Category: Vancouver Whitecaps

Friday roundup: Rays may have bot-lobbied for stadium funds, OR gov says not rubber-stamping Blazers cash is “playing politics”

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ve run off the end of April, and — spoiler alert — neither the Chicago Bears nor Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations have yet been resolved as team owners had hoped. Sportswriters often like to portray a slow approval process as dysfunction, but it can equally well be the opposite: Taking your time and driving a hard bargain are good negotiating tools, and when billions of dollars in tax money are at stake, rushing to get something approved just because the local billionaire is impatient is a great way to end up with unexpected costs. It’s still very much unknown whether residents of Illinois and Florida will end up with better stadium deals as a result of legislators taking their time, but it’s hard to imagine it’ll end up being any worse than if they’d just signed off on whatever they were presented with without reading it.

Anyway, lots of news did happen this week, even in Tampa Bay and Chicago, so let’s get to it:

  • Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal claims that somebody sent more than 2,000 bot-written emails from a single IP address in Los Angeles urging county commissioners to hurry up and approve the Rays’ stadium deal. Wostal says he doesn’t want to move forward with any stadium plan until the Rays owners provide documentation of where they’ll get the money to finance their part of the deal, which would include more than $1 billion for the stadium plus possibly billions more for surrounding development (some of which would be recouped by tax and land breaks), though the team hasn’t actually committed to what exactly it will build; a Rays statement said only that it would provide financing details “at the appropriate time as is standard with similar public-private partnerships,” which must be ownerese for “maybe after we’ve cashed your check.”
  • Bears executives held a meeting with NFL officials this week, in which everyone agreed that the best stadium options are either in Arlington Heights or Indiana. The assembled dignitaries then warned Illinois legislators that if a stadium bill to the Bears owners’ liking isn’t approved ASAP, the team and league could meet again.
  • Count Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek among the hurry-up-and-rubber-stampers: After signing a bill to provide $365 million in state money for Portland Trail Blazers renovations, she chided city and county officials for not swiftly approving their own $235 million, saying, “This is not a time to play politics. This is a time to get it done.” (“Playing politics,” in this case, includes things like not wanting to sign a nondisclosure agreement before entering into arena funding talks.)
  • The Cleveland Browns held a groundbreaking for their new Brook Park stadium, even as legal questions remain about the state unclaimed funds money that is supposed to pay $600 million toward the project. Everyone involved is still moving full steam ahead, though: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said that “we’re not attorneys, OK?” but after talking to actual attorneys “we do think it’ll be resolved,” while Gov. Mike DeWine reassured everyone that if this public funding plan fails, the state could always go back to his plan to raise sports gambling taxes and give the proceeds to sports teams that everyone hated. No one is saying exactly what will happen if the state — and the city of Brook Park, which is still negotiating its own $245 million in stadium spending — can’t come up with the money after stadium construction is already underway, probably because nobody wants to admit that “let the Haslams figure out how to find the rest of the money” is still an option for fear of risking the benefits of moving the Browns from Ohio to Ohio.
  • But if (greater) Cleveland doesn’t get a new stadium, how will it host a Super Bowl? Don’t worry, it probably won’t get one anyway unless it builds more hotels, says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who pointedly did not mention this during the runup to the stadium funding vote.
  • MLS has a prospective Las Vegas bidder for the Vancouver Whitecaps: a group led by Grant Gustavson, the 30-year-old son of Kentucky’s wealthiest billionaire. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Whitecaps will move if they don’t get a new arena deal in Vancouver — Vegas doesn’t have a soccer arena at all (though Gustavson said he’s ready to “privately finance” one, without providing details) and is getting dangerously close to a market glut of sports teams — but it’ll likely light a fire under officials in British Columbia, who already started scrambling the jets once the league announced its Vegas move threat earlier this week.
  • Team owner insists he needs state money for a new stadium, state says no you can’t have any, team owner finds an existing stadium to play in. Happy endings all around in the CT United F.C. story, unless you’re team owner Andre Swanston, who now has to settle for just selling tickets to watch soccer matches instead of getting $127 million in state aid to help boost his team’s bottom line.
  • Would this Comiskey Park–inspired stadium design be a better place for Chicago White Sox fans to watch a game? Undoubtedly, since it would bring back that ballpark’s close-to-the-action upper deck. Would it make more money for the White Sox owners? Probably not, because it would be missing the wall of luxury suites that are to blame for the current stadium’s unloved distant upper deck: Extra-nosebleedy cheap seats in modern stadiums are a feature, not a bug. Maybe work on reducing soaring income inequality that has created such a soaring market for high-priced tickets, and then we can get back to stadium design that actually works for everyone.
  • How did the economic impact go from the NFL Draft that Pittsburgh canceled school for? Not so hot, according to one restaurant worker who fought through draft-related bus rerouting only to have her hours cut because fewer customers than usual showed up. (Economists are shocked, shocked!) The city tourism agency responded with a statement that really the NFL Draft was less about bringing in new spending than “positioning Pittsburgh as a modern, globally relevant city well beyond the weekend.”
  • In related news, New Jersey transit officials are recommending that state residents work from home during World Cup matches to avoid the transit nightmare caused by rerouting trains to take fans to matches since they won’t be allowed to drive there. This could be good news for New Jersey restaurants, maybe, unless everyone just makes their own lunches those days, see why economic impact of sporting events is harder to calculate than just adding up all the fans and declaring “> ? > profit”?
  • No, the Athletics aren’t going to change their name to the “Las Vegas Black Fire” just because they listed that as a location in a job listing, it’s just the name of a co-working space in Vegas. Thanks to SF Gate for clearing this up, maybe everyone should have done a little more research before firing up the AI jersey designs.
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Garber to Vancouver: Sell stadium land to Whitecaps for cheap or we’ll shoot this team, really this time

access_time personNeil deMause

Back in December, amid threats by MLS to move the Vancouver Whitecaps if they didn’t get a new stadium, the city of Vancouver agreed to a memorandum of understanding to open talks on the team owners building one in exchange for getting a cut-rate price on public land. Those talks must not be going well, because MLS owners have now gone and held a committee meeting on moving the Whitecaps, then leaked word about it to The Athletic:

A special committee of Major League Soccer owners met earlier this month to discuss and evaluate the future of the Vancouver Whitecaps, including the possibility of relocation, sources briefed on the conversations told The Athletic.

A move to Las Vegas was the chief option discussed at the meeting, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. MLS has had discussions with a group looking to bring a team to the market, the sources said.

This is slightly off-brand for MLS, which in recent years has largely focused on handing out expansion teams like candy: six new teams in the last six years, 12 in the last 12. (MLS commissioner Don Garber said in 2024 that the latest new team, San Diego F.C., would be “the end of expansion for a period of time until we’re ready to expand again” but then also said “we would strongly consider expanding beyond the 30 teams that we have now” if “there’s a good market for us to expand in and that market makes sense with the right owner and the right stadium plan,” so who the hell knows what if anything he really meant there.) And this, the Athletic reports, could represent a stumbling block to moving the Whitecaps, as MLS owners would want to get a cut of any sale price in lieu of an expansion fee — likely meaning a relocation fee on top of whatever the current Whitecaps owners would get, which would cut into how much cash they would take home from a sale.

Whether a move threat is realistic, though, is almost beside the point if you just want to use it to shake down an existing host city for stadium dollars, which appears to be goal #1 here. Whether it’ll work is unclear: Some panicked Whitecaps fans are already blaming NIMBYs and local government for the team’s presumed imminent demise, while others counter, “that’s not true at all, it’s mainly down to greed.” It’s still unclear how Vancouver elected officials will respond to the Las Vegas threat, not to mention whether MLS owners would actually pull the trigger on a move to an increasingly crowded small sports market if they don’t get what they want; stay tuned.

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Vancouver gives preliminary okay to build Whitecaps stadium on public land amid move threats

access_time personNeil deMause

One week after MLS commissioner Don Garber said the Vancouver Whitecaps needed a “better lease” or else it’d be a shame about those paratroopers, the Vancouver city council and team owners have signed a memorandum of understanding to “explore” a new stadium and an entertainment district around it at a recently closed city-owned racetrack. And while there are still a lot of details to resolve — the MOU only establishes an exclusive negotiating period until the end of 2026 — the basic principles seem to have been worked out: The Whitecaps owners will build the stadium and arrange for the surrounding development in exchange for getting discounted access to public land.

Under the terms of the MOU, the Whitecaps would be financially responsible for building the stadium, while receiving the land at a below-market rate on a long-term lease.

However, the real change to the face of Vancouver wouldn’t come from the stadium — but a new “entertainment district” that the Whitecaps would receive continual profits from.

“If you have to build a stadium in Vancouver and it’s only the stadium, then the cost … will not put you in a financially better situation than we are now,” said [Whitecaps CEO Axel] Schuster, who has said a better long-term business model for the Whitecaps outside of B.C. Place was necessary to attract new investors.

“If we want to build a successful future for this club here, we have to get to a better and financial sustainable situation as a club … so we have to develop a whole plan around this.”

The MOU actually says that the project will pay “fair market value rents,” but also that such rents (and any property taxes and/or payments in lieu of them) will be “determined by the Parties as part of the negotiations,” so these are numbers that are going to be haggled over, not calculated by an independent assessor. Which, if the goal is to put the Whitecaps in a “better and financial sustainable situation” (sic), makes sense: You don’t make windfall profits by leasing city land at market rates, you do it by getting a sweetheart deal on the property and then keeping all the revenues for yourself.

The Whitecaps are indeed one of the less profitable teams in MLS, though calculating profit in that league has always been dodgy thanks to its single entity structure and reliance on inflated sale prices relative to actual income. Why the profits of the owners — Greg Kerfoot, Steve Luczo, Jeff Mallett, and (yes that) Steve Nash — should be the city’s problem is another story, and is probably why the owners have leaned heavily on threats that if they don’t get their way on a stadium, they could sell the team to out-of-towners:

“There are interested parties that would like to buy the Whitecaps,” said [Vancouver mayor Ken] Sim. “There are interested parties who want to take the Whitecaps out of the city of Vancouver if we do not create an environment, or if there’s no opportunity to have your own stadium or you have your concessions in the economics around it. There is no viable option for anyone who wants to keep the Whitecaps in the city of Vancouver.

“Let’s just call it what it is, there’s probably absolutely no path for the Vancouver Whitecaps to remain in Vancouver without this MOU.”

What makes all this especially interesting is that soccer is the only North American sport right now that isn’t a monopoly: The USL is moving ahead with forming a top division by 2027 that would compete with MLS as a tier-one league, even adopting promotion and relegation like European leagues use (and U.S. soccer fans are bitterly divided over). This means that even if the Whitecaps were to move, Vancouver could always apply for a USL team — or even a new MLS team, knowing that MLS would have to worry about their rival league staking a claim to Vancouver if MLS abandoned it. (Given the new promotion/relegation structure of the USL, it wouldn’t even have to be a top-tier team, but could be a lower-level team at first that could work its way up to the top by winning its league on the backs of relatively large-market revenues.) This changes the dynamic in a small but significant way, and arguably makes it even more unseemly for Vancouver’s mayor to be levying move threats on the team owners’ behalf rather than trying to cut a hard bargain with them.

In any case, whether this ends up a bad deal for Vancouver taxpayers will depend on the details of what gets hashed out: There’s a big difference between getting a slight discount on city land and getting it virtually for free, and we (and possibly even the city negotiators) don’t know which it will be yet. Vancouver residents, the next year will be important for keeping your elected officials’ feet to the fire, at least in terms of being transparent about what’s being agreed to before it happens — don’t be like your neighbors to the south on this one.

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Friday roundup: Everybody needs a soccer stadium for a pillow

access_time personNeil deMause

Soccer! All the kids today are digging it! It’s the future! And also the past! Your city is nothing without a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, 10,000-seat soccer stadium, which is why Mesa is creating a “theme park district” to kick tax money back to a soccer stadium district that nobody wanted to give to the Arizona Coyotes but this is soccer, and Oklahoma City is spending $121 million on one so that Oklahomans can raise their fists to support of not nearly enough players spread out over way too much of the pitch, and MLS commissioner Don Garber says Vancouver had better give the Whitecaps a “better lease” or it’ll be “untenable” if you know what he means, and the co-chair of the Congressional Soccer Caucus — of course there’s a Congressional Soccer Caucus, get with the times, bruh — wants to allocate $50 million in federal tax money for cities to use for transit programs during big events like the (soccer) World Cup and the Olympics (one event: soccer)! Soccer!

There are only a limited number of soccer teams, though (a number that is thought to exceed the number of Planck volumes in the observable universe), so some cities still must, sadly, spend public money on pro teams in other sports instead. Not that elected officials are sad, they seem downright psyched:

  • The Columbus Blue Jackets have gone from thinking about maybe asking for public arena renovation money from the state now that the Browns and Bengals are getting it to receiving $200 million in state money plus $25 million each from the city and county, all in the course of less than five months. “I think this is an incredibly important community asset, and we have an opportunity to advance this …. and ensure the future of the facility for the next 30 years,” arena authority director Ken Paul said; if you think the Blue Jackets owners are going to wait 30 years for their next grab at the brass subsidy ring, you can place your prop bet at the arena’s gambling kiosks.
  • Cleveland Browns fans are not psyched about having to pay personal seat license fees for tickets at the new Browns stadium. Many say they’ll give up their season tickets before paying for PSLs, and yeah, that’s what Bills fans said too, and now the Bills PSLs have almost sold out, though to be fair things may be different once Browns fans realize that buying Browns tickets obligates them to actually watch Browns games.
  • YouTube channel entrepreneur (?) Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he has a plan for bringing the Expos back to Montreal, and “money is not the constraint.” Rather, doing so “requires capital, political alignment, real estate vision, a winning outlook, patience, and a lot of humility.” Note to Karbasfrooshan: “Capital” is another word for “money.” (You can look up “humility” while you have your dictionary open.) Rob Manfred did say recently that he might like a second Canadian team, but reportedly he meant Vancouver and not Montreal, if baseball is even going to expand at all, maybe Karbasfrooshan meant that money is not the only constraint, that tracks.
  • The Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers owners are still planning on building a new arena … maybe? They’re not saying anything publicly about any moves to get legislative approval, what on earth could they be waiting fo — “[Governor’s office spokesperson Kayla Anderson] didn’t address questions regarding the state’s role in the project and whether incentives or tax breaks will be involved,” oh I see, never mind then.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is starting to look more like itself again, which is, to be clear, to be taken as a good thing. The brown and white alternating roof panels are expected to be all bleached white by the sun by opening day, at least, so it will still look like the dome that Rays fans have come to know and, I’m going to go with “love.”
  • No disrespect to sports barons, but they still can’t hold a candle to Amazon when it comes to wielding monopoly power to get rich at someone else’s expense. This week: Forcing school systems to use dynamic pricing solely so Amazon can charge the public more for supplies, presumably only because the infinity gauntlet is no longer available.
  • The Athletics of Nowhere In Particular have opened a new Las Vegas “interactive space” (read: room) where fans can view a scale model of their planned stadium, plus also enter an “Immersive Cube” (read: room with lots of video screens on the walls) where they can view what it will look like from the inside, if it’s ever finished, and it will be, team execs swear. Early reviews on social media from fans who probably didn’t get personally immersed are that the design is “garbage” and an “abomination” and “the f*** is this ugly thing?” Me, I’m wondering how the A’s architects managed such a distant upper deck at a stadium with only 33,000 seats, plus whether at the real stadium everyone who enters will have to remove their shoes like in the simulation.
  • Sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen, check.
  • Ex-AEG/Oak View Group stadium developer Tim Leiweke won’t be going to jail for bid rigging after all — no, not because he’s necessarily not guilty, the other reason this happens these days.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is getting his stadium-side casino, saw that coming.
  • The 2026 Winter Olympics hockey arena in Milan is running behind schedule and has the wrong rink dimensions for international standards. Defector doesn’t report whether this will lead to it going over budget, but c’mon, you know how this movie ends.
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Friday roundup: Royals “poll” fans on why they need a new stadium, plus still more soccer teams, so many soccer teams

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m posting this week’s roundup from the road, so apologies if any news slipped through the cracks, and I’ll try to catch up with it next week. But at least I’m not shutting down my site to take a full-time editing job: While I’m very happy for Tom Scocca’s bank balance and health coverage, he’s one of the best writers and most astute political analysts in an increasingly threadbare media landscape, and his writing at Indignity and elsewhere will be sorely missed.

In happier news … hahaha, what am I saying, most of this news is dismal as always. But anyway in LOLdemocracy news:

  • Kansas City Royals officials are surveying selected fans about their thoughts on three potential stadium locations — Downtown/Near Downtown, Clay County/North Kansas City and Johnson County/Overland Park — some of which surely is meant to serve as a push poll, given that it only includes one positive option about the team’s current home (“Kauffman Stadium is still a great place to watch a game; There is no reason for the Royals to leave”) and two negative ones (“Kauffman Stadium is past its prime and needs to be replaced by a modern ballpark that is surrounded by an entertainment district with shops, restaurants and bars” and “I love the ‘K’, but it lacks the amenities of modern ballparks and our region would be better served with a brand-new ballpark in a different part of town”). And while surely team owner John Sherman will use the actual responses in some way, you know that his main concern is who he can extricate the most public money from — and by naming three potential locations, he also creates leverage to get the most public money from whichever site he or fans might prefer otherwise, so really win-win-win for him!
  • Raleigh may be asked to build a new stadium for the NC Courage and North Carolina F.C. (currently about to go on hiatus before jumping to the USL’s new top tier intended to compete with MLS) soccer teams, and Green Bay may build a stadium for new minor-league soccer teams, and Rancho Cordova may get tax incentives to help build a $175 million arena for an indoor soccer team, hands up everyone who knows where Rancho Cordova is or that the U.S. has an indoor soccer league! In any event, everybody still gets a soccer team, cities really don’t have to rush to pay for stadiums to get one, you have to beat them away with sticks at this point.
  • Tampa Bay Business and Wealth (?) headline: “The data is in: Mixed-use stadiums win big for cities and fans.” Actual report (?) by consultants JLL (“We believe in the power of real estate to shape a better world”) linked to in the article: “Attendance trends from the 2025 MLB regular season show that stadiums in Lifestyle Market ecosystems drive elevated attendance, even when team performance is poor” (mostly based on the success of the Atlanta Braves, who drew well in 2025 despite sucking largely because people still  bought tickets thinking the entire starting rotation wasn’t going to get injured) and “By 2040, we predict that at least half of MLB organizations will announce plans to develop a new stadium or perform a major redevelopment of their existing venue” this seems to be more winning big for team owners than for fans or cities, you know?
  • MLS commissioner Don Garber is headed to Vancouver to complain that the Whitecaps don’t get first dibs on dates for playoff games and have to share food and beverage revenue with their government landlords, can you imagine the nerve of those Canadians?
  • On Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposal for a sales tax surcharge district to fund Guardians and Cavaliers upgrades, Cleveland.com reports that “on Reddit, users on r/cleveland and r/cavs were largely united around the same message: billionaire team owners should pay for their own stadiums. They rejected the idea that beers or hotdogs should cost more,” while “on Facebook, the reaction was more skeptical — and often sarcastic.”
  • We already knew that the Baltimore Ravens were working on a nearly-half-billion-dollar renovation funded mostly by tax dollars, but “The Ravens are investing an additional $55 million for the improvements, with the stadium authority set to reimburse the team up to $35 million of that amount” is a new twist, not to mention a new definition of “investing.”
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Do the Whitecaps really want a new stadium, or just a cheaper BC Place lease?

access_time personNeil deMause

Add the Vancouver Whitecaps to the list of teams looking to build a new stadium, maybe, possibly, if the price is right:

The Major League Soccer club is in talks with the City of Vancouver about the construction of a stadium at the PNE fairgrounds site, said Whitecaps CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster.

“The club’s ownership has always been clear on their goal of constructing a purpose-built stadium and the importance of a suitable venue to both fan experience and financial performance for any professional sports franchise,” said Schuster in a statement on Friday.

The talks are in the early stages and Schuster did not disclose any other details, but said the club is looking forward to continuing its “constructive engagement” with the city.

The Whitecaps are currently renters at the province-owned B.C. Place, where the CFL’s B.C. Lions are the primary tenant, so surely they wouldn’t mind a stadium of their own. Whether they would welcome the construction debt that would come with it is another story: Schuster didn’t reveal anything about how much a new stadium would cost or whether that “constructive engagement” — interesting choice of that term, by the way — would include seeking public subsidies, something that is significantly less common in Canada than the U.S., though by no means unheard of.

Meanwhile, Schuster added that he’s simultaneously talking with B.C. Place operator PavCo about continuing on under a “different type of lease” after their current one expires later this year. If the Whitecaps owners are just trying to get a better deal by warning they might consider building a stadium on their own, more power to them; if they’re trying to leverage one branch of government against the other, though, the city and the province might want to consider getting together on this to tell the team they’re not going to bid against themselves.

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Vancouver stadium reno cost many times initial estimates (but you knew that)

access_time personNeil deMause

Business Vancouver has an “exclusive” today that the renovation of the B.C. Lions‘ and Vancouver Whitecaps‘ B.C. Place, which cost $514 million, was originally projected to cost less than one-fifth that amount:

“In order for BC Place to remain over the long term, major improvements and upgrading are necessary,” wrote PavCo’s then-chairman David Podmore in a confidential January 2008 letter to Vancouver’s city manager Judy Rogers. “The scope of the rehabilitation project is in the order of $100 million, which includes replacement of the roof.”

That’s pretty remarkable … except for the fact that British Columbia legislative assemblymember Rob Fleming already said that the project was originally supposed to cost only $60 million, circa 2006. So having $100 million in writing as the target figure is interesting, but not exactly groundbreaking news.

The really interesting part, meanwhile, would be about how the hell the construction cost soared so much — they only put on a retractable roof and added some suites and stuff, while spending almost as much as the cost of an entirely new stadium. About that, Business Vancouver has nothing much to say. There was a $25 million cost overrun with installing the steel cables that hold up the roof— contractor Marc Dutil called the complexity of the cable system “mind-boggling” and said, “You can look at a 3-D animation, a picture on the Web, and then you step inside and look at it and you think ‘Oh my God'” — but the construction companies say they absorbed that. Of course, given that the contract for installing the cables for the roof alone ended up at $125 million, you have to think there was some lowballing going on in those initial $60 million and $100 million price tags; anything to get people onto the lot.

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B.C. Place is “cheerier” after $563m reno, but does it pay?

access_time personNeil deMause

Vancouver’s newly renovated, soon-to-be-corporate-renamed B.C. Place reopened this weekend for games by the B.C. Lions and Vancouver Whitecaps, and initial reports were positive: With a new retractable roof, scoreboard, lounges and suites, and redone concessions concourses, the stadium is “a lot cheerier looking,” according to one longtime fan, and — inevitably — “world-class,” according to The Province newspaper.

Which it had better be, considering that the province (the province this time, not the newspaper) spent $563 million upgrading the place. That’s up from an initial estimate of $60 million, according to British Columbia assembly member Rob Fleming. Yes, retractable roofs are expensive, and there’s also some retractable seating to convert the place from football to soccer use, but it still seems a hefty price tag for a building where most of the original steel and concrete remains in place.

As for what B.C. will get for its investment, the province projects an extra $40 million a year in economic activity, which would be enough to pay off the $563 renovation cost … except that that’s only economic activity (i.e., money changing hands in the local economy), not actual tax receipts, so any benefit to taxpayers is likely to be exponentially lower. Also, economist Dennis Coates thinks even these figures are hogwash. So enjoy your fresh air, Vancouver sports fans; you’re paying for it.

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B.C. Place reno cost more than doubles

access_time personNeil deMause

The latest numbers are finally in on the ongoing renovation of Vancouver’s B.C. Place, and it’s a bit higher than the $200 million first estimated last year: The new figure is a staggering $523 million, including $458 million to install a retractable roof. “It will be an icon that will be a symbol that will be recognized around the world as Vancouver,” said David Podmore, chair of the provincial BC Pavilion Corporation that owns the dome — presumably speaking of the refurbished stadium, not the price tag.

How all this will be paid for is a bit unclear: The province of British Columbia is lending PavCo the money for the project, which must be paid back within 40 years. PavCo says it’ll do so by selling naming rights and developing land near the stadium — but the naming rights market is in the toilet right now, and the province has estimated that land development would only raise $100 million total. (The government says it will be able to increase the number of dates the stadium is rented out by 20%, and that this would nearly triple revenues; forgive me my skepticism at this math.) I don’t pretend to be an expert on crown corporations, but it seems like there’s at least some risk that PavCo will have to go back to B.C. for a bailout down the road — unless the B.C. Lions and Vancouver Whitecaps are intending to pay really, really high rent.

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