Too much news to recap this week to have time writing an amusing intro, sorry!
- WUSA-TV “went in search of tax plans for the new [Washington Commanders] football stadium. What we found was so much more.” Actually, they didn’t find anything about the tax plans, but they did find an internal document from December, provided by “a source close to the Washington Commanders stadium project,” showing which three sites in Virginia team owner Dan Snyder is looking at for a stadium: the Loudoun Quarries in Sterling, across the highway from Dulles Airport; a plot of undeveloped land between Summit School Road and Telegraph Road in Woodbridge, off I-95 about 25 miles south of D.C.; and Potomac Shores in Dumfries, a new development even farther south along the west bank of the Potomac River. Each site would be developed with not just an NFL stadium and training facilities but “a 14,000-seat amphitheater, hotels and a conference center, residential buildings and mixed-used retail including nightlife.” No price tags were included ($3 billion has been the going figure), nor plans for who would pay for acquiring the land, whether it would be on the public rolls and thus skip out on paying property taxes, or anything like that, but if anyone wants to start debating the vital question of how long it would take to drive to Commanders games — up to 90 minutes during a Thursday night rush hour, according to WUSA — have at it.
- One Orchard Park councilmember wants the Buffalo Bills owners to pay for extra police on game days if they get a new stadium, and one New York state assemblymember wants the Bills owners to lower food and drink prices if they get stadium subsidies. Both of which are reasonable asks — if you’re going to hand over close to a billion dollars in tax money for a stadium, you may as well get something in return — but both are also likely to amount to a rounding error compared to the state’s price tag for a stadium, so neither would be so much a win as a consolation prize.
- Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell says there’s talk underway of building a new stadium for the F.C. Tulsa USL team on the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and surprisingly this isn’t going over real well, not just because the city already built a Tulsa Drillers minor-league baseball stadium on a possible burial site for victims of the massacre, but because the surviving descendants of the city’s Black community still live there, and a soccer stadium isn’t especially at the top of their development list.
- Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee reports on the roots of the Milwaukee Brewers owners’ demands for upwards of $70 million in stadium upgrades under their state-of-the-art lease clause, and notes a list of things the money would go for, including replacing the air conditioning, replacing parts of the retractable roof, replacing all the seats, replacing all the lights, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards again 10-15 years later, and upgrading the sound system to a “multi-zone system.” A Brewers exec said this list wasn’t “comprehensive,” so put on your owner goggles and imagine your own wish list as well!
- “Will a new Denver Broncos owner mean a push for a new stadium, too?” The Denver Post actually has no idea, but the Broncos‘ current stadium is a whole 21 years old already, you can’t expect these things to just last forever before tearing them down and building a new one, and another new one, and another…
- John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, an FoS reader and maker of excellent stickers, published an essay at Baseball Prospectus asserting that the baseball lockout makes stadium subsidies even worse, since now stadiums aren’t even providing the meager tax revenues that they usually do when baseball games are being played. This prompted an email discussion between myself and John about whether the substitution effect means that when stadiums are shuttered people will just spend money elsewhere in the area so it’s really a wash; and then more emails between myself and an economist about what the data shows about whether, say, a stadium in a city can at least be a net plus by siphoning off spending from the suburbs. No conclusive evidence yet, will report more later if and when I find out if we have yet another reason to hate Rob Manfred.
- Chris Fedor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer tweets: “NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said they are estimating a roughly $100 million economic impact for the city of Cleveland as a result of All-Star Weekend.” Asked and answered!
- Neither the Boston Red Sox nor the Chicago Cubs are planning to move out of their popular, historic ballparks, and yup, that qualifies as a reason to write a whole Athletic article these days.
- And here’s a whole article about the housing group that pointed out that the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium land purchase likely violated the state Surplus Land Act, I guess there’s just a lot of sports-page space to fill what with spring training getting wiped out by the lockout. Not that I’m complaining, they’re interesting enough overview articles, but it would be nice if publications were investigating things we didn’t know instead of rehashing what we already do, that’s all.