Category: Salt Lake City MLB team

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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Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
  • Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
  • New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
  • Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
  • The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
  • “The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
  • “[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
  • Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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Friday roundup: Manfred’s A’s-move mumblings, plus Sixers get upset when community shows up to community meeting

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s a bit of a crazed day over here, so apologies in advance if this roundup is more perfunctory than usual or arrives at an unusual hour.* (I don’t know yet, haven’t finished writing it!)

Here’s what’s happening:

  • I already recapped Rob Manfred’s post-Oakland-A’s-to-Vegas-approval press conference in an update yesterday, but “In terms of the public support that was available, the waving of a relocation fee made that support stronger. … That’s the best I can do for you on that one” is a keeper in the MLB commissioner’s long litany of word salads. As I wrote yesterday: Rob Manfred, saying the quiet parts loud since 2015.
  • Weirdest headline of A’s-to-Vegas week goes to Utah’s Deseret News, which ran with “Could Salt Lake City face more competition for an MLB team?” (Though Salt Lake is at least a bigger TV market than Las Vegas, I’ll give it that.)
  • The Philadelphia 76ers held their first community input meeting on their proposed arena yesterday, and promptly ejected some community members for providing input (via signs reading things like “‘Privately-Funded’? State/Federal $$ is still public”) that they disapproved of. People wearing “PRO-JOBS PRO-UNION PRO-ARENA” T-shirts were allowed to remain.
  • Bruce Murphy in Urban Milwaukee wrote a long postmortem of the finalized Brewers subsidy deal, and the tl;dr is: The team is profitable and soaring in value and nobody actually studied how much in upgrades the stadium actually needs, yet team owner Mark Attanasio didn’t even have to lobby hard to get the state legislature to hand him everything he wanted (less a few million dollars off the public price tag that he kept ratcheting up as things went along). Even more tl;dr: WTF, Wisconsin legislature?
  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman still hasn’t made the decision between two possible stadium sites that he promised would come back in September, and now he’s maybe considering a third site? That’s his prerogative as a member of the bourgeoisie, of course, but it’s also our prerogative to then wonder if he’s just trying to throw more rumored bidders into the game to try to get Kansas City and North Kansas City to up their antes.
  • Construction unions are pro-construction of pretty much anything including soccer stadiums, local newspaper gives them op-ed space to say this, film at 11. The same paper reports that “new details” of said NYC F.C. stadium were revealed this week, and … nope, no actual new details, other than Mayor Turkish-Bribes (alleged) asserting that it will be the “first fully electric sports stadium in Major League Soccer,” and he does know electricity!

*Sure did! Enjoy your late-Friday roundup, and see you Monday.

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Friday roundup: Utah enters MLB expansion sweepstakes, Bettman’s mouth issues more checks Coyotes can’t cover

access_time personNeil deMause

It was 89 degrees in New York yesterday, which made me think about how the cities most threatened by climate change are only going to be threatened sooner and sooner. It may be too soon for team owners to start thinking about threatening to move to Duluth, but, you know, is it ever really too soon to threaten to move anywhere? Food for thought.

News roundup time!

  • Former Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller, who owns the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees, says she wants to bid for an MLB expansion team when and if MLB starts taking bids. “We believe that as a top-30 media market in the fastest-growing state in the country with the youngest population, that’s where our attention should be,” said Miller Company CEO Steve Starks, and while he’s right about those things — Salt Lake sits at 29th, just behind Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Baltimore — it also could soon be the site of arsenic-mercury dust storms, which may not be the best selling point. Salt Lake City also doesn’t have a major-league stadium, and Gov. Spencer Cox has already declared that he’s opposed to public funding of one … except for tax-increment financing kickbacks, which he’d be just fine with.
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has visited Tempe, Arizona to take in an Arizona Coyotes game and promise that “once this [arena] project is built, this team is never going anywhere. It’s going to be here forever.” So Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is going to sign a 999-year lease? That’s the only thing he can mean. Hey, everybody, Alex Meruelo is signing a forever lease, Gary Bettman promised, this is great news, Gary Bettman would never lie to us!
  • Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris, who is already wrapped up in seeking a Philadelphia arena that all the neighbors hate and for which he’s been accused of illegally funneling money to a mayoral candidate, may be about to buy the Washington Commanders for $6 billion — at which point he will presumably begin lobbying for all the legislators who stopped pursuing stadium bills because they hated Commanders owner Daniel Snyder to resume their subsidy efforts. Here, let’s listen to effusive pro-stadium remarks in the Washington Post from Jack Evans, who was forced off the D.C. council after accepting tons of money from private businesses whose projects he was voting on. Old bribe-takers never die, they just end up becoming pundits.
  • Did I say last month that “the Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies“? Turns out the actual figure could be as high as $1.8 billion, according to figures compiled by Bridge Detroit, which quotes me as saying, “Once you get your foot in the door and shovels in the ground then you have the city on the hook. That’s how this becomes a gift that keeps on giving for developers, and it’s ‘In for a dime, in for a billion dollars.” (Okay, I got it right at least one of those times.)
  • Kansas City is going to cancel all in-person K-12 classes for two days at the end of the month to avoid traffic created by the NFL draft being held in the city, this is fine and normal.
  • Finally, enjoy some raves from the Globe and Mail about renovations to the Toronto Blue Jays‘ stadium, if pointing out that the Jays are charging $1 just to be admitted to a new liquor automat where you can pay $70 for a drink “reminiscent of Black Forest cake” counts as a rave. The paper also calls the stadium formerly known as Skydome “ancient,” which may be alarming to any readers born before it opened in 1989, apologies for not adding a trigger warning to the top of this post, my bad.
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