Category: Salt Lake City MLB team

Friday roundup: D-Backs tax kickback plan rushes ahead despite questions, Utah bill would let a hundred stadiums bloom

access_time personNeil deMause

Springtime is always a busy time for stadium and arena shenanigans, if only because it’s budget season for most states and cities. But still! Buncha bullet points today, is what I’m saying, and expect a lot more next week, and so on and so on until legislators break for the summer or come to their senses, whichever comes first (you know damn well which will come first):

  • An Arizona state legislative analysis says because Diamondbacks players pay $3.5 million a year in state income tax, that would over more than a quarter of the tax kickbacks team execs want for stadium renovations — asked and answered, move to strike. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, meanwhile, says the state analysis doesn’t look at actual economic data but rather projections like calculating every fan buys two beers (first, assume a spherical fan). No worries, though, the bill still has to go through — oh, welp, looks like it already passed the state house and just needs to clear the senate, and House Democratic Leader Rep. Oscar De Los Santos has expressed “alarm” and said “we should not be rushing through this legislative process,” guess there’s no time to worry like the present.
  • Utah state senator Scott Sandall, figuring one MLB stadium with no team to play in it and no way to pay for it isn’t enough for a growing state, introduced a bill to let Salt Lake City’s stadium district build multiple stadiums as small as 18,000 seats for any sport, “to be proactive, just for the future,” not because he has any particular sports teams in mind that could use an 18,000-seat stadium or anything.
  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is supporting a new Missouri state bill to raise money for Royals and/or Chiefs stadiums by providing … okay, Lucas didn’t say exactly how much money or from where, and the bill itself isn’t posted on the Missouri senate website yet, but Lucas says it’ll help Kansas City “host FIFA World Cup games,” please nobody tell him that it’s going to be decades before the U.S. gets another World Cup after 2026, I don’t want to spoil his day.
  • The proposed Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park is set to lead to the creation of a new Circle K gas station, maybe, if government bureaucrats don’t get in the way with their red tape about “residents” being “concerned,” can you believe those guys?
  • Phoenix Suns co-owner Justin Ishbia has pulled out of bidding for the Minnesota Twins and is instead upping his minority stake in the Chicago White Sox, which certainly can be read as positioning himself to become majority owner once 89-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf gives up either control or this mortal coil. Whether he would go ahead with with Reinsdorf’s current stadium plans, let alone rebranding the team as the Chicacago White Sox, remains to be seen.
  • The MLB cable empire keeps on crumbling, and at least one small-market owner, the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Mark Attanasio, says he wants a TV revenue sharing model more like the NFL’s where all the money is shared equally. This is worth watching since it would have a major impact on where teams could relocate to (Green Bay would suddenly be a viable MLB market), plus all sort of other things like how long the 2027 baseball lockout is likely to last.
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Friday roundup: Chiefs hire clown consultants for fan poll, Bears try to conjure stadium money with magic words

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”

We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.

Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:

  • Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
  •  Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
  • The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
  • Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
  • Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
  • The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
  • There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”
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Salt Lake okays rezoning for MLB as soon as someone finds an MLB team and $1.8B to pay for a stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Salt Lake City council approved rezoning last night for a 95-acre site that could include an MLB stadium, which “historic opportunity” and “create a place for Utah’s families to gather and thrive” and blah blah blah, is anyone actually proposing who would pay for this thing?

The answer appears to be no, or at least no more than the last time this was discussed back in March, at which time the state legislature approved kicking back sales and property taxes from a 200-acre “entertainment district” around the stadium to help pay for construction. At the time, the bill’s sponsors indicated that it would take $900 million to pay for half the cost of a $1.8 billion stadium, and that it would take more than just the tax kickbacks, without specifying how much more or where the more would come from. There had previously been talk of using hotel taxes as well, but that was stripped by the legislature at the last minute and not replaced.

Plus, of course, Salt Lake City doesn’t have an MLB team, though presumably someone there could put in for an expansion franchise as soon as the league decides to open itself up for expansion, which was supposed to happen as soon as the Tampa Bay Rays and Athletics situations are resolved, so, yeah, maybe don’t hold your breath there. At least it does have renderings — the best part is how there are no turnstiles between the ballpark and the adjacent river, so either fans will enjoy free in-game kayaking or kayakers will get free admission to the games, two thumbs up for both ideas.

 

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Utah passes $2B in MLB and NHL subsidies, now just needs MLB and NHL teams

access_time personNeil deMause

The Utah state legislature, in the final days of its session on Thursday night and Friday, passed bills to pay for both $900 million in construction costs for an MLB stadium and $500 million in construction costs for an NHL arena, if Salt Lake City can land teams in both those sports. The bills now go to Gov. Spencer Cox, who is expected to sign them.

As for how the sports venue subsidies will be paid for, that’s still a little bit up in the air:

  • The $900 million in baseball money will start with the kickback of state sales taxes within a 200-acre “entertainment district” around the stadium; property taxes from the district would also be used to pay for potentially $500 million in infrastructure and other non-stadium construction. (The stadium itself wouldn’t pay property taxes, since it would be owned by the state.) The bill’s “sponsors concede other revenue may be needed,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune, to cover half of a planned $1.8 billion stadium construction tab.
  • The $500 million in hockey money — which according to the legislation can be used for either a new arena, renovations to the Jazz‘ arena, or both — will come from both a 0.5% citywide sales tax hike and the kickback of all sales taxes from a “10-block revitalization area” around the arena or arenas, as the case may be. There’s also talk of “reorienting” the Salt Palace convention center by rebuilding parts of it, which would come with an unknown price tag.

This is being widely reported as $2 billion in subsidies, which isn’t quite right because that’s the number you get from adding up all the future tax payments over time, but that’s just how the state would pay for $1.4 billion in spending right now. On the other hand, it also overlooks things like all the future property tax breaks the two venues would get, not to mention any additional costs like maintenance and upgrade funds that might be approved as part of leases with these so-far-hypothetical teams — so “around $2 billion” is probably a fair assessment.

That’s a staggering amount of money for two sports venues of any kind, but the two bills passed with little opposition once it was decided to focus entirely on future sales tax money (and, in the case of the MLB stadium, future we’ll-get-back-to-you-on-that money). Besides, who could say no when former Atlanta Braves star and Utah resident Dale Murphy turned up to sign baseballs for legislators:

There are 75 state representatives in Utah and 29 state senators, making that $19.2 million per autograph, handily breaking Babe Ruth’s record. Guess Dale Murphy really does deserve to be in the Hall of Fame for something!

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Friday roundup: Utah still unclear on where it’d get $1.4B in MLB/NHL subsidies, White Sox have lots of friends in high places

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another nutty week in stadiumland, but let’s give thanks for the small things — in this case, for the WP Dark Mode plugin, which has been updated so that it again gives FoS readers the option to avoid eyestrain while still navigating the site as you’re meant to. If you haven’t clicked the little crescent moon in the corner of the screen, give it a try, it’s fun!

Or you can read about the news of the week, which is less guaranteed to be fun, but is still … interesting? Informative? One of those:

  • Fox 13 in Salt Lake City claims that both the proposed MLB stadium and NHL arena would create entertainment districts where sales taxes would be kicked back to pay for the projects. We knew this for the baseball stadium, but for the arena the legislation says “authorizes a qualifying local government to levy a sales and use tax within the local government’s boundaries and for use within the project area” and caps the amount at 0.5%, so it looks like this would actually be a citywide sales tax hike? Either way, it’s a lot of money, and still more money would be required to pay the full $1.4 billion combined cost — including, notes University of Colorado economist Geoffrey Propheter, $1 million a year in kicked-back “possessory interest taxes,” more than half of which would come out of school budgets — but it sure would be nice to see some clarity on this before the legislature wraps up its session … wait, today? Well, that’s suboptimal.
  • NBC Chicago obtained emails showing that Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf had their comms departments work together to concoct a press statement about the team’s stadium plans in January, and while it’s sort of understandable given that it was about a meeting between the two, it’s also maybe not the best sign of a mayor being interested in driving a hard bargain for his constituents that when the White Sox asked the mayor’s office to vet their press release, the response was “Could we do a joint statement?” Especially when the resulting statement referred to a meeting “to discuss the historic partnership between the team and Chicago and the team’s ideas for remaining competitive in Chicago in perpetuity” and didn’t mention anything about the $2 billion public price tag.
  • Chicago political consultant David Axelrod tweeted that the White Sox stadium plan would be “a game-changer for the city” and immediately got piled on for “peddling disinformation” (The Athletic’s Keith Law), told “You’re not an economist, so how about trust the economists who are” (economist J.C. Bradbury) and “Claiming stadiums catalyze economic development is like arguing vaccines cause autism” (Bradbury again), among many, many others.
  • Comcast Spectacor, the owners of the Philadelphia Flyers, are talking about doing a $2.5 billion redevelopment of the parking lots around their arena, to include “hotels, residences, restaurants, shops and a 5,500-seat performance stage.” Funding for the first phase would come from Comcast and its development partners, while the second phase would be paid for by “yet to be determined,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which isn’t a red flag at all.
  • The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill handing over the RFK Stadium site to Washington, D.C. for redevelopment which will likely mean a proposal to build a new Commanders stadium there. Every representative from Maryland but one voted against it, as did four of 11 members from Virginia; “It’s most certainly not a level playing field when one interested jurisdiction receives a free transfer of federal government subsidized land,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland. We’re still a long way from actual stadium plans or price tags, and the D.C. council may yet vote to use the site for something other than a stadium, but it definitely adds one more potential competitor to what’s been a mostly quiet of late three-way bidding war.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred called the Oakland A’s Las Vegas relocation plans “solid” and immediately got piled on for damning it with faint praise. Manfred also acknowledged that “to most effectively build the [2025] schedule, we need to know at some point in the spring exactly where they’re going to be,” which isn’t exactly giving A’s owner John Fisher a deadline, the commissioner knows who signs his checks. Fisher is apparently hoping that if he agrees to sell his share of the Oakland Coliseum site to the local group that wants to develop it, the city of Oakland will grant him a lease extension to play there through 2027, which isn’t the deal the Oakland mayor’s office has been talking about at all, so we’ll see what the reaction there is.
  • Tennessee’s tourism department has asked the state legislature for the right to deny public access to public records about how much it offers the NFL for the right to host the Super Bowl at the new Titans stadium under construction. “The Super Bowl deal is often embarrassing for the NFL because of the demands they make and for the politicians that agree to give the league things like free high-end hotel rooms and police escorts,” notes College of Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson.
  • Toronto is now expecting to spend $380 million on hosting six 2026 World Cup matches, which is, let’s see, $63 million per match. It says it expects an economic boost of $392 million in GDP and tax revenues of $119 million, which seem both optimistic and mismatched unless Toronto has a 30% sales tax rate, but since World Cup impact numbers are generally garbage anyway — Matheson once called them “so outlandish as to defy common sense” — we can safely ignore them entirely.
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Utah legislators proposing $1.4B in spending on MLB, NHL venues, to be paid for with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

access_time personNeil deMause

Utah state legislators are pushing ahead with plans to build both an NHL arena and an MLB stadium, despite not having teams in either sport. And also despite not quite having figured out how to pay for either of them:

  • The Utah state house passed a bill to spend up to $900 million on a baseball stadium and surrounding entertainment district, provided a team arrives. However, earlier plans to fund the project with a statewide hike in hotel taxes was dropped amid opposition from rural legislators (and hotel operators), leaving the stadium bonds to be paid off, according to the bill, by statewide car rental taxes, kickbacks from sales and property taxes on the site (hello, mega-TIF!), and a whole lot of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  • The Utah state senate passed a bill to spend around another $500 million (estimated at $1 billion over 30 years, which would fund around half a billion in bonds) to create a different sports and entertainment district for the Jazz and an as-yet-nonexistent hockey team. The money would, according to the bill, allow Salt Lake City to both impose a citywide sales tax hike and also kick back the share of existing state sales taxes designated for building prisons, generating ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in new revenue.

The two legislative bodies now swap bills, and will have to figure out how to pay for both at the same time. Dan McCay, sponsor of the senate hockey arena bill, said he didn’t want to stack the tax hikes on top of each other for the same people, “so that those become unlivable environments for those who are paying the tax”; if local residents visit both sports venues, though, their tax money will be getting funneled to both projects, plus of course everyone in the city will be dealing with the budget hole created by having taxes kicked back that could otherwise be used to pay for other things.

There’s a whole lot still to be worked out here, even before figuring out whether Salt Lake City would even get teams and what kind of leases they would demand — as we’ve seen before, lease opt-outs and state-of-the-art clauses can end up forcing cities to throw a lot of good money after bad. But the general dimensions of the plan are in place: around $1.4 billion in tax money to be set aside as a lure to get major-league hockey and baseball teams. Normally I’d call that a staggering amount of money for elected officials to give preliminary approval to all in one day, but what with the way things are going in other states, it’s going to take more than $1.4 billion to stagger anybody.

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Friday roundup: Opposition builds (somewhat) to sports subsidy plans in Virginia, Kansas City, elsewhere

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a rough week, what with new stadium demands dropping every couple of hours, half of them from Jerry Reinsdorf. But there have also been signs of new organized opposition from all corners, some of them involving heavy hitters:

  • The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO came out against the proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria after being unable to reach an agreement with the teams and the state on whether a hotel that would be part of the $2 billion project would employ union workers. “If they’re against it, then the arena deal is probably going to have a very difficult time,” remarked Virginia House Speaker Don L. Scott Jr. afterwards, as the arena bill heads for reconciliation talks between the house, which passed it, and the senate, which didn’t even give it a hearing. “If it dies, it dies.”
  • Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, meanwhile, upped the ante on her opposition to Alexandria arena plans, challenging D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Twitter to “compete by both offering $0 in taxpayer dollars to these teams and let them decide where they want to pay to build their own arena.” (Bowser’s account did not respond, unless this counts.) Former Alexandria mayor Allison Silberberg, who is part of the Coalition to Stop the Potomac Yard Arena campaign, was so pleased that she brought Lucas a cake.
  • After the Kansas City renters’ group KC Tenants came out against the upcoming April 2 referendum to renew Jackson County’s 0.375% sales tax surcharge and give the money to Royals owner John Sherman as part of a potential $1 billion in public money for a new downtown stadium, calling it “$167 per household, per year, all to pay for a playground for the wealthy and for tourists,” a group of city residents have formed the Committee Against New Royals Stadium Taxes to likewise oppose the tax hike. The group has “little to no money in its bank account,” according to the Kansas City Star’s account of campaign manager Tim Smith’s characterization, but it does have a parked domain name and its organizers are members of the extremely active Save Kauffman (Royals) Stadium at Truman Sports Complex Facebook group, which is a recommended follow if you want to see how extremely angry many Kansas City residents, and Royals fans, are about this whole state of affairs.
  • Arthur Acolin, a real estate economics professor at the University of Washington, released a three-page report on the proposed downtown Philadelphia 76ers arena that found that disruptions to existing businesses during construction and operation could cost the city and state between $260 million and $1 billion in lost tax revenues. The math is a little rough — it looks like Acolin just added up all the economic activity in the area of the proposed arena and calculated what would happen if it fell by sample round numbers — but as he writes, “the 76ers have provided nowhere near this level of details nor any of the analysis behind their figures.” It was enough to get the 76ers to respond by calling the report “fatally flawed” and “another attempt by those who oppose the project to obfuscate the truth by pumping out misinformation and half-baked theories instead of engaging in productive dialogue,” in a CBS News article that repeatedly refers to Acolin as “Albert Alcoin,” which should get all their copy editors immediately fired, if they had copy editors, which they probably don’t.
  • Arizona Republic sportswriter Greg Moore wrote a column about Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick’s threat to leave town if he doesn’t get public stadium money that includes the subhead “I don’t like bullies,” and really the rest of the column is just icing on that four-word cake.
  • I brought my mighty rhetorical weight to the airwaves, or at least the internetwaves, by going on the Sox Machine podcast to talk about why giving Reinsdorf $1.7 billion in tax money for a new Chicago White Sox stadium development (since upped to $2 billion) would be crazytown.

So that’s it, then, the tide is finally turning, and maybe soon we can all stop pushing this damn rock back up this damn hill day after day? Hahaha of course not, the forces of vacuuming up money and giving it to rich people so they can have more money (because that’s what makes them rich people) continue unabated:

  • The Utah legislature advanced a bill to hike sales taxes in Salt Lake City by 0.5% to generate $1 billion for an arena for a nonexistent NHL team, with the backing of Mayor Erin Mendenhall. This would be on top of $600 million or more in proposed hotel tax hikes to help pay for a stadium for a nonexistent MLB team. Hockey bill sponsor state Sen. Dan McCay denied that this was giving in to threats by the Jazz ownership that they could move out of the city limits without a new subsidized arena, then added, “you’d hate to see downtown lose the sporting opportunities they have now,” so, yeah.
  • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered up a fresh bowl of word salad about whether he’ll endorse city money being used for a new White Sox stadium: “As far as public dollars, we haven’t gotten into any of those specifics just yet. But I will say that we’re gonna explore all options. … Everything is on the table here. But again, I want to make sure that there’s a real commitment to public use and public benefit. … There’s no guarantee that they’ll get it from the city. What I’ve said repeatedly is that we need to make sure that our investments have real public benefit and that there has to be a commitment to public use. Those conversations are being had, and there are some promising developments that eventually we’ll be able to talk about out loud.” He has it right here on this list…
  • The new $27 million Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium in Pawtucket will now cost state taxpayers $132 million over 30 years, because the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency got a terrible bond rate. State commerce secretary Liz Tanner defended the pricey borrowing by pointing out that even though the state legislature could have just appropriated the money and saved taxpayers a ton of interest payments, “there would’ve been a level of uncertainty without knowing whether the legislature was going to pass those dollars or not,” and we can’t have that, now can we?
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project — surely you remember the Dodger Stadium gondola project — lurched forward again on Thursday when the Metro Board of Directors signed off on its environmental impact report. The gondola still needs approval from the city of Los Angeles and parks and transit officials, plus to figure out who exactly will pay for its potential $500 million price tag, but if nothing else it lives to gondola another day.
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is reportedly focused on staying in Oakland until a new Las Vegas stadium is open in 2028, and also Sacramento is the frontrunner to be the temporary home of the A’s, this is way too blind-men-and-the-elephant for me, maybe let’s all calm down about the latest rumors you heard, guys.
  • And in non-sports news, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry defended signing a bill to remove the requirement that recipients of state development subsidies report how many jobs they’ll be creating, because “this program is about capital investment. It is not about job creating.” Just gonna sit here and let that roll around in my brain for a while, have a great weekend and see you back here Monday!

 

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Utah preparing to offer $600m+ toward stadium project for MLB team that doesn’t actually exist

access_time personNeil deMause

Not one but two different overview articles today on how lots of sports owners sure are demanding lots of money for lots of stadiums and arenas, neither of which will contain any surprises for regular readers of this site. To really get a rise out of sports subsidy followers these days, you need some real novelty — say, legislators proposing a massive stadium subsidy for a team that doesn’t even exist yet. Which brings us to Friday’s news out of Utah:

Legislative leaders are still working behind closed doors on a proposal that could throw more than $1 billion in public financing toward not just the baseball stadium, but the sprawling entertainment district stretching from the northwest corner of downtown Salt Lake west along North Temple toward the State Fairpark…

Under the framework, the state would issue hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bonds, essentially borrowing the money, then repay the debt with revenue generated by an increase to the transient room tax, or hotel tax.

Technically this would be public money toward a $3.5 billion development that included a stadium, but the clear goal is to bring an MLB expansion team to Salt Lake City — something that isn’t likely before 2030 at the earliest if it happens at all, though USA Today’s Bob Nightengale calls Nashville and Salt Lake City the frontrunners, citing no sources at all.

Calling this a $1 billion stadium subsidy may be overstating it just slightly. While there was an initial plan to hike hotel taxes by enough to generate $70 million a year, the current bill percolating in the Utah state legislature would generate between $42 million and $50 million a year over 20 years, which isn’t enough to pay off $1 billion in stadium costs unless the state could borrow money at zero interest. (If we use Tennessee’s 5% rate for its Titans stadium bonds, it would cover at most $623 million.) But there would likely be additional money provided to the rest of the project: The Salt Lake Tribune, citing “sources,” said one proposal would be to kick back “a portion” of sales and property taxes from the stadium district to pay for its construction costs, aka a mega-TIF.

The hotel tax hike, which could come either in the form of a 2.5% hotel tax surcharge across seven counties or a statewide tax hike of 1% to 1.5%, has the backing of both Utah house speaker Mike Schultz and Gov. Spencer Cox, who declared on Thursday that giving money from a hotel tax isn’t like giving money from other taxes:

“We have some of the lowest taxes in the United States on hotels … so the argument is there’s a little bit of room. Most of those taxes are paid by people outside of the state of Utah, so that’s one area where we’re having discussions and negotiations where I’m open to it.”

“I’m not open to using General Fund money and writing a check to subsidize these at all,” he said.

It’s the Casino Night Fallacy! Everybody drink!

The Tribune’s sources added that there would have to be “a deal signed with MLB committing to an expansion team” before the tax money was actually provided, so at least this wouldn’t be building a stadium on spec like some cities have done in the past. It’s absolutely upping the ante for what MLB can demand from prospective expansion cities, though — Oakland officials might want to be careful what exactly it asks for as part of lease extension talks with the A’s, if they don’t want to end up winning a replacement team that comes with a billion-dollar public stadium price tag.

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Ex-Jazz owners propose Salt Lake development with MLB stadium that would cost (checks notes, coughs uncomfortably, looks down at shoes)

access_time personNeil deMause

One day, I try to take one measly day off of posting, and then this goes and happens:

The Larry H. Miller Company intends to put at least $3.5 billion into a mixed-use development on Salt Lake City’s long-overlooked west side, including a potential Major League Baseball stadium.

Blah blah, “transformational,” “catalytic,” “once-in-a-generation opportunity,” what’s the public price tag, I don’t got all day here, Deseret News:

Thursday’s announcement didn’t include specific details about the proposed ballpark. Big League Utah recently said it envisions a year-round, multiuse stadium for all kinds of events from sports to concerts to community celebrations.

Construction of a ballpark would likely include some public investment. State government officials are averse to diverting taxpayer dollars directly but have acknowledged tax increment financing or a public-private partnership could be options.

Reading between the lines, that comes to “It wasn’t in the Miller Company’s press release, and we didn’t take the time to ask.”

But look, there’s a rendering!

Not a whole lot of detail there, though it has one of those translucent roofs that are all the rage, revealing some kind of fan concourse above the top level of seating and with no actual concessions or even restrooms? Also lots of umbrella tables on the outside of the stadium for fans to sit at during games, this must be in the Stadiums Pro 2024 Clip Art package, because everybody sure is using lots of them.

Needless to say, Salt Lake City doesn’t not have a major-league baseball team, so this would presumably be a plan to keep in the Miller family’s back pocket should an expansion franchise become available, or maybe the Oakland A’s, who knows? But anyway, they’re undoubtedly hoping that “$3.5 billion in private investment” sticks in people’s heads for long enough that they won’t bat an eye when they see how many billions taxpayers may have to put up for the stadium part — umbrellas don’t actually grow on trees, you know!

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Friday roundup: White vetoes Royals/Chiefs tax vote, everybody losing mind over White Sox vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Everybody’s talking about that new Chicago White Sox stadium proposal despite it not actually being a proposal yet, but first, potentially big news out of Kansas City:

  • Jackson County executive and eight-time Gold Glove winner Frank White yesterday vetoed the planned April vote on a sales tax extension to raise more than $500 million for the Royals and Chiefs, saying he won’t support it “without robust, binding agreements in place” on leases and community benefits agreements. The county legislature doesn’t have the votes to override it right now, and the deadline to make the April ballot is Tuesday, so expect a whole lot of frantic gamesmanship over the weekend — we’ll see if the teams actually commit to anything substantial, but props to White for trying, anyway.
  • Crain’s Chicago Business has investigated who would pay for a new White Sox stadium in the South Loop, and come up with a resounding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Gov. J.B. Pritzker weighed in yesterday to say “I think you know my views about privately owned teams, and whether the public should be paying for private facilities” but also “there are things that government does to support business all across the state” and “we’ll be looking at whatever they may be suggesting or asking,” so somebody’s ready to haggle over the price. Crain’s does confirm that the site is in a TIF district that would get property tax kicked back to pay for construction, but also that stadiums are typically owned by the public so they don’t pay property taxes anyway, so lots and lots of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ here.
  • Somebody posted a bunch of renderings of a possible White Sox stadium of unknown origin that had previously been posted to Twitter then deleted, and yup, they look like generic renderings. NBC Sports Chicago complains that “the renderings have the stadium face the wrong way” and “it’s a no-brainer to face the stadium towards the river so (hopefully) White Sox players can hit home runs into the water” — can somebody please inform NBC Sports Chicago of how the sun works?
  • “Are we really talking about a new stadium for the White Sox when we still don’t know how two people got shot during a game at their current one?” Sure, that’s a take.
  • Oakland A’s execs are visiting Salt Lake City to see if its Triple-A stadium could be a temporary home until the team (maybe) moves to Las Vegas, after visiting Sacramento yesterday and probably other sites to come. Somebody has suggested an appropriate rebranding, all good, no notes.
  • Virginia probably isn’t going to consider building a Washington Commanders stadium while it’s considering spending over a billion dollars on a Wizards and Capitals arena, meaning new Commanders owner Josh Harris will have to settle for getting Maryland and D.C. to bid against each other, or else wait a bit until the arena issue is resolved, still plenty of options there.

There was other stadium-adjacent news this week — MLB TV carrier Diamond Sports cutting a deal with Amazon to escape bankruptcy, New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan getting sued for sexual assault charges that somehow involve both Harvey Weinstein and the Eagles — but I’m still technically on vacation here. Have a good weekend, and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled outrage on Monday!

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