Category: NBA

Adam Silver is behind the Sixers-Flyers arena deal, sure, maybe

access_time personNeil deMause

I figured eventually we’d get one of those insider journalism articles about why the Philadelphia 76ers owners switched from a planned Market Street arena of their own to sharing a new building with their current landlords, the Flyers, I didn’t figure that “eventually” would mean two days, but here we are. And the answer — or at least one answer — appears to be “NBA commissioner Adam Silver got his billionaire friends together to have them kiss and make up”:

On the afternoon of Dec. 1, Sixers managing partner and co-owner Josh Harris, who is also managing partner of the NFL Washington Commanders, hosted a group of sports business heavyweights at the football team’s home game against the Tennessee Titans.

The group included two other Sixers co-owners — David Blitzer and David Adelman — as well as NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Comcast chair and CEO Brian L. Roberts…

Silver, who has served as NBA commissioner since 2014, believed that having two competing Philadelphia arena projects in the same timeframe would be detrimental to both the city and the teams, according to the sources.

There’s some logic to this: Silver has an interest in the health of the Sixers, obviously, but his league is also business partners with Comcast, the Flyers owner, which just signed an 11-year broadcast deal with the NBA. Having the two teams each fighting for Philadelphia arena supremacy could only end up with one side or another losing, so by brokering a deal Silver is just shoring up ruling class solidarity and monopoly power.

The question remains, though, why Sixers owner Josh Harris took the bait. He seemed all-in on a Market East arena as recently as last month, so either something changed his mind about that, or that was always a dodge to get Comcast (and Silver, as it turned out) to the negotiating table, or Silver truly has the power to cloud men’s minds. The Philadelphia Inquirer article laying out the commissioner’s role doesn’t include any quotes from Harris other than those from his press conference on Monday, which are PR mush along the lines of “We didn’t really change our mind. Actually, we were really committed to Market East, but … our north star was doing the right thing by Philly.”

The Inquirer article is evasive about its sourcing for the entire chain of events, citing only “sources familiar with the matter,” which could always mean that this story is what somebody wants to push as a narrative more than actual, you know, reality. The closest to a named source it provides is Philadelphia Building and Trades Council leader Ryan Bower, who says Silver “put [the team owners] together” and “I’m sure that that partnership [between the NBA and Comcast] played a lot in this decision that you see now.” This all amounts to intriguing hints, but is far from the deeply investigated timeline that one would really want; maybe once the Athletic has successfully gotten its union recognized, it can devote some time to putting together all the pieces here.

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Joint Sixers-Flyers arena declared “win, win, win, win,” but for who exactly and at what cost?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Tuesday morning, and here’s what we know about the plans for a joint Philadelphia 76ers–Flyers arena in South Philly:

  • Sixers owners Harris Blitzer and Flyers owners Comcast Spectacor have entered into a “binding agreement” to go halfsies on a new arena to replace the Wells Fargo Center, which Comcast owns (and recently renovated) and Sixers rent. The new arena, which doesn’t yet have an announced price tag, is planned to open in 2031.
  • The two companies will also work together on the “revitalization” of the Market East site near Chinatown that the Sixers had previously targeted for a new arena of their own.
  • Comcast will buy a minority stake in the Sixers, and will get full ownership of the naming rights to the new arena.
  • The Flyers owners will join the Sixers owners in seeking a WNBA team to play in the new arena.
  • Mayor Cherelle Parker called this development a “win, win, win, win for Philadelphia” and a “curveball that none of us saw coming” and “exciting” and “unprecedented” and “a celebration for the city” and said as the city’s “CEO, I don’t have the luxury of wallowing in this 180.”
  • Parker said the city will still spend $20 million on affordable housing initiatives in Chinatown, though it sounds like the $50 million in community benefits promised by Harris as part of his original arena deal is now kaput.

All this still leaves a lot of questions: What will the “revitalization” at Market East look like, and will it still be eligible for the property tax breaks that were approved for the previously planned arena? What will the previously announced arena district in South Philly look like, when will it be built, and will Comcast and Harris seek any tax breaks or public infrastructure money for that? Who’s paying who for what in all these new cross-ownership deals, and how certain is it that any of these new plans will come to fruition? (City councilmember Mark Squilla, who played a key role in approving the now-suddenly-dead Market East arena plan, said when asked how he knows the new arena will actually happen, “I mean, you don’t. I mean, they say their commitment is there, there’s a little trust building that needs to be done.”)

In an editorial late yesterday afternoon, the Philadelphia Inquirer called the last four years spent on the Market East arena plans “a giant waste of time and money for everyone.” That’s not quite true: It was clearly time and money well spent for the Sixers owners, who were able to use the threat of their own arena to get Comcast to the table to work out this new deal. Whether it can now really be a “win, win, win, win” for the city, Sixers, Flyers, and whoever else Parker had in mind is going to depend on a lot of details that are currently unknown; once the excited press conferences die down and we start seeing financial details, we’ll know better who exactly got played here, and for what.

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Sixers abandon Chinatown arena plan, pivot to sharing South Philly venue with Flyers

access_time personNeil deMause

This was not on anybody’s bingo card: Officials with the Philadelphia 76ers revealed to Philadelphia city council members yesterday that they were turning their back on the planned arena adjacent to the city’s Chinatown that they had spent the last four years getting approved. Instead, the Sixers will be throwing in with their hated landlords, the Flyers-owning Comcast, on something at the teams’ current South Philly site, though what exactly and when remains a little unclear this morning:

After the Sixers announced their desire to leave South Philadelphia, Comcast Spectacor began aggressively courting them to stay in the stadium district. As part of their campaign, they revealed an ambitious and sprawling proposal for a $2.5 billion complete redevelopment of the area that would add thousands of apartments, restaurants, and more entertainment options.

And, with an “eventually” that is doing a lot of work:

Ryan Boyer, president of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council, told NBC10’s Lauren Mayk that instead, the team plans to demolish Wells Fargo Center and will eventually build a new arena in South Philadelphia for the Sixers and Flyers.

If the plan is for one combined arena in South Philly, this could end up a win-win all around: Philly taxpayers get out of the $96 million to 273 million in property tax breaks the city was planning to give Sixers owners Josh Harris and David Adelman for their new Market East arena, Chinatown residents escape the threat of arena-related redevelopment displacing part of their neighborhood, and the Sixers owners, Comcast, and the city as a whole escapes the likelihood of two competing arenas eventually driving one to shut down from lack of business. (Former Philly mayoral candidate and local power broker Sam Katz had previously said a second competing arena was “never privately financeable,” though it’s worth noting he was consulting for Comcast when he said that.) Major emphasis on “could,” though: One unnamed councilmember told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the Sixers still plan to move ahead with “some of” the Market East development, so there Harris and Adelman could yet end up having his tax breaks and eating them too. And when Comcast first announced plans for that arena district last March, the company hedged on whether it would require public money, which should have everyone on the lookout for an additional city funding ask.

For the moment, though, the only clear loser here is Comcast, which is looking at (maybe) having to demolish and replace an arena that it just spent $300 million on renovating, plus (definitely) going halfsies with its former tenants on ownership in order to keep them from setting up their own shingle. The obvious question is whether Harris and Adelman planned this all along: Was the entire Chinatown arena plan just for leverage to get Comcast to agree to new terms in South Philly? Did they fully intend to move, but were lured back by a sweeter offer from the Flyers owners? Or, as is so often the case, did they push ahead with new arena plans not knowing or caring how it would work out, but figuring that having another option in their pocket could only be to their benefit?

Whichever way, Philadelphia city officials who spent the last four years working with the Sixers owners on what turned out to be just a stalking horse are feeling played, because they were. At-large councilmember Jimmy Harrity has been especially vocal, telling the Inquirer that “I’m so livid right now I don’t even know what to do” and “I feel as though I was used as a pawn”; he told NBC Philadelphia, meanwhile, that “I feel completely bamboozled” and that he’s upset that city schools won’t get the proceeds from new taxes that the arena would bring — which doesn’t make any sense since the tax breaks the Sixers arena would have gotten were going to come out of the schools budget, but cut the man some slack, he’s bamboozled.

Chinatown activists, meanwhile, are ecstatic, saying in a statement that “the nightmare of a Center City Sixers arena will not haunt our city any more” and thanking citizens and elected officials who opposed the deal. In the end, though, it seems like public opposition to the plan was less important than corporate bigfooting — as we saw, for example, when Madison Square Garden’s owners killed the plan for a Manhattan New York Jets stadium, sometimes when elephants fight, the grass ends up being spared.

There are reports that Mayor Cherelle Parker plans to hold a press conference today at 11 am to address the unfolding situation, which hopefully will at least have better production values than her last one. For now, it looks like Philadelphia may have dodged a bullet, but let’s hold off on that assessment until the shooting stops.

 

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Texas judge blocks Spurs arena subsidy vote until somebody can explain how much it’ll cost

access_time personNeil deMause

Good news, everyone! Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai says he’s not going to put a tax subsidy for a San Antonio Spurs arena on the May 3 ballot, because nobody knows how much tax money would actually be involved:

State law allows the county to raise the hotel portion of the tax to 2%.

Asked Tuesday if raising the tax was part of the discussion, Sakai said, “Those are all preliminary questions that need to be addressed.”

At least, there won’t be a public vote until November at the earliest, by which time the judge (yes, Texas counties are run by judges, it’s left over from when Texas was its own country) hopes to have those questions answered: “We are moving forward to find the win-win solution in this complex issue that we call the new Spurs arena.”

Finding a “win-win” in funneling an unknown but huge amount of money to the local NBA owner to replace a 22-year-old arena seems like a challenge, especially when one main argument for is “locals bring visitors because of the authenticity,” but sure, okay. The basic principle of “maybe people should know what they’re voting on before they vote” is a good one, so here’s hoping that Sakai actually gets Spurs owner Peter Holt and the city to cough up some financial details before moving ahead with a public ballot measure. If nothing else, it might make those polls Holt has been doing of San Antonio residents on the arena plan more valid if there’s an actual dollar figure involved.

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Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”

There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:

All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.

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How not to write a sports arena editorial, San Antonio Spurs division

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the key factors in perpetuating the billions-of-dollars-a-year system of public subsidies for private sports stadiums is what’s been dubbed the sports-media complex: the way that local news sites in most cases parrot the arguments of team execs and local elected officials for devoting taxpayer money to new sports venues. There are a bunch of reasons for this, from news outlets’ reliance on team access for reporters and team-related ad spending to the media’s inclination to uncritically repeat claims made by powerful people — Joanna Cagan and I were writing about this as early as 1998. The upshot is that voters, when they even get any kind of say in these deals, are usually working from information that is heavily skewed toward what the people who stand to benefit from stadium subsidies are saying, whether it’s true or not.

To see how this works in practice, let’s check out today’s San Antonio Express-News editorial on the prospect of a May vote to direct tax money toward a new arena for the Spurs:

Winning May vote for Spurs arena combines county venue tax, private funding

Okay, that is just a terrible headline. Is county tax money and private funding required in order to win the May vote? Is the May vote a winning idea, because it would include both tax money and private funding? How much of each would be combined? Why does a vote to spend tax money on a Spurs arena qualify as “winning,” as opposed to a more neutral term like “passing”? The whole thing seems designed to confuse readers more than enlighten them, which is not the traditional goal of journalism.

May is absolutely the right time for a public vote. A May election provides ample time for debate and discussion. A vote would serve as a capstone to Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s tenure. … Finally, with the Spurs’ lease agreement at Frost Bank Center set to expire in 2032, should a public vote fail, there would be plenty of time to bring a revised plan to voters.

So voting on (or for?) an arena deal would be a “capstone” for the mayor, because what longtime local politician wouldn’t want their legacy to be “tried to send a bunch of tax money to the local nepo baby rich guy“? And no worries that voters might not agree, because if they say no, there’s plenty of time to ask them again and see if they can be convinced to say yes.

Should Bexar County dedicate its venue tax — on rental vehicles and hotel rooms — toward the new Spurs arena? Yes, it absolutely should. But commissioners should do this with a negotiated guarantee from the Spurs and the city for investment in around the Frost Bank Center.

It absolutely should! Because reasons! But only if the Spurs owners agree to “invest” enough in and around the arena to make up for the cost of … how much would this be costing the city again?

Should the Spurs make a major contribution toward a project that will exceed $1 billion? Yes, absolutely.

The whole project will cost over $1 billion, okay. (Actually previously reported as maybe as much as $4 billion total, but who’s counting?) But what deal exactly does the Express-News think voters should be voting on, or for? The only attempt to estimate how much hotel and sales tax money San Antonio could divert to pay for arena costs is “holy sh*t that’s a lot of money” (actual quote from an actual economist!), so it would be nice for the paper to provide some numbers, but that’s apparently outside the scope of the editorial board.

One criticism of a potential new arena is that the Frost Bank Center would sit empty, but the reality is that if the Spurs were to move (and we are not suggesting that will happen), then the Frost Bank Center would still be empty and the surrounding area would still lack economic development.

So building a new arena would leave the city’s 22-year-old current arena vacant and redundant, but that’s okay because if the Spurs moved, to somewhere, which they won’t, but they could, to somewhere, then the arena would be vacant anyway. Checks out!

The best path forward is for a May vote on a new arena downtown, with a commitment to a new economic development approach to the area surrounding the Frost Bank Center and a sizable contribution from Spurs ownership.

And from city taxpayers, a contribution that is … what’s 100% minus “sizable”?

Newspaper editorials are always weird and maybe a bad idea overall: They simultaneously give newspaper editors a soapbox where they can throw all pretense at accuracy and fairness out the window, while simultaneously making it seem like the paper’s news coverage must be objective, because it’s not the editorial page. But to the extent that there is any point in the things, it’s that newspaper editors are supposed to know stuff, by virtue of being in charge of reporting the news all day, so when they say something is a good or bad idea, they know what they’re talking about. When instead they just use that public stage to repeat what Important People are whispering in their ears … I’m not sure what it is, but it sure ain’t journalism, and it sure ain’t earning the public’s trust.

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Friday roundup: Sixers arena OKed after protests, RFK site transfer KOed by Elon Musk

access_time personNeil deMause

Weekly news roundup, special abbreviated travel edition:

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium, Sixers arena could both get final approval on Tuesday

access_time personNeil deMause

No time to waste this week on a lengthy preamble, let’s get right to the news roundup:

  • It looks like we may have an answer to the question of how much Pinellas County commissioners will demand from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg to approve $312.5 million in county bonds, and that is: nothing. Or at least nothing more than a promise that he’ll accept the $1 billion in cash and tax and land breaks he agreed to back in July: Commissioners Dave Eggers is looking like the likely swing vote at next Tuesday’s commission meeting, saying he wants to see proof that Sternberg will go ahead with the original deal before okaying the bonds, adding, “It’s really on them kind of to be moving this deal along, and maybe they can show us that’s what they’re doing.” (The county legally can’t sell bonds until the Rays provide more documentation of their own progress on the stadium, though it can approve selling bonds.) If the Rays execs are successful at responding to “We don’t know if we want to give you a billion dollars after we were hit with two hurricanes” with “Well, maybe we’ll ask for even more money” before settling on “Never mind, a billion dollars is fine,” then maybe there was a method to their madness after all.
  • The St. Petersburg city council moved slightly ahead on repairing the Tropicana Field roof as well this week, approving spending $1.7 million on architectural designs. Can, kicked.
  • The Philadelphia city council voted 12-4 on Thursday to approve the $60 million community benefits package for a new 76ers arena near Chinatown, signaling that they will almost certainly approve the entire arena deal at their final meeting of the year on Tuesday. That’s better than nothing (and marginally better than the $50 million originally proposed), but still a whole lot less than the $96 million to 273 million that Sixers owner Josh Harris will be getting in tax breaks, which sports economist Geoffrey Propheter sums up as “pretty f’ing stupid.”
  • Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has weighed in on the question of whether the state should put up half a billion dollars toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium in suburban Brook Park, and his verdict is that he’s still “in a fact gathering process” and “I want what is best for Cleveland” and “This would be a decision that would have to be made by the legislature, and of course, I will weigh in on that as well.” Reply hazy, try again.
  • Diamond Baseball Holdings, which has been buying up every minor-league baseball team it can get its hands on, just announced that it’s moving the Modesto Nuts to San Bernardino, where they will become the Inland Empire 66ers. The new 66ers will take the place of the old 66ers, also owned by DBH, who are moving to Rancho Cucamonga to take the place of the Quakes, who are moving to a new stadium in Ontario that that southern California city is paying about $100 million to build. Having the ability to move franchises around like chess pieces would be one advantage to monopoly control over all of MiLB, but it’s still not entirely clear if that’s DBH’s main gambit or if they have even more ambitious plans.
  • Boston’s plan to renovate White Stadium to be the home of the NWSL’s new BOS Nation FC women’s soccer team (yes, that is officially the worst team name ever) has risen in cost to $200 million, with the city’s share going from $50 million to $91 million. “We are going to pay for our half of the stadium, no matter what it costs,” vowed Mayor Michelle Wu, which critics are calling a “blank check.”

I’m going to be traveling for much of next week, so expect posts here to be a bit more sporadic than usual, though I will make sure to at least check in after the Pinellas County and Philadelphia votes on Tuesday. We will resume our regularly scheduled firehose of news after the Christmas log has pooped out its nougat.

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Inside why Cleveland keeps having to throw good stadium money after bad

access_time personNeil deMause

One day after the Cleveland city council approved an additional $20 million in Cavaliers arena spending and Guardians stadium spending because the team’s leases say the public has to pay for it and the public repair fund had run dry, the Cuyahoga County council followed suit last night, approving $17.35 million in county money to buy the Cavs new elevators and a broadcast control room and buy the Guardians new HVAC units and repairs to a “subroof,” whatever that is:

Cuyahoga County will borrow $14.5 million to help Gateway Economic Development Corp. pay the repair bills at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse and Progressive Field.

On top of that, the county is giving $2.85 million in General Fund dollars to Gateway, the nonprofit that owns the ballpark and arena and oversees repairs.

Those with advanced degrees in how money works will recognize that “borrowing $14.5 million” is not actually a way of explaining how one plans to pay for something, but it fills Gateway’s budget hole for the moment. Future generations of county officials will get to figure out how to pay it off, though one got a head start by explaining that really, at least paying for constant upgrades is better than build a whole new stadium, amirite?

County Council Member Dale Miller, in a committee hearing on the proposal in November, argued that spending on repairs was preferable to building new stadiums.

“The key to our continuing to be a big-league sports town is that we maintain facilities in good condition, so that we don’t have to replace facilities every 25 years or so,” he said. “I know they’re doing that in some other cities, but we don’t have that kind of resources here.”

(Ed. note: Cuyahoga County is currently considering whether to replace a Browns stadium that is exactly 25 years old.)

Yesterday I wondered aloud why Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are paying for constant upgrades, and today I have a partial answer to that: Former Gateway chair Ken Silliman kindly provided copies of the Guardians and Cavs leases, and it turns out they each have slightly different definitions of what the public is on the hook for:

This, needless to say, raises a lot of questions, some of which Silliman was able to shed some light on:

How come Gateway pays for all routine maintenance, capital repairs, and major capital repairs for the Guardians, but only major capital repairs for the Cavs? Both teams, Silliman explains, were on the hook for maintenance and minor repairs as of 2021. That was when the city and county approved spending $17 million a year on stadium upgrades in exchange for Guardians owners Larry and Paul Dolan extending their team’s lease through 2036; as Silliman puts it, “the Guardians were successful in assigning ALL ballpark capital repairs to Gateway as a byproduct of the lease extension.” So a blank check got considerably blanker, in exchange for the Guardians owners agreeing to stay put for an extra 13 years.

Why does anything over $500,000 count as a major capital repair? Doesn’t this 1) incentivize the Cavs to bundle repair items into bigger projects, in hopes of making them the public’s responsibility, and 2) mean that as inflation kicks in over time, more and more repair items would be expected to fall under “major capital repairs”? The $500,000 threshold dates back to the teams’ 2004 leases, and Silliman says he doesn’t know how that distinction between major and minor repairs was decided on. He says the team cheating by piling up small repair projects hasn’t been an issue — Gateway’s engineering consultant has to approve expenses — but inflation absolutely is.

Silliman also forwarded a memo he wrote last fall to the Gateway board in which he said:

This “elephant in the room” is the unprecedented post-pandemic two year spike in construction cost inflation which unfortunately coincided with Gateway’s obligations to fund two of its costliest capital repairs (Cavaliers’ vertical transportation/video production room and Guardians’ lower and upper bowl seat replacements). This perfect storm of events is a major contributor to Gateway’s present cash needs.

That’s potentially good news in that the post-pandemic inflation spike is now over. However, construction costs continue to rise, and sin tax revenues continue to fall, and that $500,000 threshold for which Cavs expenses the public is on the hook for is going to be a lower and lower hurdle, so, it’s not all that good news.

Finally, the leases say the teams can sue Gateway for damages if they don’t get their repair money on time. However, if Gateway runs out of money — which it would if the city and county stopped giving it more cash — it doesn’t appear that the Guardians and Cavs owners can sue the city and county, so it’s within the governments’ power to shut off the money spigot and dare the teams to break their leases and try to find better ones elsewhere, if they wanted.

Tl;dr: Cleveland and Cuyahoga taxpayers aren’t on the hook for all upgrades to the Cavs arena and Guardians stadium, but they are responsible for paying for an unlimited amount of a limited number of items. (Think of it like different infinities.) The city officials who first set this up back in 2004 are mostly no longer around, though the ones in 2021 who took on “ALL ballpark capital repairs” for the Guardians should be getting questioned about that, early and often.

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Cleveland okays taking money from minority business program to give to Cavs, Guardians

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland city council voted 13-3 last night to provide $20 million in extra funding to the Gateway Economic Development Corporation for upgrades to the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena. Council president Blaine Griffin said that the cash will come from projects “in which we have already borrowed and do not need the money this year” — and if your ears perked up at that “this year,” you’re not alone. The money, which will be used for such things as upgrading elevators and broadcast equipment, replacing seats, and upgrading HVAC and video systems, will come from three sources:

  • $5 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding that was slated for a minority business program but not allocated yet.
  • $10 million from other bond proceeds that was intended for other projects that the council didn’t specify.
  • $5 million from Cleveland’s general fund, which one would think the city could have found something to spend it on.

The new spending is needed because the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County agreed in 2017 to give Cavs owner Dan Gilbert $70 million for arena upgrades and in 2021 to give Guardians owners Larry and Paul Dolan $285 million for stadium upgrades, both in exchange for lease extensions. While the money is coming from a ton of different sources, one slice is from the extension of cigarette and alcohol taxes (aka “sin taxes”) that were used to build the venues in the first place, and sin tax revenues are falling while construction costs are rising, resulting in a budget gap for Gateway that the city and county are left to fill.

Going by news coverage, it’s been unclear for some time now what exactly the team leases require the public to pay for — I’m digging around for the exact language and will report back here once I’ve located it. Crain’s Cleveland Business previously reported that if Gateway runs out of money and stops paying for required upgrades, however those are defined, “the teams could stop paying the $2 million in annual rent to Gateway or sue the city for breach of contract,” according to Gateway’s lawyer. (Again, it would help to see the actual lease language.) Griffin called the added $20 million in city spending approved last night “responsible” in order to avoid “having to pony up for expensive litigation” and ending up “with a stadium and trying to figure out an end user,” implying that the teams could leave if Gateway defaulted — though given the current Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays situations, “leave for where?” is a worthy question.

The Cuyahoga County Council is set to vote today on more than $17 million of new spending of its own on Guardians and Cavs capital expenses. And this isn’t likely to be the end of it: There’s another ask for another $30 million in potential Gateway spending around the corner, and unless construction costs come down (ha!) or Clevelanders start smoking more, likely more budget gaps to fill beyond that.

City councilmember Jenny Spencer, one of the three “no” votes last night, put it this way at the council’s previous meeting last week:

“From the residents’ perspective, it always seems that when it comes to stadium funding, money just comes like a magic rabbit out of a hat. It just appears magically. Magically, we have $20 million in general funds available. But when it comes to other things the residents need, we don’t have the money.”

To which Griffin replied:

“Somehow, several years ago, this city made a commitment that they wanted teams as part of the economic engine in the central business district. There are some legal obligations that this city has with this lease.”

That “somehow” is doing a lot of work, huh? Griffin has been on the council since 2017, so presumably he knows at least a little something about how this sausage got made; instead, he’s staying focused on how Cleveland taxpayers will have to choke it down.

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Field of Schemes