Category: Miami Heat

Friday roundup: Guardians issue screwy new seating plans, NYCFC tax breaks hit $516m, Illinois blocks some Bears subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news for you this week! If you don’t like any of this news, you just don’t like any news at all!

  • Cleveland Guardians management has released some details of how they plan to spend their new $435 million renovation fund ($285 million of it from city, county, and state taxpayers), and the answer is: on $202.5 million of renovations now, then bank the rest for future maintenance and upgrades. Progressive Field Reimagined is focused on creating new “social spaces,” which from the looks of things include some kind of seating terrace where fans will sit on sofas, some of them facing away from the game, plus, if you look real fast at WKYC’s video, turning much of the outfield upper deck into a giant sun-shaded outdoor concessions plaza that you can’t actually see the game from. (Right now much of that area is currently taken up by giant shipping containers that serve as ad boards because nobody wants to sit there, so maybe this isn’t too much of a loss.) It’s also amusing to see that some of the “Terrace Hub” weird-facing sofas will be behind, yes, pillars, that favorite bugaboo of stadium designers that many a team owner has declared to be the reason they need to replace existing stadiums, but apparently set to make a comeback now that a team owner realizes they need them to hold the upper deck up, physics FTW!
  • Turns out when sports economist Geoffrey Propheter estimated that NYC F.C.‘s full property tax break on its new stadium would cost taxpayers between $132.5 million and $197 million, he was lowballing a bit; his former colleagues at the New York City Independent Budget Office have now crunched the numbers and come up with a total tax-break cost of $516 million in present value. Add in city infrastructure costs that will likely top $100 million and whatever the benefits are of getting the use of city land for 49 years for just $30 million in rent, and we’re looking at well over $600 million in subsidies for a stadium that Mayor Eric Adams touted as “100% privately financed.” But then, that’s kind of a tradition in New York.
  • An Illinois state bill to create a $400 million “large business attraction fund” has had an amendment added to bar any of the money from going to “a professional sports organization that moves its operations from one location in the state to another location in the state,” which it doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to see means the Chicago Bears. A Bears stadium in Arlington Heights could still receive other state subsidies, as well as local subsidies like the property-tax kickbacks they’re reportedly considering, but at least it’s an indication that Illinois state legislators aren’t quite so dumb that they think paying a sports team to relocate from one part of the state to another is good policy. (Them thinking that paying other businesses $400 million to relocate to Illinois is anything other than wasted money is another story, but one baby step at a time.)
  • What should Miami Heat fans call their arena now that their crypto naming-rights partner is going out of business and its founder is in jail? The Arena, says a spokesperson for Miami Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, “with a capital A.” No, I don’t know how one pronounces a capital A differently either, but I guess this counts as Branding™, whereas just letting people call it “the arena” would be a failure of leadership or something.
  • What do you do when a local sports team owner, in this case the Detroit Red Wings‘ Ilitch family, gets $400 million in public money to build a new neighborhood and then just doesn’t? Why, give them another $797 million to not build more development, of course! Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan must figure he doesn’t have much choice, given that the rest of his city is just a blank gray void.
  • Opposition continues to build to the Philadelphia 76ers owners building a new arena right next to the city’s Chinatown, with 87 of around 100 local business owners signing a petition opposing the plan, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund looking into legal action. “This is something that will destroy Chinatown,” said Steven Zhu, head of the Philadelphia Chinese Restaurant Association, and given what happened with Washington, D.C.’s arena, he may have a point.
  • Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin says he’s ready to talk about building the Washington Commanders a new stadium in Virginia as soon as Daniel Snyder sells the team, because doing so while Snyder still owned the team turned out to be a non-starter.
  • Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is reportedly “embarrassed” that so many visiting-team fans are flying in to Vegas to watch Raiders games, which, has he forgotten that the whole pitch for Nevada building him a stadium was so that it would bring more tourists to town? Or, now that Davis has his $750 million in state cash in hand, he just doesn’t care about economics and only wants to see more fans rooting for his team? Almost certainly one of those.

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks, so if posts here are a little irregular or appear at weird hours of the day, don’t worry yourself over it. Have a good long (if you’re in the U.S.) weekend, and see you back here on Tuesday or thereabouts!

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Miami Heat park 26 years overdue, Virginia Commanders stadium plan rises slightly from dead

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry to keep you waiting this morning — let’s just blame “the holidays” and leave it at that. Getting straight to the news:

  • The Miami Herald editorial board would like to remind everyone that Miami Heat owner Micky Arison promised to build a waterfront park as part of his arena deal with the city … in 1996. “But there was a loophole,” notes the Herald. “The ballot language didn’t actually specify that the park would be built.” Whoops! Too bad there aren’t such things as legal proofreaders to check over ballot language to be sure that it does what it says it does! Or, you know, newspapers like the Herald to check that people are voting on what team owners have promised they are.
  • Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed spending $500,000 for a study of how to lure the Washington Commanders to his state with a new stadium, which is a drop in the bucket in stadium spending terms, but as the first sign of life since the Virginia legislature killed a Commanders stadium bill in June, it’s worth watching.
  • Here’s a long article by CNBC about how “since 2000, public funds diverted to helping build professional sports stadiums and arenas have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion” (no source provided, but that is almost certainly a massive undercount) that says “the reason cities end up paying for stadiums begins with the issuance of tax-exempt bonds from state and local governments that the federal government has signed off on for decades,” which isn’t really true at all, so I’d probably recommend not reading it unless you want to risk being confused by spaghetti logic. (There’s also a video piece that I haven’t watched, please report back in comments if it’s any better.)
  • The MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, which is technically not an arena since it will only host concerts and such and not sports, has now reached $2.17 billion in estimated cost, which is mind-boggling. MSG is set to pay the entire cost, at least, but I can’t help but wonder if this had any impact on MSG owner James Dolan’s announced plan to spin off the Sphere and his regional sports networks into a new company — not that I’m saying cable channels have as dubious a future business plan as a $2 billion concert theater, but I’m not not saying it, either.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen wants to seek a state license to build a casino … somewhere. In his parking lot? Across the street next to the proposed new NYC F.C. stadium? Either of those places are owned by the city, and the former is technically parkland so this could get interesting.

Okay, I have lots to do and so do you, only two shopping days before Christmas/the last day of Hanukkah/the first day of Kwanzaa! Happy holidays if you observe any, and see you on Tuesday.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: NYCFC deal gets even worse; Royals and Titans plans, World Cup stay as awful as ever

access_time personNeil deMause

Every single damn time: I start thinking that things have calmed down and it’ll just be the same few sports subsidy deals for a while, and then suddenly someone drops a new one or two out of nowhere. The NYC F.C. and Kansas City Royals stadium demands weren’t entirely unexpected, but they also weren’t expected just now for the sums of money that are being asked for, so they definitely qualify as a surprise to me.

I’ve already been on one Kansas City TV station this week, and I’ll be on their NPR station KCUR this morning from 9 to 9:30 am Central time. And I wrote about the NYC F.C. plan for Hell Gate, and will likely be doing so again, so clearly more people are paying attention as the ongoing stadium game moves to, or rather returns to, a couple more localities. (If you’re new to this site as a result: Hi! This all has been going on for a long time, and seems determined to continue until we’re all dead, try not to be too depressed, near-hopeless causes are worth fighting for, and laughing to keep from crying is a perfectly acceptable way of getting through the days.)

And with that, let’s get to other news that fell by the wayside this week, or that has come up since yesterday:

  • With that NYC F.C. public price tag still very much an unknown, I put in an email to University of Colorado economist Geoffrey Propheter, who formerly specialized in property tax expenditures for the New York City Independent Budget Office, to see if he had any ideas for estimating how much New York City would be giving up by granting a full property tax break for a $780 million soccer stadium. As it turned out, he very much did: His new book “Major League Sports and the Property Tax Costs and Implications of a Stealth Tax Expenditure” is due out next week, and it includes a methodology for estimating the forgone property tax on sports projects. In the case of NYC F.C., he estimated that a full tax exemption over 49 years would cost New York City somewhere between $132.5 million and $197 million. Add that to the share of city infrastructure costs that would be going to the stadium (almost certainly $100 million or more, if the total infrastructure tab comes to $200-300 million as City Hall has projected), the value of getting the use of city land for 49 years (still TBD), and subtract out the $30 million the city will take in in rent, and we have … somewhere between a $200 million loss for city taxpayers and something substantially more than that. We’ll hopefully know more once Adams presents an actual memorandum of understanding and/or lease proposal to the city council, unless this is part of Adams’ whole pretending-things-are-true-just-because-he-says-them thing, in which case we may have to dig a bit more to come up with final numbers.
  • Oh, and also NYC F.C. paid one of Adams’ top campaign aides $20,000 to lobby his former boss on the stadium deal, according to the New York Daily News. This is totally legal, somehow.
  • On Royals owner John Sherman’s $2 billion stadium ask, Craig Calcaterra has feels that are so well stated that I’ll just quote them here: “Less than 15 years ago Kansas City taxpayers spent $250 million for renovations to what was the already wonderful Kauffman Stadium and made it even more wonderful. Indeed, it remains wonderful. It’s one of the best parks in all of baseball by any conceivable measure. To suggest that it even needs another $250 million, let alone eight times that much, just to keep pace with other ballparks is to insult the intelligence of literally any person who has ever stepped foot in that or any other ballpark. As for the economic benefits, literally every shred of comprehensive research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has established that they are not drivers of economic development. I realize that the actual facts on this score are routinely ignored as team owners, team boosters, and credulous members of the media parrot utterly unsupported claims that ‘New sTADiUM mEAN BiG puBlIc bEneFiT!!!’ but their parroting does not make it true. It is bullshit even if they want people to believe otherwise.”
  • Economist J.C. Bradbury adds: Yup, that’s about the size of it.
  • The World Cup starts Sunday in Qatar, and there are two ways to write about it: List all of the horrors of slave labor that helped build a fleet of new stadiums, or … not.
  • The news has been too busy for me to get around to the collapse of FTX and what it means for the Miami Heat‘s naming-rights deal with the now-bankrupt crypto company, which is a shame because it’s a true laugh-to-keep-from-crying masterpiece. (FTX signed a penalty clause to pay $16.5 million if it defaults on its naming rights payments, plus pay for removing its signage on the arena — but now it’s penniless and bankrupt and can’t be made to pay anything! Hilarious!) Let’s make up for that now by enjoying the fact that a Miami strip club is offering to buy the used naming rights, which is truly the ending we all deserve.
  • Speaking of bankrupt things, Chester, Pennsylvania is now one of them. Guess that revitalization-through-publicly-subsidized-soccer-stadium thing is continuing not to work out so well there.
  • Anaheim is planning to do an appraisal of the condition of the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium, in anticipation of maybe enforcing a lease clause that could require team owner Arte Moreno to do a couple hundred million dollars worth of maintenance. “It’s important for the people of Anaheim and the council to know the condition of the stadium and [whether it is] being kept at a first-class professional baseball stadium,” said councilmember Jose Moreno, no doubt cackling deep inside at the idea of holding Moreno to the kind of state-of-the-art clause that teams usually use against cities.
  • Nashville Mayor John Cooper says it would cost as much to renovate the Tennessee Titans‘ stadium as to built a $2.1 billion new one; Nashville councilmember Bob Mendes called this “the biggest lie the mayor has told” and said ‘there’s no way on Earth that ‘first class’ stadium requires a three-story sports bar or a luxury songwriters lounge or a covered rooftop area with grass and trees on top of Nissan Stadium.” Mendes also released renderings of what the Titans owners are looking for in a renovated stadium — do they include gratuitous balloons, people watching anything but the game, and ghostly figures from another realm? Would you have it any other way?

 

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Georgia man holds no truck with numbers, new stadiums falling apart already, plus a guy who spent three years living in a Phillies concession stand

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! Still recovering from the double whammy of my second shot on Sunday plus learning that birds aren’t real, so I’ll keep the intro short this week and get right to the news:

Share this post:

Miami-Dade County just maneuvered its way into paying the Heat an extra $2m toward arena debt

access_time personNeil deMause

Miami-Dade County has budgeted an extra $2 million in payments to the Heat for the team’s arena construction debt in 2020, to make up for the fact that the arena is currently without a naming-rights sponsor after American Airlines opted out of its deal last year. If you’re wondering why this is the county’s problem, I direct you to my post from back in October 2018 where I recapped the situation thusly:

Back in 1996, when the arena measure was going to the polls for a public vote, there was a lot of opposition to the notion of putting tax money into a private sports arena. So the Heat owners pulled a last-minute switcheroo: Instead of Miami-Dade paying for the team’s arena, the team would pay for it — but the county would pay the team $8.5 million a year to play in it, amounting to the exact same amount of subsidy at the end of the day. But the team would at least pass along its $2 million a year in naming-rights fees to the county as part of the deal.

Flash forward to today, when $2 million a year is a relative pittance in naming-rights fees. Miami-Dade County leaders clearly realized this, and figured, “Hell, if there’s more money to be had from naming rights, we should be getting it to defray our annual subsidies to the team.” And thanks to that lease clause, they could do it.

Yeah, well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, the county’s naming-rights-sales consultant, the maybe-ironically named Superlative Group, failed to cut a deal in 2019, and 2020 has been godawful for the airlines and other industries that typically like to throw big money at sports naming-rights deals, so now Miami-Dade is looking at having to cover this year’s $2 million payment out of its general funds, and quite likely next year’s as well.

There’s still a chance that the county could make it all back if it signs a big-money naming-rights deal once the pandemic is over, but if everything has changed as we’re constantly being told, it’s not a certainty. I don’t especially blame county officials for rolling the dice on a naming-rights windfall to try to recoup some its arena subsidies — hell, I praised them for it less than two years ago — but digging that $6.5-million-a-year hole in the first place just looks worse and worse.

Share this post:

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.

Share this post:

Miami stadium sites are “future Atlantis” thanks to climate change, teams to deal with this by ditching plastic cups

access_time personNeil deMause

As you may have noticed, I’m slightly interested in the massive human-created changes to Earth’s climate that are going to make many major cities uninhabitable soon via increased heat or sea level rise or both, so this CNBC article on sports venues at risk from climate change promised to check all of my boxes:

  • Florida International University climate professor Henry Briceno predicts that the Miami Heat arena will flood with only two feet of sea level rise (expected as soon as 2060), while the Dolphins‘ stadium will flood at a three-foot rise. As for the site of David Beckham’s new Inter Miami stadium, Briceno remarked, “I don’t know if those guys know that they are building in the future Atlantis.”
  • The San Diego Padres‘ stadium flooded in 2017, and the Quad Cities River Bandits stadium was made inaccessible thanks to flooding last year, and while both of those were because of torrential rains and not sea-level rise, more and more severe storms are expected to be a consequence of a warmed planet as well.
  • Disappointingly, the article doesn’t talk much about what will happen to sports teams once the cities they play in are largely uninhabitable as a result of climate change — Phoenix isn’t going to be underwater ever, but it could be too hot to live in as soon as 2050.

And the article then pivots to what sports teams are doing to help combat climate change — including a long set of quotes from Allen Hershkowitz, the staff environmentalist the New York Yankees hired after he helped MLB come up with programs to claim “green” status and then called commissioner Bud Selig “the most influential environmental advocate in the history of sports” — though only one specific initiative is mentioned: The Dolphins are replacing disposable plastic cups with (presumably reusable) aluminum ones. That sounds great, but while plastics are indeed a pollution nightmare, in terms of carbon footprint they’re not all that much better for the planet than alternatives (reusability is more important than what cups are made of). And there’s no mention of what the carbon footprint was of these teams’ repeated building and upgrading of new stadiums, which is kind of a big omission when nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions are related to construction.

The best way to keep sports from drowning themselves, really, would be for teams to play in whatever stadiums they already have and for fans to stay out of their cars and instead stay home and watch on the internet listen on the radio. Or maybe just play fewer games. Somebody ask Hershkowitz about that, maybe?

Share this post:

Miami-Dade may have found a way to reduce its Heat arena subsidies, two decades later

access_time personNeil deMause

The old joke about the New York Times is that you need to read the articles backwards, since all the most important information is usually buried way at the bottom. That’s sort of the case with this Miami Herald article about Miami-Dade County taking control of naming rights sales for the Heat‘s arena, which takes a long time to explain what’s really going on. With the unimportant bits redacted, we get:

Miami-Dade is exercising its option to end the Heat’s current exclusive negotiations with the airline in favor of a broader search for sponsors….

Miami-Dade had until the end of 2018 to exercise its option, or let the Heat negotiate the arena’s next naming-rights deal under more favorable terms for the county….

Superlative Group’s Myles Gallagher said a new sponsorship deal in Miami should bring at least $6 million a year….

By exercising its naming-rights option, Miami-Dade must pay the Heat an additional $2 million a year starting in 2020 to make up for the money the team currently receives from American Airlines. … Anything over $2 million, the county gets to keep.

If you’re still confused, here’s what’s going on: Back in 1996, when the arena measure was going to the polls for a public vote, there was a lot of opposition to the notion of putting tax money into a private sports arena. So the Heat owners pulled a last-minute switcheroo: Instead of Miami-Dade paying for the team’s arena, the team would pay for it — but the county would pay the team $8.5 million a year to play in it, amounting to the exact same amount of subsidy at the end of the day. But the team would at least pass along its $2 million a year in naming-rights fees to the county as part of the deal.

Flash forward to today, when $2 million a year is a relative pittance in naming-rights fees. Miami-Dade County leaders clearly realized this, and figured, “Hell, if there’s more money to be had from naming rights, we should be getting it to defray our annual subsidies to the team.” And thanks to that lease clause, they could do it.

The upshot: If Miami-Dade officials can manage to sell naming rights for more than $2 million a year, which they should be able to do if they hire a halfway competent rights-fee manager, Miami residents might finally see their annual costs for the Heat’s arena go down a tad. Score one for whoever got that naming-rights buyback clause inserted back in the day, and for today’s officials for remembering it was there — it’s only the kind of due diligence we should expect from our elected officials, but sadly not the kind we usually get.

Share this post:

Hurricane Irma fails to knock over any of Florida’s sports venues

access_time personNeil deMause

Time for your “What damage did Florida sports facilities suffer during Hurricane Irma?” rundown!

Also, two-thirds of the state is without power and many residents could remain so for weeks, at least 11 people died in the U.S. and 38 in Caribbean nations, nobody knows how many people are currently trapped in the Florida Keys, and a whole island of 1,800 people is now evacuated and uninhabitable. The Jaguars may move Sunday’s game to Tennessee if they have to.

Share this post:

Miami celebrates subsidizing suddenly-crappy Heat by laying off librarians, cops

access_time personNeil deMause

Now here’s a lede, courtesy of Bloomberg News:

Last month, Miami politicians approved a $19 million subsidy for the professional basketball arena. Six weeks later, they turned to a grimmer task: deciding how many police and librarians to fire.

It’s not quite fair to blame Miami-Dade County’s $64 million budget hole, which could require 700 layoffs, on the Heat arena subsidy deal, since that’s only costing the county $19 million in subsidies over 20 years (and more like $6 million in present value). Still, it’s not helping any, and does point up not only that it’s easier to get public money if you’re a rich guy with a sports team than if you’re actually working for the public, but that sports subsidies can often paint future elected officials into a budget corner. As Holy Cross sports economist Victor Matheson tells Bloomberg:

“You can’t stop your debt payments without actually declaring bankruptcy,” he said. “But you can cut the number of police officers and teachers and librarians and firefighters.”

But at least Miami fans can now rest easy that they can keep watching LeBron James for another, um, whoops. Heat owner Micky Arison sure timed that subsidy demand right, didn’t he?

Share this post: