Category: Seattle Mariners

And the Seattle Mariners owners have gotten their $135 million in tax money, as the King County council voted 5-4 to give final approval to the same stadium renovation fund plan as it approved two weeks ago. The same councilmembers who objected and proposed amendments last time — including that the Mariners be required to open their books or share future naming-rights revenue with the public — did so again yesterday with the same result, albeit with some added absurdist comedy:

One notable moment was when Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer accidentally gave an affirmative vote to one such amendment. His colleague, Councilmember Reagan Dunn looked down the line at him.

“Pete,” Dunn said. “You meant to vote no.”

Von Reichbauer, flustered, quickly changed his vote.

If you’re scoring at home, the $135 million in hotel taxes that will now be handed over the Mariners owners for upgrades plus the $380 million taxpayers spent on building Safeco Field in the first place brings the total public cost for construction and upkeep to $515 million. (And significantly more if you include the discounted rent the M’s are paying on the building that they operate and control all revenues from but don’t own because who wants all the headaches of home ownership?) Or, if you prefer to look at this deal on its own, King County is paying the Mariners $5.4 million a year for a 25-year lease extension, and while there have been worse deals in recent sports lease history, those teams also had more options for relocating than the Mariners ever did, so King County had a hammer here that it never even unwrapped from its packaging.

As part of the deal approved yesterday, some hotel tax money will also go to the arts, affordable housing, and tourism. But that will be less than critics of the deal had hoped for — in particular, tourism projects will now get a piddly $8 million, which councilmember Rod Dembowski took particular umbrage to:

“$8 million scrap thrown at you, while 94-plus percent is given to one entity? That’s not right, that’s not the intent of the legislation, that is not a compromise. It is a heist. It is a fleecing. And it is not good policy.”

But anyway, at least Seattle’s wildly lucrative pro baseball team will now get some really nice toasters. And isn’t that what public spending priorities are supposed to be all about?

The Stranger newspaper in Seattle did a clever thing in its coverage of the Mariners‘ new lease extension on Safeco Field: Instead of just looking at the $135 million in public money for renovations the team will be getting, the paper calculated whether the M’s $1.5 million-a-year rent is what they should be expected to pay for office space in the city. The result:

Between club level administrative offices and suite level administrative offices, the Mariners have 35,135 square feet of office space….

Most recently, Class A office space is going for $47.06 per square foot in the downtown Seattle region. … Some pretty simple math (it’s multiplication, okay) applying that figure to the Mariners’ square-footage of office space shows that the Mariners’ rent is $153,453 below market value.

And as the Stranger’s Nathalie Graham notes, that’s just for the actual office space at the stadium — it’s “not even taking into account THE ENTIRE BASEBALL STADIUM that they occupy.” (Scare boldface all-caps in original.)

It’s nearly impossible to calculate fair market rent on a baseball stadium since the “market” consists almost entirely of sweetheart deals, but suffice to say that what looked like a bad deal for Seattle taxpayers just got even worse.

This is breaking news, so there’s not a lot of details, but:

McDermott's amendment passes — the council will give $135 million for Safeco renovation and $661M for affordable housing.

— David Kroman (@KromanDavid) September 5, 2018

That’s less than the $185 million that the Seattle Mariners were asking for in stadium upgrade money in exchange for signing a lease extension, but way more than the proposal by councilmember Jeanne Kohl-Welles to cut it to a mere $26 million. (Kohl-Welles’ bill failed earlier today by a 5-4 vote.) The McDermott amendment mostly eliminates use of the tax revenue stream for tourism spending and pours that into affordable housing instead, but it also slices off $50 million from the M’s stadium fund, so, yay?

There’s still a vote to come on asking the voters to decide on this whole mess [UPDATE: it was voted down too]; it doesn’t seem likely that the county council would vote for a specific funding plan and then vote to let somebody else decide the specific funding plan, but who knows? Follow David Kroman above on Twitter, he has his finger on the slow, unsteady pulse of the council.

[FURTHER UPDATE: Kroman’s article on all of yesterday’s votes and how they went down is now up at Crosscut, for anyone who wants the full scoop.]

It looks like the Seattle Mariners owners’ attempt to get $180 million in county tax money to buy fancier stadium toasters isn’t off to a rousing start, with county councilmembers starting to line up in opposition to the proposed lease. Opponents now include Larry Gossett (who last week asked “why in the world” governments “keep giving public tax dollars to very wealthy professional teams”), Jeanne Kohl-Welles (who said the M’s should get just $25 million and the rest of the tax money should go toward affordable housing), and Dave Upthegrove (who’s hated on this plan from the start), with Pete Von Reichbauer and Joe McDermott on the pro side; the other four members, Rod Dembowski, Kathy Lambert, Claudia Balducci, and Reagan Dunn, haven’t stated a position yet, which obviously leaves lots of swing votes, but only two of the four would be needed at this point to block the plan.

The risk here isn’t huge — the Mariners owners aren’t threatening to leave Seattle, likely in part because they know there are no other available markets remotely the same size, and would in fact be willing to sign a short-term lease extension if they can’t get their long-term one with all the cash attached. The King County council will be holding a public hearing this Wednesday on the proposed lease extension, at which point maybe we’ll have a better sense of which way the other councilmembers are leaning, likely after getting an earful from Seattle residents.

I was busy yesterday finishing up the transcription of my Nick Licata interview, but I don’t want to let this weekend’s actual news out of Seattle pass unnoticed, which is that Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat went through the list of “necessary improvements” that the Mariners are demanding taxpayers pay $180 million toward, and found this:

By way of example, one of them is a four-slice toaster for the M’s clubhouse that the consultant priced out at … $501.

It’s just one of thousands of items listed in the report. It’s obviously minor, compared to, say, the $24 million to fix the mammoth retractable roof. But it leapt out because $501 seems a mighty goosed-up price for a toaster.

The report is filled with eyebrow-raising prices. The total cost of new furniture for the park’s 60 luxury suites — also on the must-have fixes list — is $3 million. That works out to 50-grand worth of furniture for each suite. The added parking in the garage pencils out to nearly $100,000 per stall.

Here’s the report itself if you want to look through it. Aome of the items that jumped out to me were: replacing all the televisions every eight years, replacing all the ad signage inside and outside the stadium (ad signage whose revenue goes entirely to the Mariners owners, I believe), redoing the luxury seating so it’s no longer “dated,” adding a brewpub and and upper deck bar, and a whole lot of other things with alarmingly specific projected costs (repairs to the retractable roof, for instance, would cost $10,797,024 in 2026 but only $1,675,269 in 2027).

The fight over the Seattle Mariners‘ lease is heating up, with team execs insisting they won’t sign a 25-year extension on their Safeco Field lease that expires this winter unless they get $180 million in county hotel tax money to use on maintenance and upgrades, and Seattle officials going, Wait, what? Let’s start with King County councilmember Dave Upthegrove, who says that now that the Seahawks‘ stadium is about to be paid off, the hotel tax money that funded that can be used for something else, such as housing:

“There is no reason they would walk away from a business enterprise that is generating so much wealth for them. The threat is nonsense,” Upthegrove said.

“We have a simple choice,” he continued. “We can invest this money in public needs, or we can use it to allow these business owners to make even more money.”

To which Mariners executive vice-president Fred Rivera responded:

“This [stadium] is owned by the county, and the question is how much should the county pay for its building?” Rivera told Seattle Weekly on July 20. “The discussion [between the Mariners and the PFD] was ‘What’s a fair amount for the club and for the PFD to contribute to make sure that those nuts-and-bolts items are appropriately taken care of over the next 25 years?’ and that’s what resulted in this financing plan.”

Rivera also said that, if the allocation isn’t made, that they “would have to go back to the table” with the PFD and “determine how the publicly owned stadium will be kept in a first-class condition.”

That’s an interesting pair of arguments, coming down to: Hey, it’s the public’s stadium, the public should pay to keep it in good shape but also You don’t wanna know what we’ll do if you don’t give us this money. On the former, while technically yes, Safeco Field is owned by the county, that was a bookkeeping dodge designed, as it is with most publicly owned stadiums, to get the team out of having to pay property taxes — the Mariners owners control all the stadium revenues, so it’s a “publicly owned stadium” solely on paper.

And on the latter, it’s not entirely clear what the M’s owners can do if their bluff is called — as Upthegrove notes, they’re profiting immensely from paying in Seattle, so moving to, I dunno, Portland would be cutting off their nose to spite their face. As I told Seattle Weekly:

DeMause points out that the Mariners aren’t exactly negotiating from a position of absolute strength given the organization’s historic roots to Seattle. “Yes, Seattle wants the Mariners to sign a lease extension. But at the same time the Mariners need to sign a lease extension, because where the hell else are they going to go?” he said. “It’s not like there are a whole lot of great markets outside of Seattle.”

In any event, Rivera says if the lease subsidy is rejected, the Mariners owner will sign a five-year lease extension, and won’t threaten to move: “There is no thought of the Mariners leaving Seattle. I want to be absolutely clear about that.” (Unless this was meant as a non-threat threat, which, maybe.)

Here’s an idea, then: Whichever public officials end up negotiating this lease, whether now or five years from now, how about instead of arguing about how much of a subsidy to give the team, ask the team owners why they can’t pay more rent than $2.2 million a year, or share some stadium revenues with the public? After all, if the Mariners are just tenants, rents in desirable neighborhoods do go up, and they’d be hard-pressed to find other digs with all the same amenities (48k rms, rtctbl rf). Two can play at lease hardball.