallowing the Mets owner’s plan whole: She at one point warned of “a casino that often extracts wealth and that could become obsolete now that all the gambling is happening on people’s phones,” but in the next breath declared that “we do not have the option of keeping the asphalt.” Cohen, meanwhile, has dismissed any talk of a casino-free development as “economically not feasible.” And each side has only one hammer, and that’s the power to block the other’s plans — Ramos by refusing to pass enabling legislation for development, Cohen by calmly tapping that 99-year lease and saying “casino or bust” — meaning the whole thing is likely to come down to a giant game of chicken, with both parties waiting to see who’ll blink first.

During a brief press scrum while everyone scrambled to pick their balloon affiliations, I asked Ramos how she thought those talks would go down, or even when they would happen. “I’m going to continue to meet with everybody who asks for a meeting,” she demurred. “This is going to be an ongoing conversation.” The next town hall is currently slated for sometime in 2024, after which the real haggling will no doubt commence.

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Mets owner finally says out loud he wants to build an $8B casino complex on city-owned parking lots

access_time personNeil deMause

New York Mets owner Steve Cohen yesterday revealed more details of his plans to build an $8 billion casino complex in the Citi Field parking lot, and, yep, that looks pretty much like it sounded when he first talked about it last winter:

Sorry, no vaportecture images with smiling gamblers raising their fists in the air while fireworks go off overhead. Gotta save something for the encore!

Cohen has said he — and/or his business partners Hard Rock, who would run the casino — will put up the $8 billion, but there are still a few question marks about the plan. First off, Cohen does not actually own a casino license: He’s hoping to be granted one of three expected to be given out by the state for the NYC area in the next year or three. This, in fact, is a large part of why he’s had this “Metropolitan Park” plan sketched out now, as the state is expected to prioritize projects that seem shovel-ready — to avoid going through the lengthy vetting process and then ending up with a project that can’t actually happen.

“Can actually happen” is up in the air as well, though, as Cohen doesn’t actually own the land he wants to build on, which is city-owned parking lots that are technically public parkland. Courts have consistently ruled that “fun stuff” does not qualify as a legally recognized park activity, so that means the state legislature would have to pass a bill demapping the parking lots as parkland. Jeff Aubrey, the state assemblymember who represents the district, has already introduced a bill to do so; Jessica Ramos, the state senator who represents the district and who also may challenge Mayor Eric Adams for City Hall in two years, has so far declined to introduce a parallel bill, saying she wants to hear more from her constituents and consider other alternatives for the site. “If you look at everybody who spoke, about two-thirds expressed not wanting a casino,” Ramos told me after holding a town hall on the project in May; she has annoucned another one for Monday, November 27.

Of course, Cohen has a hammer, too, which is that as the leaseholder for the parking lots, nothing can really happen on the site without his say-so. There is likely lots of gamesmanship still to come, in other words, not to mention financial details of who will pay what rent and property taxes — if an $8 billion casino development gets deemed tax-exempt because it’s on public land, that’d be a ton of tax breaks. Right now this is just about Cohen getting the ball rolling on building public support (or at least legislative support) for his casino dreams, and trying to make his plan seem less vapory than the ones across town.

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Friday roundup: Vegas A’s stadium in limbo; so are Coyotes’ future, maybe Mets’ casino?

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Nevada legislature never got around to holding its second day of Oakland A’s stadium hearings yesterday, and while there was no announcement of why, the obvious conclusion is that it’s because they don’t have the votes to pass anything. The current plan is to reconvene on Monday, with the time until then used to see if amending the bill will turn any legislators’ heads: Rumored changes include removing the A’s exemption from the state’s live entertainment tax (which could save the state about $100 million in tax breaks, though that’s a subsidy I didn’t include in my latest estimate, so it would still leave the total public cost at around $500 million) and improving the team’s community benefits agreement to include things like donations to a local food bank (which wouldn’t amount to much at all), so my question stands.

At least A’s owner John Fisher has one friend in the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board, which helpfully asserted yesterday that though the economic benefits of a stadium are questionable, this is about “making the region a more attractive place to work, live, invest in and visit,” which Las Vegas desperately needs because nobody visits there, it’s too crowded, or something? Maybe Fisher could actually use some more persuasive friends, though presumably that’s who he has in behind-closed-doors meetings with state legislators between now and Monday.

But that’s not all that’s happening, not by a long shot:

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Friday roundup: Nevada wants county to share A’s stadium cost, Commanders execs think Virginia will give them $1.5B to move there

access_time personNeil deMause

Yesterday was a rare off day in the Oakland A’s saga as we all looked for the long-awaited Las Vegas stadium legislation to drop — and it still hasn’t, and according to the Nevada Independent, there are reasons:

  • According to the ever-popular “sources close to negotiations,” the reason there’s no A’s stadium legislation yet in the Nevada legislature, just five business days before the deadline for the session, is that state legislators are only willing to put up $150-195 million in transferable tax credits, with another $200-million-plus coming from Clark County super-TIF tax kickbacks. Whether the county can decide on how much it’s willing to kick in before next Friday is unclear, as is whether the Nevada legislature would vote on its share before the county does, as is whether the state would call a special session if needed — but at least we sort of know how much the total subsidy would be? Sort of? It sure would be nice to see the fine print, but it sounds like that won’t happen until the backroom dealing is complete, which is not how democracy is supposed to work but is 100% the way it often does.
  • A’s officials also released the results of a poll that showed that Clark County registered voters mostly supported building a stadium for the A’s, so long as you didn’t tell them who would be paying for it.
  • Finally from Vegas, the Bally’s Corporation has sent a memo to its employees saying it would build a new hotel next to an A’s stadium, which KNTV says would be “unique” but the stadium I’m going to tonight says otherwise.
  • Washington Commanders execs believe Virginia “will offer the best incentive package — potentially up to $1.5 billion” to build a new stadium there once Josh Harris completes his purchase of the team, according to a prospectus prepared by Harris’s company and obtained by ESPN. The prospectus also projects the Commanders bringing in $959 million a year by 2032-33, or $1.05 billion with a new stadium, which raises questions of 1) why Harris can’t build a stadium with his own money if he wants to so bad and 2) why Harris really wants a new stadium if it’s only a matter of $100 million a year in revenue, but the headlines are all about which state will win the right to throw money at the team, go horsies!
  • A bill to freeze property taxes on the Arlington Park racetrack site if the Chicago Bears owners build a stadium on it is on hold for now, and isn’t expected to be voted on this session. It could be brought up next session, though, by which time hopefully the Chicago media will actually report on how much of a tax expenditure that would amount to, no rush.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is reportedly stalling on allowing NYC F.C. fans to park in his stadium parking lots (really the city’s parking lots, but Cohen controls them and gets all the revenue from them) in hopes of using it as leverage to get permission to build a casino there, according to “multiple people familiar with the negotiations,” which almost has to mean NYC F.C. or its political allies who are steamed at Cohen. There’s a town hall being held tonight to discuss the casino plans — it’ll be interesting to see if any NYC F.C. advocates turn out in force to either support Cohen or yell at him.
  • Andy Zimbalist really wants you to know that whether the Worcester Red Sox deal was good like he originally reported or bad like a new paper he hasn’t read concluded, it was better than if he hadn’t been paid $225/hour for his services.

Okay, gotta get going to that baseball game. See you back here on Monday!

 

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NYC is handing out $377m a year in tax breaks to its pro sports teams

access_time personNeil deMause

The New York City Independent Budget Office, an agency created in 1989 as an independent check on city governance that has provided a ton of good economic analysis over the years throwing cold numerical water on various elected officials’ pet projects, has a report out on city subsidies for Madison Square Garden and the city’s three most recently built sports venues, for the Yankees, Mets, and Brooklyn Nets. And while it includes no overall subsidy numbers — “because the subsidy structures for each are different, cross-comparisons are difficult to make,” writes the IBO — there is this breakdown of property tax breaks alone:

As of February 2023, the DOF assessed fair market values for Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and Barclays Center are $2.6 billion, $3.2 billion, and $2.6 billion respectively, and the property tax amounts would be $115 million, $121 million, and $99 million, respectively.

That’s foregone property tax amounts per year, mind you. Add in the complete tax break for Madison Square Garden, and the city is currently granting Hal Steinbrenner, Steve Cohen, Joe Tsai, and James Dolan $377 million a year in tax breaks. (The Yanks, Mets, and Nets technically pay a smaller amount of “payments in lieu of taxes,” but as the IBO notes, these are redirected to pay off the teams’ own construction costs, so the city treasury is still getting bupkis.) Even without taking into account that property values are certain to rise, that would amount to more than $5 billion in present value over the next 30 years, assuming all these sports facilities last 30 years, or at least that the tax exemptions do.

This is on top of more than $1.1 billion in other subsidies for the Yanks and Mets stadiums alone. (The Nets arena financing is so complex, being all intertwined with housing development and its attendant subsidies, that it’s nearly impossible to put a number on its public costs.) That brings the total to more than $6 billion, which could build 15,000 units of affordable housing, or an entire new train line linking Brooklyn and Queens, or lots of other things costing $5 billion. (A free 99-cent pizza slice for every city resident every day for a year and a half?) It’s a bunch of money, but “a bunch of money” doesn’t make headlines, numbers like “$377 million a year” and “more than $6 billion” do, so feel free to bandy those about on the socials as you see fit.

[NOTE: This post initially had lower numbers because I typoed “$277 million” for “$377 million.” My fingers regret the error.]

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Friday roundup: Mets casino gets bill, Angels deal lurches from grave, news outlets everywhere need editing help, stat

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to everyone for helping us make it through another week! (I’m assuming here that it’s you readers who someone make time progress; I don’t actually know that much about science.)

Here’s what’s been happening that we haven’t talked about yet:

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Mets owner asks fans and Queens residents: What side order would you like with your casino?

access_time personNeil deMause

I covered New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s “visioning session” for a new casino-plus-other-stuff-but-mostly-a-casino development on Saturday for Hell Gate. And as with most of these things staged by developers, it turned out to be equal parts fact-finding about what local residents would like to see and PR campaign for why the project absolutely must happen, cost and legality be damned:

The presentation included very little information about Cohen’s actual plans—the man himself put in a cameo but stuck to generalities—preferring to stick to open-ended questions about what local residents would like to see built; handwritten suggestions from the masses included a “jobs training center,” “soapbox derby track,” and “community cannabis gardens.” (There were a lot of Post-its, but a quick scan of those on display revealed no one actively requesting a casino.) These were accompanied by some more subtly coercive elements, such as video screens asking what people think of the Citi Field environs today and what they would like to see in the future, displaying sample word clouds highlighting “barren” and “empty” for the before scenario and “welcoming” and “community” for a Cohen-redeveloped future.

“It’s kind of a push poll, in that it’s presupposing that you want something done,” said one Mets fan from Great Neck who gave his name only as Tom. “There’s a smorgasbord of possibilities, and they’re all nice, and they all sound interesting. But you don’t see the word ‘casino’ anywhere, and everybody knows that’s what this is about.”

The problem with a casino — aside from the fact that it would bring more car traffic to an area that’s already badly snarled when there are Mets games or tennis matches at the nearby U.S. Open or soccer matches at the soon-to-be-built-maybe nearby NYC F.C. stadium — is that it’s currently illegal to build one on the stadium parking lots that Cohen has in mind for the project, since those are technically public parkland. This means that the state legislature would need to pass a law to okay the plan, which means convincing a bunch of elected officials from all over the state that the parking lots are a blight upon the land that cannot stand, and which must be replaced by new parks/cannabis gardens/oh-did-we-forget-to-mention-a-casino?

The casino approval process itself was spelled out in a Request For Applications issued last week by the state Gaming Facility Location Board, and involves applications first to go to the location board, then through a community advisory committee, then zoning approvals, then back to the location board, so nothing is likely to be final for a couple of years. That gives Cohen plenty of time to try to build a groundswell for his casino dreams, or at least the appearance of one to counter the community groups that are already opposing it — not to mention to figure out what, if anything, he would pay to the city for the right to build on public land, on top of the $500 million minimum bid to the state for a casino license. Gentlemen, start your lobbyists.

Some photos from the event, including those 100% unbiased word clouds:

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Mets owner wants to build something in stadium parking lot, surely not a casino as that would be illegal

access_time personNeil deMause

So apparently New York Mets owner Steve Cohen has some plans afoot for his stadium parking lots:

To clarify a bunch of questions you may have:

  • No, that’s not the site of the old auto shops where the new NYC F.C. stadium is supposed to go; according to the not-at-all-self-importantly-titled queensfuture.com, it’s just the existing Mets parking lots, which the site calls “vacant asphalt and wasted opportunity.”
  • Cohen wants to “create a shared space that people not only want to come to and enjoy, but can be proud of,” according to the website.
  • Yes, there’s been talk that this might have to do with Cohen seeking one of New York City’s new casino licenses.
  • No, a casino probably wouldn’t pass muster as an acceptable use of city parkland, which the parking lots are still zoned as, something that deep-sixed a previous plan to build a mall on them.

So what, exactly, is Cohen up to here? Given all the PR glurge on his site about wasted opportunities, any presentation on Saturday is likely to be a bunch of public kvetching about how his team shouldn’t be forced to remain surrounded by a sea of asphalt when it could be surrounded by shiny new somethings that Queens can be proud of, and incidentally he can make a ton of money off of, all without paying property tax on the land under them since it’s owned by the city. Whether that will be enough to convince the city council or the courts that a private casino counts as a public purpose related to athletics, who can say. I mean, you can bet on games at casinos, right? Which raises the question: Did Cohen’s lawyers try arguing that a mall would be related to Mets games because you can buy Mets gear there, not to mention beer to drown your sorrows in when the Mets lose?

Will report back more on Monday on how this “visioning session” goes, but judging from the Twitter replies, it’s going to be a lot of people saying “Sign Carlos Correa already, and don’t fuck with my parking.”

P.S. I didn’t even notice on first glance that the heading on Cohen’s new website is “A New Day in Queens.” Nice callback, I guess?

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