Category: DC United

DC officials battle over giving United owners $300m to upgrade 8-year-old stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson’s proposal to give D.C. United‘s owners $300 million for upgrades to their eight-year-old stadium is facing opposition from Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has argued that she already gave a pile of public money to one 20,000-seat venue in the district — the Wizards and Capitals arena, which is in the midst of getting a $515 million facelift courtesy of D.C. taxpayers — and doing so for the United stadium would be “cannibalizing one for the other.” And this weekend the Washington Post editorial board chimed in with an opinion piece under the 10/10, no notes headline “Yet another subsidy for a D.C. stadium? Really?”

History shows that promises of new revenue from sports venues almost never pan out. The same is true of arguments that such public investments can help boost the local economy. And it’s especially true of more subsidies for Audi Field — since it already exists.

(Somebody’s already making use of J.C. Bradbury’s new stadium economics FAQ, excellent!)

There are ironies up the wazoo here, starting with Bowser finally finding a sports subsidy deal she doesn’t like after writing enormous checks to not just the Caps and Wizards but to Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris; and Mendelson, who was against the $7 billion Commanders deal before he was for it, now taking the lead on fighting for money for United owner Jason Levien. (Both Mendelson and Bowser were on the council when the initial United stadium funding was approved, and worked together to craft the final deal.) Then there’s the fact that the renovations to an eight-year-old stadium will somehow cost $620 million — Levien would cover the rest — when the initial construction cost in 2018 was only $400 million, just under half of it funded by the district. Levien says the stadium needs 8,000 more seats and a roof to be “more impactful,” and the rebuild is not just because MLS is about to shift to a winter schedule that will mean more cold-weather games in D.C.

If Mendelson has a case here, it may be that the funding scheme for the United renovations looks less bad than the previous D.C. stadium deals: The city’s share would be partly funded by a 4.25% ticket tax surcharge, which as previously discussed here mostly ends up coming out of sports team owners’ pockets. (The rest would be funded by a 4.25% sales tax surcharge at the stadium, which would less fall on the United owners; it’s a marginal cost thing.) There would also be a new city maintenance and repair fund for the stadium, which would be directly funded by team rent and naming rights and sponsorship money. It’s hard to say that putting public money into upgrading a stadium just eight years after it opened, in exchange for no additional years of a lease commitment, is ever a good thing, but this seems to be one of the less bad ways to pay for it, at least.

Or that’s how it looks from Mendelson’s proposed legislation, which runs only seven pages and just authorizes the mayor to negotiate the details. Bowser doesn’t seem interested in negotiating squat, but Mendelson is going ahead with an October 23 hearing regardless; maybe at that point we’ll find out more about the details of this plan, but don’t get your hopes up.

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Friday roundup: Tampa plans for Rays keep going sideways; new stadium funding demands in Orlando, D.C.

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday to those of you who can see this through all the burning Canada! Everyone stay safe, mask up, and stay indoors to read the latest sports subsidy news, only most of which this week involves Florida men:

  • Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan said Wednesday that if the Tampa city council won’t go along with contributing tax money to a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, maybe the county will just go ahead without them. Hagan did not go on to describe where he would find $180 million to replace the city’s planned contribution. Rather than object to being threatened with a good time, Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin warned his recalcitrant colleagues, “Unfortunately, there’ll be a cost of the city not having participated in the process.” He didn’t say what kind of cost he meant, but he gave his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough with old Clenny.
  • The chances of convincing Tampa elected officials to spend public dollars on a Rays stadium, meanwhile, could plummet if Florida voters adopt sweeping property tax cuts in November, which would decimate local budgets. On the bright side — sort of — that would at least make any property tax exemption for the Rays stadium project worth less, since there would be less in property taxes to exempt, though it still would leave Tampa in the same budget hole for the project.
  • And finally, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred also chimed in on the Rays stadium situation, saying at the All-Star Game, “Every delay just makes it more difficult to hit a timetable of when the stadium is going to open,” which, yes, that’s how time works. Maybe Manfred would like to impose a pitch clock on stadium talks?
  • The group of wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owners say they have more than $2 billion in place combined for acquiring a team and building a stadium, and with MLB’s expansion fee expected to be more than $2 billion, they’re asking the state of Florida to kick in $975 million in tourist tax dollars toward a stadium. The prospective ownership group said this would 100% be worth it, as a new team in Orlando would generate $73 trillion dollars in new economic activity in the first week alone (or something like that, I didn’t write down the actual number, mine is equally likely to be accurate). It also raises the question of whether Orlando is really a move threat for the Rays if it would require state money too, meaning state officials would really be bidding against themselves.
  • Some rich people in Nashville would like an MLB expansion team too, but city officials there say that’ll only work if they can privately fund a stadium, good luck with that.
  • The Chicago city council, as expected, approved spending $425 million in property tax proceeds on roads and public plazas and stuff surrounding a new downtown Chicago Fire stadium. Alderman Anthony Beale called the project “what exactly TIF is supposed to be used for,” adding, “When you look at the jobs that are going to be created by this, when you look at the revenue that’s going to be brought into the city by this project, the restaurants, the parking, the ticket sales and all the things that go along with that, that’s how we make our economy grow.” Beale did not explain how moving the Fire from one part of Chicago to another was going to create all this new revenue — or, for that matter, how encouraging construction of new housing in one part of Chicago rather than another — but surely he knows what he’s talking about, no reason not to trust him just bceause he once attended a fundraiser in his honor held by the taxicab industry the week before before voting to water down taxicab regulations.
  • Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson has proposed spending $300 million in city money on expanding D.C. United‘s stadium to 28,000 seats and building a roof on it, with the team owners on the hook for the other $320 million. In exchange, the district would receive “stadium-generated revenues and economic activity,” which is to say no actual money, just “maybe it’ll host some more concerts and not everyone buying tickets would have been spending their money elsewhere in D.C. anyway.”
  • The city of Portland broke the stalemate in Portland Trail Blazers arena talks yesterday, sending team owner Tom Dundon a draft term sheet that doesn’t include rent payments but does include payments in lieu of property taxes starting at $3 million a year and escalating over time. This came after NBA commissioner Adam Silver griped that Dundon’s plan to get $600 million in public money for arena renovations while putting in nothing of his own money “seems to have gone off track,” then refused to promise that the Blazers would stay in Portland even if the $600 million was approved — which seems to be a violation of Extortion 101, but maybe you do catch more flies with vinegar than honey, who knew?
  • Cleveland’s Gateway Economic Development Corp. just got a $52 million bill for projected repair needs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and doesn’t have $52 million to pay it with. Surely nobody could have seen that coming when the city agreed to cover the teams’ future capital expenses as long as they played there! Live and learn, or in Cleveland’s case, just live.
  • More World Cup economic impact data points: Some businesses in Atlanta are doing well, others are not; Arlington businesses are only doing well if they sell tourists on Texas-y things like barbecue or access to cattle drives; New York’s bars made out better during the event than its hotels; bars in England are doing great, too, despite England not actually hosting any games; downtown Seattle got an extra 3 million visitors on World Cup hosting days, but the Downtown Seattle Association didn’t release figures on whether the rest of Seattle got fewer visitors than normal on those days; and Miami and Los Angeles and Arlington should all see massive economic impact, report news sites (mostly former news site CBS) that only cite FIFA’s numbers.
  • Economist Geoff Propheter decided to get into the vaportecture game with AI designs for a new Blazers arena, and after some online kibitzing it ended up here, 10/10, no notes.
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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends read stadium news coverage, Bears’ list of places not to move to keeps growing

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the things you learn if you read enough articles with the word “stadium” in them, as I am condemned by an ancient mummy’s curse to do, is how very many news reports are just about nothing. For every article that tells us some actual information, there are easily five to 10 that are just meant to fill pixels with something easily reportable, regardless of whether it qualifies as “news,” let alone “reporting.”

Just this week, we’ve had: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is in favor of the Tampa stadium plan that his co-bosses the Rays owner wants and he’s “optimistic” about getting it done; a Baltimore soccer stadium is “gaining momentum,” according to a headline describing a press conference by Baltimore’s mayor, who didn’t actually even say that; Denver Broncos president says team leaders are “laser-focused” on building the tax-subsidy-funded stadium in a rail yard they already said they want; the Broncos president says actually the rail yard is only the “preferred” site and team execs are still considering other options; Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner A-Rod says a new arena is a “necessity” for the 6th-in-the-Western-Conference, $3.6-billion-valued franchise “to compete”; Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says he’s determined to build a new Royals stadium that will create “economic development” in a way that’s “fair and transparent for our taxpayers,” no details provided.

That’s a whole lot of Important People giving press conferences in order to get their message out in the news media, which the news media is happy to oblige for them. For normal people, meanwhile, the only option is to try to get space on an op-ed page, if you can convince the op-ed editors that you should be allowed to have an opinion that diverges from that of Important People. It’s also an awful lot of reporters’ time spent on this when they could be trying to investigate all the open questions about what these stadium deals would actually entail for taxpayers and why elected officials are pushing them — but asking questions takes up valuable time that could be spent transcribing press statements. As the old journalism adage goes, “if your grandmother says she loves you, take her at her word and put it on the front page, so long as she owns a local sports team.”

Enough whining about the news media, time to attempt to do some actual reporting by, uh, seeing what’s in the news media:

  • The Chicago Bears have almost as many places now in neighboring states wanting to be their new home (without offering any money toward it) as they do in the Illinois suburbs: In addition to Gary, Indiana, there’s now Portage, Indiana, plus the entire state of Iowa. While the Bears moving to Iowa sounds like a joke and probably is, at least there’s a bill there to provide actual state tax credits toward a stadium; in Indiana, meanwhile, even the bill to create a stadium authority with no funding attached now isn’t going to move forward, Indiana legislators say, until the Bears owners first commit to moving there if it does. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders might want to just bide their time and see if all the new Bears move threats evaporate just like the last round did, though it sure sounds like they’re more interested in throwing state money at the problem while the move-threat iron is hot.
  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer still wants the major stadium renovation he asked for last April before he’ll sign a five-year lease extension, and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan has assured Glazer that the county’s plan to divert more than a billion dollars in tax money to a Rays stadium won’t get in the way of diverting money for the Bucs. In exchange for only a five-year extension, by the way, it would only take about $220 million in subsidies to break the record for priciest per-year lease extension in U.S. sports history, you can pretty much take it to the bank that that’ll be the plan.
  • On the subject of that Baltimore soccer stadium, D.C. United owners said on Thursday that they’re planning to build a 12,000-seat venue on the site of Carroll Park Golf Course, to host a minor-league MLS Next Pro franchise and a pro women’s team owned by former NBA star Carmelo Anthony. And by “planning to build” I of course mean “hoping to receive $216 million in state money to build.” One of the state lawmakers sponsoring bills to provide the cash says “the stars have aligned” now that Carmelo Anthony is on board, maybe somebody should call a local economist to see if studies have found that involving Carmelo Anthony increases economic impact? If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what they’d say if they could ever stop laughing.
  • Foxborough, Massachusetts officials say they may not issue a permit for men’s World Cup games to be played at the New England Patriots stadium in June unless someone helps cover $8 million in security costs that the town is currently faced with paying, Asked why Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose team is worth an estimated $9 billion, couldn’t just cut a check, FIFA World Cup Boston 26 organizers said the Krafts are offering up the use of their football stadium for two months in “peak period” of the NFL offseason, what do you want from them, blood?
  • The Center Square is a libertarian-leaning news site that has generally been pretty skeptical of stadium subsidies, so for it to run the headline “Seahawks’ Super Bowl win temporarily jolts local Seattle economy” is pretty notable — or would be if the gist of the actual article weren’t “U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims Seattle will benefit from the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, economist Victor Matheson says one study found a short-term bump in per-capita income from Super Bowl-winning cities but it may have just been a spurious finding because ‘when you test 100 different things, even if all those things are random, one of them is going to end up being the best.'” At least the Center Square called an actual economist, unlike those corporate stooges at Al Jazeera in their article on how the Super Bowl will be a windfall for the San Francisco Bay Area despite the 49ers not being in the game and also economists consistently saying no it won’t be.
  • If Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can’t get money to build roads and pedestrian bridges around his new Brook Park stadium from the state of Ohio, he’ll ask for $25 million from the federal government instead, there’s got to be someone to stick with the bill that isn’t named Jimmy.
  • Also in K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas news, marginally more newsworthy edition: The mayor wants to cut spending on everything except a Royals stadium and more cops.
  • Plans for an Indianapolis MLS stadium have gone from on hold to pretty much dead, according to Indiana legislative leaders, though in stadium deals just like in comic books, only Uncle Ben ever stays dead for good.
  • The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics just applied for another billion dollars in building permits for their planned Vegas stadium, everyone gets that applying for a permit doesn’t mean you’re actually committing to spend the money on the project, right? Maybe requiring personal seat licenses to buy some A’s tickets in Vegas will help raise the needed funds to employ the permits, anything is possible.
  • Nope, nobody got back to me from Wyandotte County about how their Kansas City Chiefs stadium subsidy numbers were arrived at, I’ll just assume it was the traditional “dart board and add lots of zeroes” algorithm.
  • If you have time to kill next Thursday at 3 pm Eastern/noon Pacific, tune in to Alissa Walker’s Torched Talk with me and Chris Tyler from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy on whether it’s worth it to Los Angeles to host the 2028 Olympics, and what the city could do to try to extricate itself if it’s not. Zoom link is here, calendar it now, see you then!
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Friday roundup: Ravens get even more public cash, D.C. United wants somebody to buy them a roof

access_time personNeil deMause

Greetings from New York, where we now have two terrible mayors instead of one! That’s hardly the worst of today’s political news, so instead let us distract ourselves with some (mostly) terrible stadium and arena news:

  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $434 million stadium renovation project is now a $489 million renovation project, and 64% of the additional cost is set to be covered by state taxpayers. Or, if you’re whatever AI is writing the headlines over at Sports Illustrated, “Ravens Spending Over $50 Million More on Stadium Upgrades,” sure, that’s probably right, no need to read your own story to check.
  • D.C. United‘s owners want to add 10,000 seats and a roof to their (checks) not yet 7-year-old stadium, and “what remains unknown is the potential price tag or whether the team will ask the city for subsidies.” Also the Axios reporter passing this along (from an original source of “two sources,” not even “familiar with the team’s thinking” or anything) calls D.C. United “American soccer royalty,” what ever happened to no more kings?
  • Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson is turning up the heat on Jackson County, saying “time is running out” for “a plan and course of action” for new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadiums, or else … the teams will kick everything back a year and try again, again? Too many showrunners these days really do substitute overbearing string sections for viable suspense plots.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says a Washington Commanders stadium “will be the anchor that attracts other investment–housing, amenities, jobs, and opportunities,” guess somebody doesn’t remember what the late Allen Sanderson said about NFL stadiums and cemeteries.
  • In 2023, the city of Anaheim commissioned a $325,000, two-month study of how to keep the Angels‘ stadium viable for decades to come, and now the study may not be done until 2026 and will cost over $1 million, cool, cool.
  • New Sacramento Republic F.C. vaportecture! And it looks like, uh, a soccer stadium? At least there are some smoke bombs, on both ends of the pitch for some reason, but no fireworks or people holding up scarves dramatically and we can’t even see what ridiculous formation the players are in, I give this a B-minus for entertainment value at best.
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Friday roundup: NYC approves $780m NYCFC stadium in Queens, still doesn’t know what it’ll cost the public

access_time personNeil deMause

I keep meaning to find a place to mention it, and here is as good as any: sports economists J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys have taken up the task of updating Judith Grant Long’s epic database of stadium and arena deals, and the results are online as a CSV file. There are likely still going to be some debates about specific figures — the Buffalo Bills stadium is listed with an $850 million public cost, for example, because that’s what the New York Times said, but that leaves out state and county money set aside for future maintenance and upgrades — but it’s still a hugely useful resource for getting ballpark estimates (sorry) of both total and taxpayer costs. Bookmark it now, or just click the “Data” tab here anytime to find it!

That’s enough about that, let’s get to the news, oh the news, so very much the news:

  • The New York city council approved NYC F.C.‘s plan to build a Queens stadium across the street from the Mets‘ stadium, which is expected to cost $780 million and open in 2027. While construction costs are being covered by the team’s owners, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner and Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, it’s still unknown exactly how much the city will be giving up in property-tax breaks and discounted rent (the city Independent Budget Office estimated $516 million) or how much the city will be spending on infrastructure for the project (which includes housing and other stuff too, so it’d be tricky to determine exactly how much of infrastructure costs should be charged to the stadium). Ah well, plenty of time to figure that out after the agreements are all signed! Queens councilmember Shekar Krishnan cast the only dissenting vote, declaring, “We are not facing a stadium crisis in this city. We are facing a housing crisis, an inequality crisis and a climate crisis. Now we’re looking at a proposal that gives away public land worth hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing for a commercial soccer stadium. What is the benefit for the people of New York City?” You mean the joy of visiting Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium isn’t enough?
  • Patrick Tuohey of the Show-Me Institute wants to know what happened to the 2022 Populous study of the Kansas City Royals‘ stadium that projected it would cost more to repair than replace, thanks to “concrete cancer,” since it’s been taken down from the KC Ballpark District website. Good news and bad news, Patrick: The report is still there on the Wayback Machine, but it provides no sourcing at all for its figures. It does print them in very large type, though, and how could anything in a 48-point font be wrong?
  • Jackson County legislator Sean Smith polled his constituents about why they voted how they did on the Royals and Chiefs stadium tax surcharge referendum last week, and determined it’s because nobody listened to their concerns and engaged in too much “fear-based campaigning” by threatening the teams would leave. Smith didn’t release any detailed results of his survey, though, so it’s left as an exercise for the reader to imagine what the public’s concerns were, exactly.
  • Adding insult to injury department: Workers for the Oakland A’s weren’t told by team management that the franchise was relocating to Sacramento next year and that they would all be laid off as a result, they saw it on the TV news. “Thank you for ruining our lives,” said one A’s bartender only identified by CBS Sports as Tony. (Also, the layoffs have reportedly already begun, because John Fisher has clearly determined you don’t need concessions workers when you’ve so effectively alienated your fans that no one will come to your games.)
  • The Atlanta Braves claim that a new survey found their stadium-in-the-middle-of-suburban-nowhere ranks 13th out of 30 teams in “walkability,” and we don’t even need to debate whether it’s a dumb survey because it turns out 13th actually means 21st because it turns out the dumb survey people don’t know how to break ties.
  • “Can Minor League Baseball Survive Its Real Estate Problems?” asks the New York Times, but those problems were created by MLB when it bought and contracted the minor leagues and then forced cities to scramble to upgrade stadiums to avoid being left without a chair when the music stopped. Try to keep up, New York Times! Even without a sports department!
  • D.C. United wants to build a stadium for a minor-league affiliate in Baltimore, and the Baltimore Banner article on how “there hasn’t been enough information shared about the project” doesn’t even try to ask how much it would cost or who would pay for it, this has not been a great week for journalism. Here are some tips, guys, start with those!
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Friday roundup: San Diego okays $1B arena complex, Manfred floats neutral-site World Series, and that time the Twins ran stadium ads featuring a kid who’d died from cancer

access_time personNeil deMause

I am way too tired this morning from waiting for tranches of vote counts to drop to write an amusing intro, so let’s get straight to the news:

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Friday roundup: Silver Knights face arena suit, Prokhorov seeks to ditch Nassau lease, journalism spirals the drain

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! MLS has resumed play with an MLS Is Back tournament in Orlando (at least for all the teams other than the two that dropped out because they had too many coronavirus-positive players), and MLB starts its season next Thursday, and restarting sports leagues are soaking up all of the United States’ available testing capacity and ballplayers are getting called “pansies” for wearing masks to the grocery store. Also, another of the few remaining news outlets just laid off a ton of quality people, including several I used to work with, because journalism is one of the many nice things we apparently can’t have anymore.

If all that doesn’t cheer you up, here’s a passel of stadium-and-arena-related news that probably won’t do the trick either:

  • The Henderson city council voted unanimously yesterday to reject a petition seeking to overturn the city’s decision to spend $60 million on a minor-league hockey arena plus some other stuff, which should probably come as no surprise given that it’s the same council that voted to approve the Silver Knights arena in the first place. (The petitions were initially rejected because of a technicality about whether enough information was included on every page of the petition, but the council was under no obligation to consider the legal requirements rather than just voting for what they wanted to happen.) Petitioners could now seek to sue the city, which is how these things always seem to turn out.
  • Former Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is in negotiations to get out of his lease with Nassau County on the Nassau Coliseum, Nassau Executive Laura Curran revealed Tuesday. This could work out well for all concerned, or it could let Prokhorov get out of his lease obligations by having shut down the arena and held it hostage; the devil will be in the details of the talks, and Curran didn’t divulge anything about those.
  • The Palace of Auburn Hills, former home of the Detroit Pistons, got blowed up real good on Saturday, as one does when one is a 32-year-old sports arena in the early 21st century. And if you thought you already saw images several months ago of the Palace being torn down, that’s because you did, but history repeats itself, the second time with dynamite.
  • The Edmonton Oilers‘ four-year-old arena was partially flooded by a hailstorm, but don’t worry, the NHL says it will still be able to use it for its planned restart on August 1. Or maybe Edmonton will have to build another new arena in the next two weeks, it’s always hard to say with these things.
  • Fivethirtyeight tried to evaluate whether the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium is a better place to see a ballgame than their old one by overlaying one seating cross-section on the other and determining that the last row of seats is 33 feet closer to the field horizontally and only a few feet higher vertically, so that’s an improvement! Except that they failed to take into account that the new stadium has 8,000 fewer seats than the old one, so really you want to compare the worst seats in the new place to the 40,000th best seat in the old place, since the people in the last row of the old place will now be watching at home on TV. I remember when Nate Silver still made sure his writers did their math correctly, those were good times.
  • D.C. United is surveying fans to ask them if they’ll feel safe attending soccer matches in person later this summer, because who better to ask for advice about public health policy than random soccer fans?
  • Have you been missing sports columns about how your city needs to replace its arena despite not having a major-league team to play in it because the old one is a “graying ghost that is all but begging for a retirement cake” and besides even Tulsa has a newer one, oh the shame? The San Diego Union-Tribune is on it!
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Here’s a bunch of ways rich sports owners are looking to get pandemic bailouts

access_time personNeil deMause

The owners of the Los Angeles Lakers have voluntarily returned $4.6 million in refundable government loans they received as part of the Payroll Protection Program—

Hold up, let’s try that again.

The owners of the Los Angeles Lakers, a sports franchise worth an estimated $4.4 billion that turns an annual $178 million profit, asked for and received $4.6 million in federal government loans as part of its Payroll Protection Program for small businesses. (The loans convert to grants if recipients keep their current employees on payroll through the end of June.) Like other prominent companies that took advantage of the PPP program — Shake Shack, Potbelly, Ruth’s Chris friggin’ Steakhouse — the Buss family that owns the Lakers chose to return the money “so that financial support would be directed to those most in need” once they realized they’d bum-rushed the subsidy line and edged out actual small businesses, and also probably realized that the PR hit from doing so would have been worth way more than a relatively piddling $4.6 million in government grants.

That a billionaire sports family got approved for small-business loans should be alarming, but not surprising: The federal government has already approved more than $2 trillion in spending to help Americans hit by the coronavirus-spawned economic crash, and it’s all but inevitable that some less-needy Americans would put in applications as well — the feds define “small businesses” based in part on how many employees they have, and sports teams don’t employ a ton of people on payroll. And it’s also inevitable that they’d also be among the first to be approved, since programs like PPP are first-come first-served and rich folks are more likely to have lawyers on staff who know how to file paperwork fast, as well as established bank connections that made them more likely to get approved.

In fact, sports team owners are working many angles to get a cut of the Covid stimulus bailout cash, just as less-deep-pocketed individuals are as they try to figure out whether to consider themselves unemployed gig workers or entrepreneurs in need of cash to keep themselves on payroll. Among the ways:

  • The Sacramento Kings owners are renting out their old empty arena in Natomas for $500,000 a month to the state of California for use as a field hospital, which is the same rent the state is paying for other temporary facilities, but maybe a tad disingenuous given that Gov. Gavin Newsom previously praised Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé as “an example of people all stepping in to meet this moment head-on” without mentioning that he’d be getting paid for his selflessness.
  • The owners of the D.C. United MLS team are part of DC2021, an advocacy group of Washington, D.C. business leaders lobbying the district for “a massive new tax relief program” to help the local restaurant, hotel, and — apparently — soccer industries survive the economic shutdown.
  • The stimulus measures approved by Congress weren’t all expanded unemployment benefits and checks with Donald Trump’s name on them; they also reestablished a tax loophole involving what are known as “pass-through entities” that will allow mostly wealthy people to save $82 billion on their tax bills this year. The biggest beneficiaries will be hedge-fund investors and owners of real estate businesses, a list that obviously includes lots of sports moguls: Just owners of hedge funds who also control sports teams include Milwaukee Bucks co-owners Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens, Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeffrey Vinik, and a pile of others.

Now, not all of this should be considered a fiasco: In the case of the PPP in particular, Pat Garofalo notes in his Boondoggle newsletter that the money is intended to keep low- and moderate-income workers from being laid off — the reimbursements top out at $100,000 per employee — and people who work for sports teams or chain restaurants are just as deserving of keeping their jobs as those who work at genuine small businesses. The main problem with PPP is that Congress massively underfunded it, then made it first-come first-served, then left it up to banks to decide who to approve — okay, there’s actually a lot here to consider a fiasco, but sports team owners deciding to fill their wallets at the same firehose of cash as everyone else is far from the worst part of it.

As for some of the other bailout proposals, though, sports owners come off looking a lot less innocent. That DC2021 plan pushed by D.C. United owner Jason Levien, for example, includes such things as tax holidays for corporate income taxes and property taxes, which Garofalo notes won’t help most small businesses that don’t turn large profits or own land.  (Levien, you will not be surprised to learn, is not just a sports mogul but also a real estate investor.) And the pass-through tax break is almost entirely a sop to millionaires and the Congresspeople who love them, which though it doesn’t single out sports team owners, certainly helps many of them given that they’re far more likely to invest in pass-through companies than you or I.

I’ve said this before, but it really is worth harping on: The recovery from the pandemic is already involving a ton of government spending, and will unavoidably involve a ton more, since the feds are pretty much the only institution that has the power to keep food in people’s mouths during this crisis. (At least until the U.S. Mint is deemed a non-essential business.) This will invariably create winners and losers, both in terms of who gets what money and in terms of who ends up paying off the government debts that are being racked up now. There’s no way to avoid this involving subsidies — pretty much the whole idea of government spending to prevent an economic crash is about creative use of subsidies — so what you want to shoot for is fairness, where you have the most money going to companies and individuals who were most hurt by coronavirus shutdowns, and the least to companies and individuals that just were able to lawyer up the fastest.

Individuals who were most hurt except, of course, for Miami Heat and Carnival Cruises owner Micky Arison, who may have lost more than a billion dollars thanks to the collapse of the cruise industry, but who also lobbied the Trump White House to let them keep sailing even after it was clear that cruise ships were perfect Covid incubators. The cruise industry was notably left out of the stimulus bills, and while that’s more about the fact that they all registered as foreign businesses in order to duck U.S. taxes than their owners being money-grubbing jerks who prioritized profits over public health, I think we can all agree: Screw those guys.

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D.C. councilmember facing pay-for-play charges, could be too in jail to help with Washington NFL stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Washington, D.C., has put close to a billion dollars in public money into sports stadiums and arenas in recent years — for the Nationals, D.C. United, and a Wizards practice facility that doubles as a Mystics home court — and at the center of pretty much all of the spending campaigns is city councilmember Jack Evans. And Evans, according to a Washington Post report, is now in super-hot water, which I will hand it over to Deadspin to explain because they do it so much pithier:

The paper alleged Evans received an estimated $100,000 in stock from a private company just before introducing “emergency” legislation that would have directly benefited the gift horse firm. The story said the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability began looking into Evans’s play-for-pay behaviors earlier this year. The ethics board suspended that investigation and released no findings, which according to the Post typically happens “in deference to law enforcement investigations.”

Uh oh.

Serious uh-oh. The private company in question is billboard company Digi Outdoor Media, and it gifted Evans with the $100,000 in stock in October 2016, one month before Evans introduced emergency legislation to legalize large digital advertising signs that the company wanted to install. Digi had earlier worked with Evans on legislation legalizing large fabric ads on the sides of buildings, and had given the councilmember $50,000 in checks earlier in 2016, in what Evans said was a retainer for future consulting work. (Evans says he ended up returning both the checks and the stock.)

If Evans goes down in flames, notes Deadspin’s Dave McKenna, it will be nothing but bad for Washington NFL team owner Daniel Snyder’s attempts to get a new stadium on the RFK site:

In keeping with his no-billionaire-left-behind reputation, Evans was viewed as the leader among D.C. politicians in putting together a package to beat whatever Maryland and Virginia lawmakers were going to give the bumbling but moneyed Skins owner. One source with ties to the D.C. council tells me Evans’s package calls for the city to turn over the choice real estate to Snyder for free, and to take care of new road and parking lot costs, and Snyder would dip into NFL coffers and maybe even his own bank accounts to finance the actual stadium construction. I was at an election night function last month and saw Evans holding court and boasting about how the plan to turn over the federally owned, city-controlled parcel of land to the most despised man in the Nation’s Capital (yes, even in the Trump era) was all but signed, sealed and delivered.

“It’s a done deal,” Evans said, according to one of the folks in the court. So done, in fact, that Evans also said the city was already planning that the stadium building project would be “announced in March” of 2019.

Maybe not, now.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t note McKenna’s excellent disclosure at the end of his article that “Jack Evans once called me to berate me for writing that Nationals Park was being built with public funds; the dumbass argument Evans made repeatedly during his phone tirade was that all the money used to build the stadium, a tab that eventually hit about $1 billion, would come from new taxes implemented specifically for that project, and therefore those tax revenues can’t be called ‘public money.’ Huh?” Hey, I’ve heard that argument before! If it turns out that Evans had a hand in killing my Washington Post op-ed way back in 2012, then full disclosure here that I had reason for animosity towards him, though honestly I think any D.C. resident or person concerned about not lavishing public dollars on wealthy sports team owners has plenty enough reason already to be excited to see him hoist on his own $100,000 petard.

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D.C. United already holding one-day-old stadium together with duct tape

access_time personNeil deMause

D.C. United opened their new $400 million stadium, which received $183 million in public subsidies, yesterday, and I know what your first question is: Was anyone injured when part of the brand-new facility fell off and hit them? Oh, were they ever:

The director of communications and sideline reporter for D.C. United was hit by a falling railing at Audi Field ahead of the brand new stadium’s inaugural match.

ABC7’s Kevin Lewis reported that the railing hit the team’s reporter Lindsay Simpson not long before D.C. United took on the Vancouver Whitecaps Saturday at 8 p.m. in their first game in their new stadium.

That’s embarrassing, but you know, one fluke accident can happen anywhere, so—

Pablo Maurer of MLSSoccer.com says there were multiple incidents of railings falling during the game. Lewis says staffers were later seen around the stadium securing railings with duct tape.

Oh, man.

The railings will undoubtedly be fixed, and the duct tape will be retired, and soccer will go on as normal for the team. But next time there’s some mishap at an older stadium, before buying the claims that “it’s falling apart, we need a new one,” remember that new ones can fall apart sometimes too.

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