Veterans Stadium – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: How to tell a dump of a stadium from a marvel, and why “stupid infrastructure” should become a term of art

April 9, 2021April 9, 2021 Neil deMause

I have nothing introductory to say this week other than that I’m wondering if you kind FoS supporters would give me $2 million in 24 hours if I made more robots out of lacrosse masks. So on to the news:

Here’s a long article about the opening of Veterans Stadium 50 years ago that has some interesting bits about all the other stadium proposals for the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles that were considered and rejected, but mostly is instructive for referring to the Vet as “a cathedral” and “a marvel” rather than how it was mostly described when it was being torn down, which was along the lines of “a dump.” It’s funny how things go from wonderful to outmoded to nostalgic, based mostly on who can make money off of getting them built and/or getting them replaced.
Honolulu’s replacement for the genuinely-falling-down Aloha Stadium is set to cost $350 million, and the state legislature has quietly switched its financing plan from a roughly 50-50 split of revenue bonds (those paid back with stadium revenues) and general obligation bonds (those paid back out of the state’s general fund) to all general obligation bonds. This could be because revenue bonds are a tougher sell during a pandemic when no revenue is coming in, or it could be because revenue bonds are a tough sell regardless when the only revenue will be from college football games; either way, my question stands about whether maybe if you can’t afford a $350 million college football stadium, you just don’t build a $350 million college football stadium.
Aaron Gordon makes an excellent point about the current debates over the federal infrastructure bill that the question should be less what counts as “infrastructure” and more what creates a good public-benefits bang for public bucks. For example: “Should we be spending $174 billion in electric vehicle incentives — a subsidy for massively profitable automakers and upper-middle class Americans — when a fraction of that could provide frequent, reliable bus service to the majority of Americans instead?” Nobody’s proposed any of the new federal infrastructure money going to stadiums just yet that I’ve seen, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to build a gondola with it, at which point I sincerely hope the decision is based less on whether gondolas are infrastructure than on whether gondolas are stupid infrastructure.
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s plan to tear down his city’s old arena and build a new arena with money from mumble mumble hey look over there has hit a snag in the form of our old friend the California Surplus Land Act, which you will remember from such past hits as “Can Inglewood provide land for a new Los Angeles Clippers arena without offering it up to affordable-housing developers first?” The Surplus Land Act got tightened with new guidelines in late 2019, so turns out the city may have to reopen bidding on the arena site, though San Diego COO Jay Goldstone (cities have COOs now?) told the Union-Tribune “there is no intention to issue a new request for proposals at this time.” Tune back in for further updates once the lawyers are done.
The planned $450 million renovation of the Superdome for the New Orleans Saints has been stalled and may be scaled back as a result of 1) the pandemic, which is making investing in such things as expanded clubs and suites look like not so great an idea, and 2) state legislators who are questioning the state’s $90 million (with another $210 million coming from the state stadium district, which is also run and funded by the state) as too expensive because “they’re the New Orleans Saints, not the Louisiana Saints.” (Okay…) The good news, reports WBRZ: “the latest federal coronavirus aid package has dollars for which the [stadium] district could be eligible.” Aaron, you listening to this?
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno still hasn’t decided whether to build a new stadium or renovate the old one on the 153 acres of land worth $500 million that Anaheim gifted him with for only $150 million last year, but he has released some images of colored blobs of whether things might go, or not.
If you were wondering whether former NBA player Jackie Robinson’s plan for a $2.7 billion arena/hotel/conference center/bowling alley/wedding chapel in Las Vegas is still in the works, a year after he initially said it would be completed, and with still no sports team to play in the arena because Vegas is already swimming in arenas, the answer is of course it is.
And finally, if you thought the Dollar Loan Center Center was hilarious, you’ll love Inter Miami‘s renaming of its temporary (they swear) stadium to “AutoNation’s DRV PNK Stadium,” a name that just trips off the tongue. It looks like AutoNation even spells it “drive pink” sometimes, so the bizarre spelling seems especially unnecessary, but if you want to promote your car dealerships by giving money to cancer research and then paying the local soccer team to put your charity’s name on its stadium, you can spell it however you want, because America.

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Friday roundup: Georgia man holds no truck with numbers, new stadiums falling apart already, plus a guy who spent three years living in a Phillies concession stand

March 26, 2021March 26, 2021 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! Still recovering from the double whammy of my second shot on Sunday plus learning that birds aren’t real, so I’ll keep the intro short this week and get right to the news:

In the wake of J.C. Bradbury’s paper showing that the Atlanta Braves stadium had no statistically significant measurable impact on sales tax receipts in Cobb County, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that former county commissioner Bob Ott retorts: “A model is one thing. But I’m looking at what’s really there.” Former county commissioner Bob Ott maybe doesn’t quite understand what economic modeling is — Bradbury was measuring what was really there, but he had to create a hypothetical model to show what would have been there without the stadium, since he doesn’t have Naomi Wolf time-traveling nanoparticles — but since he’s no longer in office and Bradbury is, maybe it doesn’t matter too much anymore.
Members of the St. Petersburg city council say they don’t want to consider any of the redevelopment bids that Mayor Rick Kriseman solicited for the Tropicana Field site until they hear from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg whether he plans to stay or go when his lease is up in 2028, which kind of makes sense, though it does allow Sternberg to make himself an obstacle to redevelopment, which is always a good way to gain leverage when seeking public funds. Councilmember Darden Rice also called the standoff between Kriseman and Sternberg “a standoff between two people with very rusty guns and one bullet,” which is a very funny image and probably unfairly more convincing as a result, much as people are more likely to believe things if they rhyme.
The Tennessee state bill to allow Knoxville to siphon off $65 million in state and local sales taxes from a quarter-mile around a new Tennessee Smokies stadium and kick them back to the team owner for stadium costs passed a state senate committee Wednesday by a vote of 8-0. Next stop for the bill: the senate ways and means committee, it looks like, though this legislative calendar is really not the easiest to read.
The Las Vegas Raiders‘ giant outdoor video screen at their one-year-old stadium needs to be taken down and repaired, and the Minnesota Vikings‘ five-year-old stadium is getting $21 million of repairs done to its faulty drainage system, and how soon is too soon to start complaining that stadiums are broken-down and obsolete and need to be replaced? (Answer: Once a team owner can demand a new building while keeping a straight face, it’s not too soon anymore.)
Some people in Delaware want to build a private indoor track and field facility, and say there are three possible ways to pay for it: find some private investor to put up the cost “because of the economic impact that it has on the community” (uh?), do a “public-private partnership,” or get the state to pay the whole bill. Yep, those would be the three possible combinations of public and private money; I guess they figured nobody would buy “Mexico will pay for it.”
The Miami Heat‘s arena is set to get a new naming rights sponsor — some cryptocurrency company instead of some airline company, we don’t need to bother with the actual names here, they’re not paying us to use them — and unlike most other public sports venue owners, Miami-Dade County actually gets a cut of naming-rights money, so will get an extra $5 million a year from the deal, yay! Still not enough to make spending $200 million to build the place worth it or anything, but it’s better than a kick in the head.
Marc Normandin has a great essay this morning about how boycotts are meant to be strategic actions, not ways to make you feel moral in an immoral world, so until there are picket lines outside stadiums, “you’re not a bad person for continuing to watch or attend MLB games just because the people who own the teams and guide the league’s direction are assholes.” It’s a useful reminder, especially in a world that increasingly insists that it’s up to individual consumers to fix things, not the people with the actual power to do so.
I don’t have much to say about this New York Times article on a former Philadelphia Phillies worker who has written a self-published book about the three years he spent living in an empty concession stand at Veterans Stadium, but I figured you’d want to know about it nonetheless. You’re welcome.

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Philly’s remaining Vet bills not actually such a big deal as media are making it

June 17, 2013 Neil deMause

I’m going to link to this story about how Philadelphia is still paying for Veterans Stadium long after it was demolished because I’m getting emails about it, and because it’s got some great demolition porn to go with it. But I honestly don’t think it’s worth getting too worked up over: As I’ve noted before, whether stadium debt is paid off before the place gets blowed up real good is just a matter of bookkeeping, not of subsidy politics — if Philadelphia had chosen to pay off all of its Vet bills in cash during the Mike Schmidt era, that wouldn’t have made the place any better or worse of a deal for taxpayers.

As Deadspin notes, Philadelphia certainly seems to have engaged in some curious financing around this deal, to the point where even city officials don’t know how much debt has been paid off. But that would be true if they’d borrowed the money for new fire trucks as well as for a stadium. Though admittedly YouTube videos of fire trucks wouldn’t be as much fun to watch, or to link to.

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