Category: Orlando Magic

Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
  • Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
  • New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
  • Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
  • The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
  • “The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
  • “[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
  • Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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Orlando mayor wants to spend $650m+ on Magic arena and Citrus Bowl, forgets to give a reason

access_time personNeil deMause

Unless I’ve been derelict in my duties as a category tagger, the last mention of the Orlando Magic around these parts came in 2017, when a Florida state rep proposed outlawing the construction or renovation of sports facilities on public land. (His bill went nowhere, obviously.) That six-year lull ends now:

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer outlined a plan Tuesday to use tourist-tax revenue to pay for an upgrade of Camping World Stadium, improvements to Amway Center and an addition to the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

Not counting interest, the bill would be over $700 million — including $400 million for the stadium and $256 million for Amway — and require the city to issue bonds that it would pay off with future revenue from the tourist development tax.

Amway Center is where the Magic play; Camping World Stadium is where the Citrus Bowl is played, and used to be known (wait for it) as the Citrus Bowl; the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts is a performing arts center, but would also be getting only pennies on the dollar here, so let’s never speak of it again. Buddy Dyer has been mayor of Orlando for long enough that he was there to shoot down attempts for the city to get a cut of stadium revenues in exchange for helping pay for the Orlando City S.C. soccer stadium that eventually opened in 2017. $700 million is a stack of twenties 5.5 miles high.

Some questions and answers:

Wut

That is not technically a question.

$700 million? Seriously?

You probably should direct that to Buddy Dyer, but yes, apparently he is serious.

How old are the buildings, anyway?

The Amway Center opened in 2010, replacing the Amway Arena, which opened in 1989. (Three guesses what company the DeVos family, which owns the Magic, gets its money from.) Camping World Stadium was built way back in 1936, but has been renovated multiple times since, most recently just two years ago.

Whose pocket would this money come out of?

The tourist taxes are collected by Orange County, not the city of Orlando, which may explain some of Dyer’s enthusiasm for the idea.

What if there are cost overruns?

Dyer said, “The city will take on the obligation of constructing [both projects] and any cost overruns for that, which we think is a substantial risk in any type of construction project right now as prices keep going up.”

He said that like it’s a good thing?

This seems to have been part of a reassurance to the county that if they take care of the first $700 million, Dyer will cover whatever’s left with city money. But, yes, he used the fact that construction price inflation is rampant as an argument for the city taking on cost overruns, that is a thing that happened.

What could Orlando and Orange County possibly get in return that would be worth more than $700 million?

“We believe these are community buildings that benefit the entire region,” said Dyer, which doesn’t answer at all how renovating them would make them benefit the region by an additional $700 million. The Magic’s lease goes until 2035, and there’s been no talk of an extension, so it’s not clear if Orlando-area taxpayers would get anything from them in return for their money. (The Citrus Bowl, needless to say, isn’t threatening to move out of the Citrus Bowl.)

Am I, an imaginary FAQ interrogator, the only one actually asking that question?

Some county commissioners asked Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings earlier in the month if the DeVoses would extend their lease in exchange for arena renovations; it’s not clear if they got an answer.

What else could the money be used for?

Theoretically, anything. In practice, the tourist tax is earmarked for promoting tourism, which lhas argely meant giving money to tourist attractions. Earlier this month the county commission voted to spend $560 million on expanding the county’s convention center, something they also failed to explain how it would pay off in increased tourist activity.

What happens now?

We all laugh and point! As to whether the Orange County commission meeting does the same, we’ll have to wait until its next meeting, which appears to be a week from Tuesday — can’t hardly wait!

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Orlando officials hate bill to halt land giveaways to sports teams, for all the wrong reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

From the Department of Maybe Well-Meaning Ideas That Probably Should’ve Been Thought Through a Little More, we have Florida House bill HB 13, which, as the Orlando Sentinel notes, would “ban teams from building or renovating stadiums on publicly owned land and also bar governments from leasing existing facilities to teams below ‘fair market value.'” The bill’s sponsor, Broward/Miami-Dade state rep Manny Diaz Jr., says he introduced it because of anger over the Miami Marlins stadium deal, and that it “aims to do is to try to curtail abuses that have gone on, where cities … are being held hostage.”

Orlando city officials are griping that the Diaz bill would make it harder for his city to lure or retain sports teams by gifting them with generous lease terms to hide from the public how big the subsidies are offering competitive deals, and that this is an unforgivable intrusion by the state on cities’ right to throw money away for no good economic reason determine their own development policies. But to note that the objections to the bill are dumb does not preclude acknowledging that the bill itself is pretty dumb, too.

As I told the Sentinel (it didn’t make the cut, though other of my quotes did), the “no leasing land below market value” bit is reasonable enough, though it’s going to be tough to enforce: If you determine “market value” by what other sports teams are paying in rent, you get into the problem that most franchises have sweetheart lease deals. And in any event, there’s nothing that I can tell in the bill that would stop a city from charging “market rent” and then handing the money back under the table through “operating subsidies” or somesuch.

The bigger problem is with the first half of the bill, which sets out to solve a problem that doesn’t exist: the unwarranted use of public land for sports facilities. Unless you’re the hardest of hard-core libertarians, there’s nothing wrong per se with government land being used for sports stadiums any more with it being used for housing developments or libraries or whatever — the public just should get some benefit from the deal, whether it’s lease payments or a cut of stadium revenues or discounted tickets or something. If “can’t renovate buildings on public land” means that the Magic, say, are restricted from paying for improvements to their arena on government property and end up using that as an excuse to demand public funds or tax breaks (which aren’t addressed at all in this bill) to build a new arena on private land, that’s not exactly a step in the right direction.

A well-written bill would have provided an ironclad prohibition on deals that directly or indirectly gift public land to teams, and maybe ruled that sports facilities run for private profits should be subject to property tax even if they’re owned by the public or on public land, to get around that subsidy loophole as well. I don’t know enough about Diaz to know whether he wrote his bill this way because of his own ideological beliefs (there are a surprising number of conservatives who consider government cash a subsidy but not government tax breaks, on the Casino Night Principle) or just because he has sloppy bill-drafters in his office. Or maybe he’s just tired of being confused with the other Manny Diaz, who was mayor of Miami when the Marlins deal was approved. Either way, before this sails through the state legislature on “sounds good enough to me!” grounds, let’s hope somebody goes in there with a red pen and does some judicious editing.

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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.

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Florida house speaker: No new sales tax “checks” for stadiums this year

access_time personNeil deMause

Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford, who said earlier this week that he’d be introducing a bill to require sports teams to show they actually have a reason to ask for sales-tax kickbacks, upped the ante slightly yesterday by declaring that he doesn’t intend on approving any sports subsidies this year at all:

“Our focus right now is on a process that treats everyone equitably and not writing any checks,” Weatherford said during an interview with The News Service of Florida in his Capitol office.

Currently, the state of Florida pays $2 million a year to the Miami Dolphins, Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay Rays, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Miami Heat, and Orlando Magic in exchange for the teams doing the state the favor of existing. (The Miami Marlins got left off this list after getting the $2 million a year break for their previous stadium, but did get everything else they wanted, so no complaining.) Right now the Orlando City Soccer Club, David Beckham’s as-yet-unnamed Miami MLS expansion team, and the Daytona International Speedway are all lining up to ask for sales-tax rebates as well, but it sounds like they’re going to have to wait — until next year, anyway, when Weatherford will, at the ripe old age of 35, be term-limited out of office. If Weatherford has his way, by then there will be new laws requiring team owners to “go through the process with the Department of Economic Opportunity just like everybody else does that wants to create jobs in Florida” to prove that their projects will provide a return on the state’s investment, though it remains to be seen whether he has a chance in hell of getting it through the state senate, which has historically been much more lenient about this kind of thing.
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Orlando paying restaurants to open near Magic arena

access_time personNeil deMause

The Amway Center, home of the Orlando Magic and property of the city of Orlando (thanks to $480 million in public spending), is having some troubles with the slew of restaurants that were supposed in and around it. There’s the restaurant that defaulted on its lease and left the city to spend $738,000 to finish building out the space, the beer lounge (beer lounge?) across the street that has racked up more than $350,000 in grants and rent forgiveness, and in general a whole lot of good-money-after-bad activity that maybe should make Miami grateful that it can’t even find any restaurants to rent space near its new stadium.

But really, there’s one sentence that stands out in the Orlando Sentinel investigation of this mess, and that is:

Oopsy Scoopsy Yogurt Shop closed last year after being awarded a city grant, its owners charged with trying to defraud the city.

If all that survives of our current civilization is that single sentence, future historians will have a great head start on defining what the early 21st century was all about.

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Old Orlando arena dies at age 23 of being insufficiently subsidized

access_time personNeil deMause

The Orlando Magic‘s old Amway Arena was demolished yesterday, if “old” is the right word for it: The arena was just 23 years old, and had been targeted for replacement by its NBA tenants pretty much since it opened.

The Magic’s owner (Amway kingpin Rich DeVos) complained from the start that the building was economically obsolete, because it lacked the kind of luxury and club seats that other, newer arenas built in the 1990s had. To put that in context, consider these quotes from the old arena’s Wikipedia page:

Major renovation was beginning to seem unfeasible in 1997 when the task-force determined that the cost of implementing everything that the team wanted would reach up to $75 million. The revenues brought in by the changes likely would not be enough to cover mortgage payments on money that would have to be borrowed to pay for the renovation…

On September 29, 2006, the City of Orlando and Orange County finally came to an agreement on a $1.1-billion improvement package that included $480 million for a new arena. The Magic would provide $114 million in cash and up-front lease payments and guarantee $100 million in bonds toward the arena. The venue plan received final approval on July 26, 2007, and the arena was completed in time for the 2010–11 NBA season.

In other words, the old arena wasn’t making enough money for DeVos’ tastes, and spending $75 million on renovations would only make profits go down. But an entirely new arena that cost six times that amount was just what the doctor ordered, so long as taxpayers paid most of the tab and the Magic kept all the revenues.

If you want the template for stadium and arena development over the last 20 years, there it is in a nutshell.

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Florida homeless-shelter bill wouldn’t actually recoup stadium subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

Apparently there’s a small problem with that bill to require Florida stadiums that received public funds to double as homeless shelters. As Stephen Nohlgren of the Tampa Bay Times reports, the original requirement was introduced in 1988 to win support for allowing sales-tax money to be kicked back to help pay for construction of the stadium that went on to become Tropicana Field, current home of the Rays — a subsidy scheme that’s since been used by numerous other sports teams. The bill, proposed by state senator Michael Bennett, would require that stadiums immediately set up shelters on off days, or else refund all the cash they’ve received.

And the problem? Take it away, Nohlgren:

But in fact, only one stadium listed by legislative analysts — the Miami Dolphins’ Sun Life Stadium — is owned by a team that received the sales tax exemption. The other 17 are owned by cities, counties or public sports authorities. Refunds would be borne by taxpayers.

The bill doesn’t seem to have much chance of passage in its current form, regardless, though it’s always possible it will lead to some debate on legislation that would actually affect the sports teams that Bennett is upset about subsidizing. I wouldn’t hold your breath, though.

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Florida bill would enforce law to use public stadiums as shelters

access_time personNeil deMause

A pair of Florida state legislators have unearthed an old law requiring that state-funded sports facilities be used as homeless shelters on days when there’s no event on, and is out to enforce it. “These organizations have failed to follow the law for over 20 years,” declared state rep Frank Artiles, co-sponsor of legislation that would require teams that have received public cash to return it if they don’t obey the law. “This is the simply the State of Florida holding them accountable.”

While it’s hard to picture the Miami Marlins, say, setting up cots around the Red Grooms home run sculpture, the bill is certainly getting media attention, and now has attracted an amendment to require publicly funded stadiums to ban TV blackouts of games. Which sounds like it has even less chance of being enforceable, but it’s certainly interesting, to say the least, to see what options people come up with for demanding conditions in exchange for public funding. Of course, it would be easier if somebody had thought to demand them before actually opening the public’s checkbook…

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Orlando Magic gyms bleeding red ink, forcing service cuts

access_time personNeil deMause

When team owners are looking for hundreds of millions of dollars in stadium or arena funds, they’ll often offer to throw a few million dollars at some community improvement to help grease the skids. So it was with the Orlando Magic, which build five community gyms as part of its deal to get its new $480 million arena in 2007.

Only one problem, the Orlando Sentinel has discovered:

However, these new gyms are also going to cost taxpayers twice as much to run as the county originally estimated, a review of budget records shows. Instead of breaking even, the five facilities are expected to generate a $1.25 million annual deficit to operate, once user fees are balanced against staffing and other costs.

After-school and summer programs at other facilities would continue to be capped or shrink to offset most of the steeper operating costs at the Magic gyms.

“The community was told these were going to be a bonus and not take away anything,” Commissioner Ted Edwards said. “The residents didn’t get what they were promised.”

Apparently one county commissioner, Tiffany Moore Russell, warned about this possibility back when the deal was first being discussed, but she was outvoted. She was not immediately available to the Sentinel, it seems, for “I told you sos.”

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