New York Knicks – Page 2 – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Bears buy stadium land but won’t promise to build stadium on it, and other confusing news of the week

February 17, 2023February 17, 2023 Neil deMause

We have made it to the end of another week, or will soon, anyway. Why not celebrate with a round of bullet points about ways in which pro sports team owners are seeking to extract money from the public purse to use to pad their own profits? No, no, that was a rhetorical question, I’m sure you have many good reasons why not, but you’re here now and it’s too late to go back. so:

The owners of the Chicago Bears have officially purchased Arlington Park racetrack for $197.2 million, a move that the team said in a statement “does not guarantee the land will be developed,” because they’re still holding out for a heaping pile of tax kickbacks. Trying to build momentum for doing something while also threatening not to do it is a tricky business, and the Bears seem to be pulling it off as well as possible, but we’ll see how it all plays in the Illinois legislature and on the Arlington Heights village board.
New Indy Eleven stadium renderings! Are there buildings that glow with a weird inner light while all around them appears dark and drab by comparison? Yes! People standing at a railing and ignoring the game while admiring the sky outside the stadium? You betcha! People ostentatiously raising their arms in the air? Again yes, and many of them are even pointing both index fingers at the sky for some reason. (Though to the renderers’ credit, the game action in the background is at least semi-realistic, with an Eleven player seemingly starting to celebrate after just having shot a goal past an inattentive keeper who failed to come off his line, though it’s also very possible it’s about to be called back by an offsides flag.) Weird crimes against physics and geometry? Definitely, until someone can explain how or why that stand at the far end is a perfect semicircle. The state of Indiana is putting $112 million into this USL facility, which sounded like a crazy amount when it was first approved in 2019 but now, well, still sounds crazy for a 20,000-seat facility in a league where no team averaged even 11,000 fans last season, maybe all those index fingers are for “We’re here for game #1, you’ll never see this place this packed again”?
Also in USL news, Phoenix Rising‘s new stadium is, yes, rising, and how’s that going? Oh, I see. I’m sure it’ll look more impressive once the robot dog showroom is in place.
A state senator from Queens thinks that as long as NYC F.C. is getting a new 25,000-seat stadium in his borough, why not expand it to 80,000 seats and bring back the New York Jets from New Jersey, where they have an opt-out in their lease? Is there room for a larger stadium? “The land is there,” said Sen. Joseph Addabbo. Is there money? (Crickets.)
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey wants the state of Minnesota to pay off the city’s remaining debt on the Vikings stadium ($333 million in future payments over 23 years, no word on what that would amount to in a lump sum payment right now) because the state has money and “Minneapolis is part of the state.” He’s got you there, state, it’s just geography!
Trying to get your arena’s operating permit renewed while fending off attempts to make your teams pay property taxes and also managing fallout from using facial recognition technology to ban lawyers for companies suing you from attending games? Invite the state assembly speaker to do the puck drop at a game, he’ll love it, no conflict of interest at all!

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Friday roundup: MSG lobbies to stay put, OKC debates new Thunder arena, plus: BEES!

February 10, 2023 Neil deMause

It’s been another week already, can you believe it? Before we get to the cavalcade of news items that didn’t make the cut for individual posts this week, it’s probably a good time for me to thank all of you who’ve generously supported this site with your hard-earned dollars to help me keep getting up at 7 am to report on this sports grift that doesn’t seem to have any intention of ending. So, thanks! And if you haven’t kicked in any coins of late and would like to, you can sign up for either a one-time donation or a small monthly payment — there are still a few cab-hailing lady art prints up for grabs!

Or just read the week’s news, that works too!

Madison Square Garden officials say they should get a perpetual operating permit from the city of New York because moving the arena elsewhere would cost $8.5 billion. Actually, the city could just send in its Padlock Unit (a real thing!) to lock the Knicks and Rangers out until James Dolan agreed to relocate the Garden on his own dime, or at least until he agreed to start paying property taxes, neither of which is likely to happen, but it could. The operating permit expires this July 31, so expect to see a whole lot more public grandstanding over the next six months, especially if the Knicks or Rangers make a deep playoff run (neither of which is likely to happen, but it could). Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to keep the Garden where it is but plans on being a “hard negotiator” for a renewed permit (which … okay, you already see where this parenthetical is going.)
Two competing Oklahoma City council candidates said they’re both in favor of building the Thunder a new arena (estimated cost: TBD) to replace their 21-year-old one, so long as the public gets something in return like “sales tax” or “full and thriving wages” for arena employees or “density.” (That’s in ascending order of likelihood, albeit descending levels of comprehensibility.)
Glendale, Arizona councilmember Joyce Clark is going to town on nearby Tempe’s planned arena for the Arizona Coyotes, posting back-to-back blog posts showing that team owner Alex Meruelo’s finances are considered high-risk and estimating that tax kickbacks for the project would amount to $700 million. In present value that’s probably more like $500 million, but it’s still not chicken feed; Tempe voters go to the polls on May 16.
Not saying that the Virginia legislature isn’t going to ever consider building a Washington Commanders stadium, but rejecting Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s request for $500,000 for “planning” a stadium proposal is a pretty good sign nothing’s going to move forward until legislators can dance on team owner Daniel Snyder’s (probably metaphorical, but either way works) grave.
Stadium architect Ron Labinski, who helped design Arrowhead Stadium, Giants Stadium, and whatever you call the Miami Dolphins‘ stadium these days, died recently at age 85, and condolences to his family and friends. The New York Times headlining his obit with the line that he “Designed a Cozier Future for Stadiums,” though, is pretty much 100% wrong, given that one of the hallmarks of his era as a stadium architect was building more luxury suites, which have forced upper decks into the stratosphere, making stadiums decidedly less cozy.
The bees are moving south! Run for your lives! Oh, wait, it’s just the Salt Lake Bees, and their new stadium in Daybreak is going to be “privately financed,” though the Bees owners still haven’t announced how that funding is going to work yet, maybe best to run for your lives anyway just to be on the safe side.

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Friday roundup: How much economic impact won’t the Super Bowl have, and other dubious sports news

February 3, 2023February 3, 2023 Neil deMause

“Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting.” I probably should have spun this off into its own post, and added some anecdata about how when I post two items in one day it always seems like one of them gets overlooked, but then I would have to come up with an additional headline and post again to social media so screw it, just go give Tom Scocca the clicks, he needs ’em now that he doesn’t have a day job again.

Anyway, you probably skipped that to go straight to the bullet points, and here they are:

Tampa Bay Rays execs really are working through the “Art of the Steal” playbook from Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes: After promising that a new stadium in the exact same place would help the Rays draw more fans and sign better players, team president Brian Auld hauled out the Two-Minute Warning, asserting that “to be comfortably playing on opening day in 2028, in a new ballpark, we’ve got to have most of these details ironed out by this time next year.” Yes, the Rays’ lease expires after 2027, but lease extensions are a thing that exists, so really this is an utterly fake deadline — but one that can help put pressure on a city council that otherwise might be tempted to ask questions like “Um, how much money are we supposed to put into this thing exactly?”
New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan still wants the city council to grant him a perpetual operating permit for Madison Square Garden, but may be running into trouble now that local electeds have taken note of his engaging in war with law firms suing him by using facial recognition technology to bar their lawyers from attending games. Though state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal does float the idea of giving Dolan his permanent permit in exchange for him dropping this new facial-recognition policy and just going back to being his usual kind of asshole, so maybe Dolan isn’t that dumb a negotiator after all?
Hosting the Super Bowl could bring Arizona as much as $1 billion, KTAR-FM reports in a story that had to be corrected because the headline initially said $2 billion even though the story didn’t. Also its only source was a guy from the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, it confused economic impact with actual state revenue, and it failed to note that previous attempts to find out where inflated Super Bowl impact figures came from turned up no sign that they’re based on any real data, but I’m sure those corrections will be added soon.
Twin headlines this week: “A’s expected to visit Las Vegas to meet with resort operators” and “California floated cutting major Southwest cities off Colorado River water before touching its agriculture supply, sources say” — in the latter case, California officials proposed studying what would happen if Las Vegas and Phoenix were entirely cut off from using the river, which given that Vegas gets 90% of its water from there probably doesn’t take all that much study to imagine. Will any of these schmancy new sports gambling services give me a betting line on Las Vegas being completely depopulated before the Oakland A’s move there? Because I’m ready to put down some cash on that.
University of Pennsylvania city planning professor Akira Drake Rodriguez writes in a WHYY-TV op-ed of a proposed Philadelphia 76ers arena on Market Street near Chinatown, “The chain restaurants and corporate entertainment experiences bring a crush of people, traffic, and congestion in the hours when an event is happening, but in the time when the space is empty — which is most of the time — they are devoid of life, and surrounded by massive open space that’s energetically dead.” That’s pretty much what happened in D.C. with the Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, and it’s pretty much what happens with every other sports venue, so, yup. (Rodriguez also notes that arena construction can be used to kickstart gentrification, which, also yup.)
The owners of the Staten Island Yankees and two other minor-league baseball teams that were vaporized in MLB’s takeover and purge of the minors are appealing a court ruling that MLB’s antitrust exemption makes it immune to prosecution, and the U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in with a friend-of-the-court brief saying yup, that’s not what the antitrust exemption was meant to do. A court hearing is expected to be held, I dunno, sometime, Reuters doesn’t mention it, maybe this article was written by its bots?
Speaking of which, the Asheville Tourists want public stadium money, and the South Bend Cubs want stadium money, and Nolan Ryan’s son wants stadium money for the San Antonio Missions, and Leland, North Carolina may want stadium money to lure the Down East Wood Ducks there, so MLB’s minor-league downsizing is very much going according to plan.
Did you know that the world’s fourth-oldest major-league baseball stadium is faced with demolition over the objection of local residents because the city government considers it “decrepit” just because it’s 97 years old? Maybe so if you follow Tokyo’s Yakult Swallows, but click the link above if you want to read more — there’s no details on how much a new stadium would cost or who would pay for it, but there is lots about how the plan was announced only in a “teeny tiny notice in a ward publication that normally nobody ever reads,” which should be a familiar scenario to some U.S. readers.

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Penn Station redevelopment bites the dust, what will this mean for MSG, A’s, other “stadium district” plans?

November 2, 2022November 1, 2022 Neil deMause

Hey, remember back this summer when there was speculation that Madison Square Garden could be torn down and rebuilt in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards complex to make way for a sea of new office buildings around Penn Station (and maybe a rebuilt Penn Station too)? Welp, the prime developer behind the Penn Station redevelopment plan just announced that, uh, nope, not gonna be doing that:

Vornado Realty Trust said it won’t be erecting towers around Penn Station any time soon and will cut its dividend early next year to conserve cash.

“The headwinds in the current environment are not at all conducive to…development,” Chief Executive Steven Roth said on a conference call Tuesday.

Asked if he might revise his ambitious plans for redeveloping the area around Penn Station, perhaps by constructing more apartments and fewer offices, Roth said, “That’s not something we’re going to get into now.”

Yow! On the one hand, Roth’s announcement makes total sense: The office building market is in a tailspin, thanks to both the growth of remote work and rising interest rates for construction, which is the whole reason MSG-to-Hudson Yards wasn’t an entirely crazy idea. (Hudson Yards builder Related still has a large plot of railyards it has yet to develop with office buildings, and is in no hurry to do so because see above re: too damn many office buildings already.) On the other hand, this Penn Station redevelopment has been a huge deal both for Vornado and for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for years now, and for Vornado to abruptly pull the plug is, well, abrupt.

There’ll likely be plenty of speculation about what this will mean for Hochul’s reelection campaign, but I’m more interested in what this will mean for the state of the “mixed-use developments” that have become part of many, many sports venue plans. If building a bunch of commercial towers around your stadium becomes more costly and less lucrative, suddenly it makes a lot less sense to, say, pay to build a stadium so long as you get $1 billion in infrastructure spending to make the rest of your development more profitable.

The reasonable response to this from city officials would be “Oh well, guess if there’s no market for commercial buildings then don’t build commercial buildings”; the expected response is more likely to be along the lines of “Oh no, we can’t get stadiums built by subsidizing profitable commercial real estate deals, we better figure out some other way of subsidizing them instead!” I mean, maybe I’m wrong and local electeds will exceed my expectations, but I’ve been betting the under on them for more than 25 years now, and haven’t gone wrong yet.

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Friday roundup: Every disaster has a silver lining, and vice versa

September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 Neil deMause

When I was seven years old, my family drove down to Sanibel Island for vacation — twice in one year, for some reason — so I’m pretty familiar with the causeway bridge that was just wiped out by Hurricane Ian, which is very not good for anyone who is now entirely cut off from the mainland. I suppose I should make some observation about how the substitution effect means Sanibel’s loss will mean some other Florida beach spot’s economic gain, but too soon, people.

More fallout from that OC Vibe development by the Anaheim Ducks that will use $400 million in city bonds but be paid off by the team owners, maybe mostly hopefully: The city of Anaheim needs to build a fire station to support the new development, but may get sued by Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno for wanting to do so in the Angel Stadium parking lot. There are a lot of moving parts in every development deal, which is why Judith Grant Long spent a decade writing her book just to figure out what stadiums even really cost.
Still more reports that Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman wants to build a downtown stadium, or have someone else build him a downtown stadium, one of those two, though it looks like all he really said was he was talking to the Chiefs owners and Jackson County about the team’s future. Good thing he didn’t reminisce about the time he took his wife on a date to see Lou Piniella, or we might have been subjected to a whole feature article.
The latest revelations in the “Brett Favre used welfare money to build a volleyball arena for his daughter’s college” scandal are that 1) Favre wanted to build a football practice facility too and 2) he at one point suggested saving money by building it with prison labor. Then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant texted back to Favre: “But we have to follow the law. I am to old for Federal Prison.😊😎.” That’s for the Department of Justice to decide, Phil.
New York state (not New York City, New York Yimby needs to read its own articles before writing its headlines) has hired an architect for its redesign of Penn Station, and Madison Square Garden is still staying put in the initial plans, look, you can see it right there. New York Mayor Eric Adams says he’s still “open” to discussing with Garden (and Knicks and Rangers) owner James Dolan the possibility of tearing down the arena and building a new one elsewhere, but as the Penn Station redevelopment is not his project — again, he’s mayor of the city, not the state, states don’t have mayors — this is just another example of his mouth opening and things coming out.
A Pittsburgh court has struck down the city’s “jock tax” on income of out-of-state athletes playing in the city, which probably will have some small impact on the finances of the city’s sports facilities, but mostly I’m impressed that the court case took so long that one of the plaintiffs is Jeff Francoeur, who retired from baseball in 2016.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers stadium has been invaded by bees, time to build a new one, bees are even worse than cats!
I’m not exactly sure why the St. Louis Post-Dispatch devoted a story to its own coverage of the opening of St. Louis Arena (1929-1999) 93 years ago, but there are some nice construction photos, as well as classic observations like “great Visitors will bring added business to local interest and will stimulate St. Louis hospitality and progressiveness anew Welcome to the new Arena civic asset.” I take back everything I said about newspaper copy editing being a dying art.

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Friday roundup: MSG throws campaign cash around, Commanders on pace for new stadium (someday), OKC to build two arenas?

August 19, 2022August 19, 2022 Neil deMause

It was a slow week for stadium and arena news — even money-grubbing plutocrats and their elected-official pals like to go on vacation in the summer — but there are still a few more items of note that didn’t make it to posts of their own:

Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan, who is currently waiting out state decisions on both the Penn Station redevelopment that could try to relocate the Garden and the arena’s never-ending $50 million–plus-a-year [CORRECTION: currently $43 million a year and rising] property tax break, has been sprinkling campaign donations around the state legislative races. Gothamist asked the ten state senate candidates Dolan’s PAC has funded what their thoughts were on the tax break, and four said they want to keep giving MSG tax money, one said they didn’t, and five didn’t deign to answer. Given that bills to repeal the exemption have never even gotten a committee hearing, that should probably be no surprise, but $400,000 in campaign ads never hurts to shore up the positions that elected officials are already taking.
Washington Commanders president Jason Wright said “I think we’ll still be able to hit our timeline” for a new stadium, without actually saying what that timeline is, that’s one way for no one to be able to prove you wrong. The Commanders’ currently lease has another five years to run, but as we’ve seen many times before, leases can almost always be extended, so basically Wright is saying here that “we still want a new stadium, hopefully once people forget what an ass my boss is.”
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said last fall that he wants a new arena to replace the team’s 20-year-old one, but then this week Stars CEO Brad Alberts said “it’s a great place to play for a long time” but “it needs a renovation.” Is this good cop/bad cop, pivoting to a more politically palatable plan, something else? Once, we had government beat writers who could (sometimes) explain what’s going on, but this was reported by a guy who mostly seems to know about railroads, so he may need a little time to get up to speed on arena financing.
Oklahoma City has approved construction of a new arena — no, no, not the new arena for the Thunder, that’s still under negotiation, this one is at the state fairgrounds for horse and livestock shows. The $102 million project is getting $77.3 million in public money, most of that from OKC’s MAPS sales-tax hike, which helped pay for the Thunder’s current arena and may help pay for a new one; as Robert Moses found, having your own revenue stream targeted for stuff you want to build is a great way to get to build stuff.
The owners of the New Jersey Jackals indy-league baseball team have announced they’re moving out of Yogi Berra Stadium in Montclair, which is weird since that stadium always seemed to be the only reason the Jackals existed in the first place. Though here comes a potential bid from Paterson for the Jackals to play at their rehabilitated Negro League ballpark, Hinchliffe Stadium, so maybe the Jackals owners are just trying to see if they can take advantage of the decimation of the minors to shop around the local stadium glut for a better deal.

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Could building a new $2B Madison Square Garden on old proposed Jets stadium site make any damn sense? A special report

August 9, 2022August 9, 2022 Neil deMause

New York City is in the midst of two mammoth publicly funded redevelopment projects, neither of which I’ve been covering here because they’re not sports-related, though they are sports-adjacent: The ongoing Hudson Yards project at the far western edge of midtown Manhattan got its start as a way to finance a New York Jets stadium that never happened, while a few blocks to the east, Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul have both pushed for approving new skyscrapers around Penn Station as a way to pay for redoing that train station, which is almost entirely underground after Madison Square Garden was built atop it in the 1960s. (Both would result in billions in red ink for taxpayers, according to independent projections.)

Now, though, there’s been renewed talk of possibly connecting the two megaprojects in a way that’s very sports-related: Tearing down the current home of the Knicks and Rangers and building a new one a few blocks west on the last big plot of undeveloped Hudson Yards land. (Or virtual land: Right now it’s air space over an open cut rail yard.) I spent the last couple of weeks looking into this possibility for my friends at Hell Gate, the scrappy home of top journalists who don’t even have the pretense to put on collared shirts for a New York Times photo shoot; the whole story is a lot, as I write there, but here are a few quick takeaways:

MSG sits on land owned by Amtrak, but it is also required to have a special “operating permit” from the city to allow an entertainment venue of more than 2,500 seats. After its first 50-year stint, the operating permit was renewed by the city council for another decade; time having flown, though, that means it now expires next July 31, and people who want to see the Garden relocated so that a new Penn Station (or a new old Penn Station) can be built in its place are so excited they’re making fake drone videos scored to soft jazz.
Crain’s New York reported that Related Cos., the developer in charge of Hudson Yards, approached MSG about moving there and was turned down. (Sources: “an MSG representative.”) Neither Related nor MSG responded to my multiple requests for comment on this; Hochul’s office said that while the governor’s Penn Station plans “do not preclude moving MSG in the future when its useful life has expired,” there are “other more pressing priorities.”
Tearing down a recently renovated arena and building a whole new one would cost a buttload of money: The state estimated $8 billion last year, though much of this was for land acquisition and building a new Penn Station; arena construction costs were a marginally more reasonable $2 billion.
Since nobody involved is dying to spend even $2 billion on a new arena, seeing a way forward for a new MSG requires a whole lot of wishcasting: If Related boss (and Miami Dolphins owner) Stephen Ross decides that an arena is a better use of space than more office buildings in the post-office era, and if the city agrees to tear up its Hudson Yards financing plan that relies on payments in lieu of property taxes from those as-yet-unbuilt office buildings and instead okay a lesser-taxed arena, and if Hochul decides that enough public space advocates railfans would be mobilized to vote for her reelection if she put a recreated Penn Station on the table, then maybe it’s possible for an MSG relocation to work. Someone would still need to come up with that $2 billion for the new arena, though, plus a couple billion to rebuild the 1910-vintage Penn Station, plus whatever would be needed to bail out Hudson Yards’ public revenue shortfall, so New York taxpayers’ sea of red ink could end up getting even deeper.
The city council says any plan to address MSG’s operating permit will require going through a months-long land use process, which, uh, somebody should probably get cracking on that since next July 31 is less than a year away, especially what with days getting shorter and all.

The takeaway: This is all still extremely speculative, so much so that the only rendering in existence of a possible Hudson Yards MSG looks like it was carved from a block of cheese. It does, however, have all the elements of an epic sports arena battle — dueling billionaires! convoluted finances! terrible bro-y roots rock! — so it’s worth keeping an eye on, which Hell Gate and I both plan to do.

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NYC will hand out $344m in tax breaks to the Nets, Knicks, Rangers, Mets, and Yanks in 2022 alone

May 19, 2022May 18, 2022 Neil deMause

The hits keep on coming from the new NYC news site Hell Gate, which I wrote for last week about how Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $1 billion Buffalo Bills subsidy was eased by the fact that New York state hates letting voters have input into actual budget decisions. On Monday, it was Doug Turetsky, former chief of staff of the city Independent Budget Office and a journalist before that, reporting on how much money New York City’s sports teams saved last year via not having to pay property taxes on their teams’ homes. How much, you ask? How much:

Take Barclays Center. The arena hasn’t paid property taxes since it opened in 2012. It’s a tax expenditure that will cost the city $85 million this year alone, according to the City’s Department of Finance Annual Tax Expenditure Report…

Madison Square Garden, the home of the Knicks and the Rangers, which are each estimated to be the most valuable teams in their respective leagues, benefits from politicians’ largesse too. MSG’s tax break is worth about $42 million this year, according to the Finance Department report…

The city will forgo about $111 million for Yankee Stadium this year and $106 million for the Mets’ Citi Field, according to the tax expenditure report.

That’s a total of $344 million that the Nets, Knicks, Rangers, Mets, and Yankees would normally be paying to the city in 2022, but aren’t because they don’t wanna. For the Knicks and Rangers, it’s because Mayor Ed Koch accidentally (he swore) gave them a special tax break in 1982 with no end date; for the Nets, Mets, and Yankees, it’s because they arranged to build on city- or state-owned land, then arranged to direct all payments in lieu of property taxes back into their own pockets to pay off their own construction costs, a gambit that helped them qualify for tax-exempt bonds that privately funded stadiums normally aren’t eligible for. (The IRS later closed that loophole, but not before the three NYC teams walked through it.)

None of this is unusual — as Turetsky points out, each and every year New York City forgoes about $7 billion in tax revenue via various and sundry tax breaks. Three years ago, I reported for Gothamist on a pair of 20-year-old tax breaks that the IBO had found to be utterly useless at creating jobs or reducing office vacancies, costing the city $400 million over that time. The two programs, the Commercial Revitalization Program and the Commercial Expansion Program, had been launched in 1995 and 2000 with exactly the sort of public oversight you would imagine:

“I have asked, ‘Show me one study, one survey that will prove or at least indicate that if we put this amount of money into commercial modernization and residential conversion that we’re actually going to create the jobs that are being claimed, that we’re going to get a good return for the public investment,'” [state senator Franz] Leichter said during the brief senate debate over the bill. “You know what? There isn’t one survey. They haven’t made one market study.”

True, no studies had been done, admitted bill sponsor Martin Connor. But, he asserted, none were needed.

“Senator Leichter says, ‘Where is the study?’ Well, we’ve all seen studies and reports and false promises in paper. The people in this business, in this real estate market, got together with their consultants and devised this because they believe it works, and they are the people that have to go out and sell. They’re the people who have to go out and sign those leases, sign up those tenants with these employees, and they believe it will work, and I say give them a chance.”

In 2019, I wrote that thanks to a newly attentive city council and that IBO report, “all signs are that [the CRP and CEP] will soon be gone.” Hey, how’s that going, anyway? Doug?

Together, [the Commercial Revitalization and Commercial Expansion Programs will] cost about $22 million in lost revenue this year…

So where’s Mayor [Eric] Adams on reviewing the dozens of tax expenditures made by the city? The executive budget he released last month reiterates the need for “staying focused on the efficient use of government resources.”…

The mayor’s press office did not respond to a request for comments on the administration’s plans for evaluating the array of city tax breaks.

Always remember: Only the little people pay taxes.

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Friday roundup: Tempe arena could depend on election, Bears land buy in limbo, Inter Miami stadium maybe finally not?

January 14, 2022 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! I have a fresh shipment of fridge magnets set to arrive this weekend, so if you’re a new or re-upped Field of Schemes subscriber waiting for yours, you shouldn’t have to wait long. And if you’re just waiting for the week’s roundup of stadium and arena news, you don’t have to wait at all, just to the end of this sentence, I swear we’ll get there soon, here we go:

Hopefuls for Tempe’s city council were asked about the proposed Arizona Coyotes arena with potentially more than $200 million in tax subsidies at a candidate forum last night, and their answers were: “good deal,” tax subsidies are bad, economic development is good but tax subsidies are maybe bad, economic development is good but traffic is bad, Tempe should “evaluate everything very carefully,” development is good but only if it doesn’t cost too much, and jobs are good but tax subsidies are bad. There’s no real way of reading tea leaves there to tell who would vote which way on an arena, but with three new councilmembers set to be seated in July, it certainly could tip the fragile balance that is currently running slightly anti-arena, maybe, if unnamed sources are to be believed.
Glendale, meanwhile, is about to embark on a $40 million renovation of the Coyotes’ old arena to optimize it for concerts, which, sure, at that relatively modest price tag it might actually pay for itself. Plus if there aren’t enough concerts, there’s always professional bull riding.
The Chicago Bears owners still haven’t bought the Arlington Racecourse site as they say they want to, and may not until 2023, and even then will only “decide whether it’s financially feasible to try to develop it further,” according to team president Ted Phillips. From the outside, the answer to that appears to be “nope, doesn’t look like it, but hey it’s your $2 billion,” but as it’s still possible the team may ask for public money, it’s worth keeping an eye on even if you’re not a Bears fan concerned about where you’ll have to be spending your Sundays starting in 2027 or something.
This actually happened last week, but Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and Inter Miami owner Jorge Mas say they’ve finally reached an agreement on a new stadium at Melreese golf course, with the city commission to vote on it maybe as soon as the end of the month. The Miami Herald is skeptical, as anyone should be given how long Mas and his co-owner David Beckham have been trying to work out a Miami stadium deal, but I guess stay tuned both for whether a vote takes place and for what exactly the details will be of what they’re voting on.
You people keep asking me about this article in the Buffalo Chronicle claiming that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to build a new Madison Square Garden in a public park where my son’s high school soccer team used to practice, and my response is that not only does it cite no named sources (just “an official with Empire State Development”), and my answer is that the Buffalo Chronicle seems to be not a real news outlet, but rather a site run by a PR consultant for “Native American financiers” who runs whatever stories he wants in order to “shape the public discourse.” Also both Hochul’s office and Empire State Development say the story is made up, so please let’s not waste more time and energy debating whether this non-plan would make any sense.
I know it’s not technically stadium news, but if you’d like to read about how legalized sports gambling isn’t likely to produce the tax windfall that states are hoping for, I wrote an article about this for my old Vice Sports editor Patrick Hruby at Global Sport Matters, go check it out.
And I also know I spend a lot of time picking on understaffed news sites for terrible reporting and worse copy editing, but you gotta admit it’s pretty hilarious that WYRK-FM in Buffalo has has a headline up for two days reading “Here’s What the New Bills Stadium Should Like.” I sincerely hope it’s strawberry ice cream.

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Friday roundup: St. Louis to get $790m Rams payoff from NFL or Kroenke or both, MSG deemed too pricey to move

November 26, 2021 Neil deMause

Not even sure how many people are out there reading this rather than still Thanksgivinging (Canadians, right?), but the news sure hasn’t taken a break for the short holiday week:

As noted in an update to Wednesday’s post about the billions of dollars Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the NFL could be on the hook for in the city and county of St. Louis’s lawsuit over the team leaving town, the league and city have reportedly come to a settlement agreement where the league will pay St. Louis $790 million to make the suit go away. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that “the league will determine internally how much will be shouldered by Kroenke and how much by the league and owners” (according to “sources with firsthand knowledge of the settlement”), which should be a fun owners’ meeting for ESPN to do one of its in-depth exposes on. St. Louis University law professor (and former minor-league pitcher suing MLB for violating minimum-wage laws for its minor leaguers) Garrett Broshuis called the settlement “a wake-up call to the NFL,” which, sure, maybe it’ll stop the league from threatening to move teams at the drop of a hat, or maybe at least give local officials some backbone in telling the league, “You just go ahead and try, we’ll see you in court.” Or maybe it’ll just get the league to rewrite its relocation guidelines so they’re not so litigable, or send its owners for training in how not to put in writing letters to fans about their pending move before the league approved it, or at least how not to call it an “Adios, MFs” letter. Either way, at least St. Louis will get $790 million that it can now spend on something more productive than an NFL stadium, which is an undeniable win, whether or not it’s ever repeated.
Talk of relocating Madison Square Garden to make way for a new Penn Station, which has been ongoing for more than eight years and was still in play as recently as this January, is apparently off the table now that it’s been determined it would cost $8.6 billion to do so and taxpayers would have to foot the bill “to avoid lingering MSG complications that would arise with no buyout.” This according to the minutes of a June 1 behind-closed-doors meeting of state development officials and local legislators that was uncovered by the government-watch group Reinvent Albany last week. Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair Janno Lieber went on to add this week in a state hearing that taking time to negotiate for the relocation of the Knicks and Rangers would be “a guarantee that Penn Station won’t be fixed for, I think, another generation,” so really, forget about all that. None of this should stop talk of finally repealing that full property tax break that was supposed to expire in 1992 but instead keeps rebating more than $50 million to the MSG owners every year, but new Gov. Kathy Hochul apparently isn’t interested in doing so; the New York Daily News notes that MSG’s political action committee donated $5,000 to Hochul’s reelection campaign fund in September, which is either a coincidence, a reward for services rendered, or the chintziest bribe ever.
Baltimore’s arena is set to get a $150 million renovation from arena managers Oak View Group — the city’s Board of Estimates voted to approve the deal on Wednesday, but I haven’t been able to track down the actual lease and operating agreement yet to see what if anything the city is giving up — which means we’re getting the usual batch of renderings what the
I have no idea what any of this has to do with a sports/concert arena or why the weird ceiling lighting appears to be reflected in the floor or who that bare-midriffed woman is whose image towers over the (squints) Top Sail Wine Bar, but presumably we’ll find out in due time.
Twenty-one out of 23 Ohio economists surveyed last week say that the economic benefits of sports stadiums don’t outweigh their subsidy costs, which is kind of a dumb way of asking it — you would think it would depend on how much subsidies are, which is actually something raised by several of the individual respondents — but we get the point.
The Newfoundland Growlers have been evicted from their arena in St. John’s during an investigation by the city into allegations of “disrespectful workplace conduct,” and their owner is now trying to turn that into a bidding war by surrounding communities to let him build the new arena that he’s been wanting for a while anyway. Maybe if my idea for a Sunday Night Kroenke series doesn’t pan out, someone could take a stab at this one? David Simon, this has your name all over it!

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