With the Tampa Bay Rays‘ new stadium plans dead or mostly dead or pining for the fjords or whatever pop culture reference you prefer, it’s time to speculate wildly on other cities that might want to take St. Petersburg’s place to offer up a steaming pile of money for a new stadium. Up first: Portland, Oregon, where would-be team owners the Portland Diamond Project (led by retired not-even-close-to-billionaire Nike executive Craig Cheek) want to revisit the $150 million in player-income-tax kickbacks that were approved two decades ago to try to lure the Montreal Expos, and invited over a ton of city and state elected officials, as one does, to discuss upping that dollar amount for bring an expansion or existing team to town. How’d that go over?
- State Sen. Lew Frederick: “How would people respond? The present state treasurer and the incoming treasurer were there—she [Elizabeth Steiner] will have a lot of say. If there’s a bill, the argument will be the same as it was in the past. Could we be leveraging the tax money for something else other than baseball?”
- Incoming state treasurer Elizabeth Steiner: “Selling bonds backed by the new salaries—that’s revenue we wouldn’t get if we didn’t get the team. In principle, I’m supportive but I’m not willing to commit until I see all the details.”
- State Sen. Mark Meek “I can’t wait.”
Feel the excitement! The initial $150 million cap on stadium bonds was in 2003 dollars, to be fair, so expanding it would make a kind of sense in that player salaries have gone up since then; on the other hand, state budget analysts at the time said player income taxes would only be enough to pay off about half of a $150 million bond, so maybe it wouldn’t actually make sense at all. A lot of the “revenue we wouldn’t get if we didn’t get the team” calculation would depend on whether the entire roster could be encouraged to live in Oregon and pay its 9.9% state income tax rate or if the state would only be able to charge income tax for days when the team was playing at home.
Plus, as always, there’s the substitution effect problem: How much of that income would be earned, and have taxes paid on it, somewhere else in the state if MLB never arrived? Part of players’ salaries are paid from out-of-state sources like national TV contracts, obviously, but part comes from local fan spending. If even some Oregonians fund their baseball ticket purchases by cutting back on other sporting events, or going out to eat as much, or some other local entertainment option, then the state loses income tax proceeds from Trailblazers players or sous chefs or pumpkin boat mechanics, which has to be factored in.
All this math will need to be hashed out in the state legislature, and even then it needs to be seen how much money a stadium would cost and how much of the tab Cheek and company would pick up themselves. The proposed site, the Zidell Yards south of downtown, is in a tax increment financing district, so it could get potentially get property tax kickbacks as well. (Here are some images of what the stadium could look like, or at least could have looked like when it was slated for an entirely different site in 2018.)
Portland mayor-elect Keith Wilson, at least, is apparently unworried about where to find a billion dollars or so, and already thinks his city is neck-and-neck at the finish line:
“I’d say this is as close as we’ve come. We feel confident it’s down to us and one other city. And we’re making a solid play.”
One other city? Give us a hint — does it rhyme with Schmeensboro?
