Apologies for the slow posting week — it was busy for me in other ways, so the site was a little quieter than I’d intended. But let’s make up for that now, since the stadium grifting industry doesn’t stop just because I have to step away from the computer:
- Arlington Heights village trustees met on Monday to discuss the Chicago Bears‘ handwavy stadium proposal, and loved the stadium part but less so the handwavy blank white “mixed use district” part: “I am all in on getting this done for this redevelopment agreement, but I can’t buy into this site plan,” said trustee Jim Tinaglia. “I can’t buy into what it means and how detrimental I think it will be for our businesses downtown.” Trustee John Scaletta likewise said, “We want to keep our downtown and what we don’t want to do is create downtown part two.” Reading tea leaves furiously, that certainly sounds like downtown business (and/or real estate?) interests aren’t happy about a Bears development siphoning off consumer dollars from their neck of the woods, which is maybe a legitimate concern especially in a world where nobody needs the office space we have already, but also maybe shouldn’t be quite as big a concern as the government “funding and assistance needed to support the feasibility of the remainder of the development” that the team owners say they’ll be seeking. Those local electeds, always horse trading for pennies while leaving dollars on the table.
- Here’s a whole San Francisco Chronicle article about the proposed Oakland A’s stadium’s $1-billion-plus public infrastructure costs and how TIF districts that use tax proceeds from new development to pay off the development almost never work. (It calls them “infrastructure financing districts,” or IFDs, which is Californian for tax increment financing, or TIFs, but same difference.) This is nothing new — check out Good Jobs First’s TIF FAQ for more details — and the Chronicle’s objection that if the promised development never happens, local taxpayers are left holding the bag is just one of the many pitfalls of TIFs: There’s also the issue of cannibalizing development from elsewhere in your city, of subsidizing projects that might have been built even with smaller or no subsidies, and so on. The lure of TIFs is to pretend that taxes from a new project are free money because they really “belong” to the developer who’s paying them — hello, Casino Night Fallacy! — but when one taxpayer gets taxes kicked back, that means everyone else in your city has to cover that taxpayer’s share of city services. (GJF calls this the “ravenous increment” problem; Oscar Madison calls it “That can’t be right. See, I’d be out all this money.”) We’ll see if this article ends up influencing either the debates of Oakland city officials over the A’s project or future news coverage — I’m not holding my breath — but it’s nice to see someone investigating this instead of just reporting on Dave Kaval’s tweets from Las Vegas or whatever Rob Manfred was paid to say this week, anyway.
- A giant ESPN report on Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder says that as his fellow NFL owners slowly turn on him he’s “lost” the support of his #1 ally, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, but also that “his fellow owners would forgive Snyder for the team’s financial woes and the toxic culture scandal if Snyder could build a new stadium.” Of course, Snyder still may not be able to convince anyone to give him money for a stadium due to that toxic culture scandal, etc., but that even a single NFL owner is saying “bring home a new stadium and all will be forgiven” is telling, to say the least.
- Hey, remember when the Phoenix Rising F.C. USL team said it was going to build a new stadium on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation complete with robot dogs and giant soccer balls, then announced it had broken ground on said stadium, probably without either thing, with no financial details? Phoenix Rising FC Stadium opened in 2021, and has decent attendance, but that isn’t stopping team management from sending a letter to season ticket holders saying, “We don’t have an update on the team’s location at this time, but as soon as we can communicate where we’re playing in 2023, we will let you know.” So Salt River built them a stadium, or at least let them build a stadium on their land, and didn’t make them sign a lease? Very much here that doesn’t make sense at the moment, but if I can find some reporting with more details, or at least more robots, I’ll report back here.
- A coalition of 50 Buffalo community groups called the Play Fair CBA Coalition are asking for the Buffalo Bills owners to spend $500 million on community benefits in exchange for their $1 billion state and county stadium subsidy. Erie County officials probably aren’t going to play that level of hardball, but they are demanding “a lot more” than the “standard plus” CBA that the team owners offered, according to longtime NFL consultant/unofficial spin doctor Marc Ganis … okay, that could just be spin doctoring, but the final agreement between the Bills and the county is being held up for unexplained reasons, and where there’s delay there’s hope, at least.
- The Philadelphia Phillies may want to spend $300 million on a new spring training complex in Clearwater, or at least have somebody spend $300 million on it (local officials got a presentation on the plan from team execs, but according to the Tampa Bay Times couldn’t say “when the Phillies will present their plan publicly, how much the team would pay or how much money the city, county and state would be asked to contribute”), all so players can have “batting cages with floor scales that track a player’s weight distribution through an entire swing”? Good, good, that definitely sounds like it would cost $300 million and be worth taxpayer dollars, no notes!
- This site doesn’t usually delve too much into college sports because who has the time, but Jackson, Mississippi considering building a new football stadium for Jackson State College and justifying it as maybe convincing the team’s coach to stay at the school, and that coach is Deion Sanders? That is news gold, baby, even if it doesn’t have any robot dogs in it. (Yet.)
- Speaking of things that could be a whole site of their own, New York state and the federal government are teaming up to give Micron, a $50 billion company owned by multibillionaire Sanjay Mehrotra, $9 billion in cash plus a 49-year property tax break to build a new computer chip plant near Syracuse. (Boondoggle newsletter author Pat Garafolo notes that even if Micron comes through with its promised 9,000 jobs, that’s “just the state’s subsidy payment comes in at a massive cost of more than $600,000 per job created. That’s …. a lot.”) We already knew that up-for-reelection Gov. Kathy Hochul was all about throwing crazy money at chip plants — I guess she figures it’ll win her the votes of all the people who think they might land one of those 9,000 jobs, or at least some campaign money from the chip industry — but $9 billion for just one is … a lot. Meanwhile, other states are spending $13.8 billion in public money on electric vehicle factories, which Good Jobs First notes is “unnecessary, because decades of federal and state investments and policies are driving a robust EV market surge. They amount to states taking credit for good news that is already unfolding.” The best way to get rich on the public dime without being a defense contractor may still be to be a sports team owner, but owning some kind of tech-y company with vague job promises isn’t too shabby either.
