Category: NBA

Friday roundup: Breaking down taxpayer costs of the proposed Indiana Bears deal, plus other stadium news

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana legislature’s amended bill for a Chicago Bears stadium project is finally up, and we can start to get a slightly better sense of what it would entail in terms of public costs. Tax expenditures would include: a city of Hammond admissions tax, Lake County and Porter County food and beverage tax surcharges, a Hammond food and beverage tax surcharge, a Lake County hotel tax surcharge, what looks like local income and sales taxes from a stadium district, and state sales taxes from a stadium district. The stadium authority would also own the stadium and lease it to the Bears (terms very much TBD), so it would presumably be exempt from property taxes.

That is a ton of moving parts, needless to say. There being no fiscal analysis attached to the bill to project how much each of these taxes will raise, it’s impossible to determine what the total public price tag would be, though something upwards of $1 billion seems likely given all the revenue streams involved. (WGN calls it $1 billion exactly, not sure where that number comes from, though Indiana house speaker Todd Huston did throw that number around as an estimate yesterday.)

The bill also says that “the stadium board is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the capital improvement upon completion of construction,” which sounds bad, and then two paragraphs later that “the authority has no responsibility to fund the ongoing maintenance and operations of the capital improvement,” which sounds good but also contradictory. (It’s possible this is just dividing up responsibilities between two state agencies, I need to keep going through the bill language to be sure; if so, it’s bad for taxpayers because it could end up a grift that keeps on giving.) Also “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement,” which sounds very good for Indiana but also not likely something the Bears ownership would agree to if it really meant what it sounds like it does. So lots of questions still up in the air, we get another public hearing on this before the full Indiana house and senate votes next week, right? Right? Anyone?

Meanwhile, in other news this week:

  • The proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium development at Hillsborough College’s Dale Mabry Campus would include relocating a middle school and some county offices to … somewhere, while the college’s buildings would be rebuilt in a compressed corner of the campus … somehow. The new Tampa Bay Times reporters on this story, one of whom was just promoted from intern and the other just graduated from college last summer, don’t appear to have actually asked anyone with the Rays or with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office about how this is all expected to work, sure do miss Colleen Wright’s reporting on the Rays stadium saga.
  • The Cleveland Guardians and Cavaliers would like some of that sweet state unclaimed funds money that the Browns are using for their new stadium, please, to use for upgrades to their current homes. The state can get right on that just as soon as that little matter of the restraining order against the state using the funds at all is cleared up.
  • The estimated $750 million cost of renovations to the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium — which only cost $354 million to build in the first place in 1998, about $700 million in today’s dollars — is now expected to be “much higher,” according to team CEO Derrick Hall. Hall didn’t say exactly how much higher, or whether it will all fall on the state to increase its planned $500 million cut of the costs, or when the D-backs will get around to actually signing a new lease in exchange for the renovations.
  • Athletics team execs say $300 million has now been spent on construction of John Fisher’s Las Vegas stadium and $989 million contracted for, out of a total price tag of still figuring that out. This is either the biggest bluff in sports history or the biggest dog-catching-the-car-and-having-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-it, honestly looking forward to the inevitable cataclysmic denouement either way.
  • The waiting to see if the state of Connecticut will provide $127 million to build and MLS Next Pro soccer stadium in Bridgeport is over, and the answer is: Nope, go kick rocks. State Economic Development Commissioner Daniel O’Keefe cited the need to reduce state spending and what the Connecticut Post termed the “mercurial nature of the sports industry,” noting that the Connecticut Sun may be about to move to Houston and the Bridgeport Islanders may be about to move to Hamilton, fool me three times, shame on me. Developers plan to instead use the planned stadium site for a project involving youth sports indoor and outdoor fields, which apparently don’t require hundreds of millions of dollars of state subsidies like pro sports do.
  • The video of my interview yesterday on whether Los Angeles should try to renegotiate its 2028 Olympics hosting deal is now up at Alissa Walker’s Torched site, go check it out if you like. Chris Tyler of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, which commissioned me to do my Olympics report, joined as well, and the three of us spent a solid hour discussing what went wrong and options for trying to fix it — suffice to say that if former L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti’s ears are burning today, this is why.
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Oregon bill offers Blazers owner all income taxes from in and around arena in exchange for not threatening to move yet

access_time personNeil deMause

The Portland Trail Blazers are in the middle of being sold to Carolina Hurricanes owner/subprime auto loan baron/“glass chewer” Tom Dundon, and apparently the threat of the team’s expiring lease in 2030 and Dundon’s reputation for playing hardball has Oregon elected officials moving toward spending a ton of money on upgrading Portland’s arena to avoid the team from moving to (Oregonian staffers throw darts at giant wall map of the U.S.) Nashville or Kansas City. What would Oregon taxpayers give up, and what would they get in return? As usual, it’s complicated:

  • According to a bill introduced on Monday by state Senate President Rob Wagner, the state would take all income taxes collected in and around the Blazers arena for the next 30 years and make them available for Dundon to use on arena upgrades. That would include not just taxes on Blazers players and staff, as team execs were previously reported to be seeking, but income taxes paid by any entertainers who perform at the arena, and even by the construction workers performing the upgrades.
  • This income tax money would be used to pay off $360 million in state bonds, as part of an overall $600 million public funding package. The rest would come via $75 million from a city climate fund meant to be used on projects that reduce carbon emissions and help residents at risk of climate change impact, $75 million from county car rental taxes, and $50 million from city business taxes and $40 million from county business taxes on the sale of the team to Dundon. All of these look to be present value, meaning the nominal amount of taxes redirected over time would be considerably more, if you prefer to count that way (I do not); the bill itself helpfully informs us that it “may have fiscal impact, but no statement yet issued” and “may have revenue impact, but no statement yet issued.”
  • In exchange, Dundon would agree to keep the Blazers in town for “a specified term” of time, which isn’t vague at all. If the Blazers’ eventual lease extension ends up concluding anytime before 2044, it could break the Charlotte Panthers record for the most expensive per-year lease extension in sports history.

That’s significant chunk of change for an arena that Portland taxpayers already helped then-Blazers owner Paul Allen build in 1995 and then took off the hands of Allen’s heirs in 2024, saving them about $1.2 million a year in property taxes. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek is on board, though, calling the arena subsidy “an opportunity for the city and the state and the county to put their best foot forward and say, ‘Look, we want to be a partner with the new owner to keep the team'” and meeting with NBA commissioner Adam Silver last month to argue for the deal. Then there’s Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, who took in a Blazers game on Saturday and wandered the arena telling anyone who would listen that he wants to “help anybody who wants to keep us in town” and calling the privately owned NBA team valued at $4.25 billion “infrastructure” and “a huge economic development opportunity” and “a big economic force in the state” when he wasn’t too busy exchanging hugs with former Blazers player Buck Williams.

The biggest stumbling block right now appears to be Multnomah County, where county leaders have expressed a desire to use their $40 million business-tax check from the Blazers sale to spend on actual resident services, or at the very least to backfill the car rental tax money the county would be giving up. That’s relatively small potatoes, though — the biggest piece, the $360 million in income tax money, is expected to be voted on by the Oregon legislature by the time it wraps up its session on March 8.

That leaves less than four weeks for public discussion, which would be plenty of time to go over the dubious theory that businesses should keep the income taxes paid by their employees because if they skipped town all that tax money would go away, which 1) it almost certainly wouldn’t and 2) pretty much defeats the whole economic purpose of luring and retaining businesses regardless. Tune in Monday at 8 am PT to watch the state senate rules committee discuss the income tax diversion bill, sorry, looks like no public testimony at this one as it’s a committee “work session,” but surely there’ll be time for the public to be heard, at least minutes before the legislature takes its ultimate vote.

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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends host the Olympics, and other cautionary tales

access_time personNeil deMause

Last week I teased a big project of mine that would drop this week, and it went live yesterday morning: a 57-page report, commissioned by Los Angeles economic justice advocacy group Strategic Action for a Just Economy, on whether L.A. can or should be trying to extricate itself from its hosting obligations for the 2028 Summer Olympics — something some local critics have suggested, especially in the wake of the city’s wildfire crisis and budget crisis and  immigration enforcement occupying force crisis. You can probably get a pretty good sense of the report’s findings from its title, “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t,” but if you want slightly more details, here’s the nut graf:

While there are numerous unknowns—the history of the Olympics shows that budget questions are never resolved until it’s far too late, a path that L.A. has headed down with its agreements for the 2028 Games as well—the available documentation and history of international event hosting shows: Yes, if Los Angeles officials, or voters, decided to withdraw from hosting the Olympics, they could do so. This would come at the risk of potentially billions of dollars in damages from a breach-of-contract lawsuit and losses from expenses already undertaken. However, continuing as host also comes with a potential risk of losses that, if history is any guide, could similarly amount to billions of dollars.

The report also contains a wealth of information about Olympic financial history, including other locales’ attempts to back out of hosting major international sporting events for fiscal reasons (the Denver 1976 Winter Olympics that never happened, plus the 2026 Commonwealth Games that the Australian state of Victoria bailed on in 2023 amid concerns about snowballing costs), as well as mention of my new favorite Olympic factoid: that time they held a Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan and nobody knows how much it cost because the local organizing committee literally set fire to its financial records. It’s all here, dig in if you’re in the mood for a long, enraging read — or if not, you can instead read the excellent summaries in Torched (which includes a quote from me on this week’s revelations about L.A. Olympics chief Casey Wasserman’s history with Jeffrey Epstein) and LAist.

And now that that’s off my plate, I have plenty of time for stadium and arena bullet points, and good thing, too, because this week brought craploads of them:

  • The Wyandotte County Commission followed suit with its neighbors in the city of Olathe and voted 7-3 to approve devoting local sales and hotel tax revenue to pay off part of the state’s $2.775 billion in bonds for a new Kansas City Chiefs stadium and surrounding development. The county, to be clear, gets absolutely nothing out of kicking in its own funding (total price tag still TBD), given that the state has indicated it will go ahead with the stadium deal regardless. Kansas City, Kansas mayor and county commission chair Christal Wilson, who didn’t vote because no ties needed to be broken, wrote on Facebook that she thinks kicking in county money is warranted because it gets the county “a seat at the table” — okay, though it’s questionable whether getting to sit at the table is worth having to split the check.
  • Indiana state Rep. Earl Harris Jr. on his bill to create a sports authority to build a Chicago Bears stadium in northwest Indiana with money from (feigns coughing fit until you go away): “Indiana does sports things like this very well. When you look at the Pacers, the Colts, the Speedway, we’re very good at figuring out a good financial plan that does not hurt the taxpayer.” Um, about that…
  • Will the Portland Trail Blazers move if the city and county decline to spend $600 million on upgrades to their arena? It’s an “urgent race against time” and “the clock continues to tick,” writes The Oregonian, citing a deadline of … huh, seems like they didn’t mention any deadline, must have run out of room. (Though there was room for “Are you ready for the Nashville or Kansas City Trail Blazers?” to cite two cities that are not particularly shopping around for NBA teams.)
  • Tampa sports radio host JP Peterson insists that spending upwards of $2 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium is warranted because it “will produce millions in tax revenue and bring major events, Super Bowls, National Championship games, World Baseball Classic, MLB All-Star games” — [citation needed], my man. Also, I can save you some time: Even if a new baseball stadium does bring in millions in tax revenue, from hosting, uh, football games, when it costs hundreds of millions a year in tax expenditures, maybe that’s … not good?
  • Speaking of the Rays, fresh Rays vaportecture! I’m sticking with my comment from yesterday: Glad to see the Rays acknowledge that even after a future stadium is built, fans still won’t buy jerseys with player names because they know they’ll be sold off as soon as they reach arbitration.
  • And if you want still more Rays commentary from me, I spoke with both WMNF radio and Tampa Bay 28 TV about the ongoing dispute this week; the former is much longer, the latter offers a view of what I have on my living room walls, pick your poison.
  • Just in time for the Super Bowl (what time does it start again?), here’s a Top 40 list of things the NFL demands from Super Bowl host cities. It’s impossible to pick just one favorite, but equally impossible to beat “three championship-level 18-hole golf courses and two top-quality bowling alleys, free of charge.”
  • Plans to build an Indy Eleven a soccer stadium for a new MLS team on Indianapolis’s former heliport are on hold because something about not rewarding a city that “continues to thumb its nose” at ICE; the FAA will soon be weighing in on the matter.
  • Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has met with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, though not in the sense of actually meeting meeting like in person, and “offered to be helpful in bringing back the Sonics” as an NBA expansion team. Seattle already has a practically brand new arena, though by the time the NBA is ready to expand it could be pushing 10 years old, is that too soon to ask for upgrades?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says Spurs owner Michael Dell donating $6 billion to Donald Trump’s “Trump accounts” savings plan “really pissed me off” because “if you can give $6 billion for these accounts, you could have paid for your own arena.” But then Dell wouldn’t have those billions he saved by getting taxpayers to build his arena! Sounds like somebody doesn’t understand what the whole point of being a billionaire is. (Hint: It’s getting billions of dollars, not spending it.)
  • And finally on the Rays front, Frank Nockels of Land O’ Lakes, Florida asks: “If we pay for half of the Rays’ new stadium, can we get free tickets?” Ian Betteridge has some bad news, Frank.
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Friday roundup: Lightning win $250m in tax money for 6-year lease extension, Missouri holds secret talks on Royals stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

We have a bunch of new followers here thanks largely to all the tumult over the Kansas City Chiefs stadium deal, so it’s worth another mention that Field of Schemes continues to exist after almost 28 years thanks to the kindness of its readers. If you have any money left after donating to help the families of government-kidnapped five-year-olds [UPDATE: Or all the other less adorable Minnesotans who can use help], you can chip in to support this site here — you’ll even get some amusing refrigerator magnets in appreciation, if we can still even be amused in 2026.

And speaking of trying to wring amusement from horror, here is your weekly dose of stadium and arena bullet points:

  • Hillsborough County approved $250 million in arena renovations for the Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for a six-year lease extension, which at $41.7 million per year would be one of the priciest per-year lease extensions in sports history.  Lightning owner Jeffrey Vinik could still request state sales tax money on top of this as well — if he does in exchange for no more years of lease extension, that would be a per-year cost of infinity, which would be an unbreakable record.
  • Officials from Kansas City, Missouri and Jackson County traveled to meet with Gov. Mike Kehoe on Wednesday about the Royals stadium situation, and no you can’t know what they talked about, that’s for Royals owner John Sherman to find out and you not to find out until it’s all been hashed out. Both Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Interim Jackson County Executive Phil LeVota said they hope to strike a stadium deal with Sherman by the end of spring training; while we’re hoping things, let’s hope that this threesome focuses on getting a good deal, and not just a deal that is resolved quickly.
  • An Indiana senate committee cast a vote on Wednesday that “establishes the necessary funding to pay for the construction of a new Chicago Bears stadium,” according to WGN, but actually just creates a stadium authority, as we discussed last week. Also the full Indiana state senate still has to vote on it, and then the state house has to, before even this can become law, but don’t let that stop reporters from calling this a “bidding war.”
  • Dallas Mavericks execs have narrowed their arena site search to two locations, one an undisclosed one downtown and one at an abandoned mall site that, uh, is already getting redeveloped? Only having two prospective sites, both in the same city, wouldn’t bode super well for Mavs owners Patrick and Sivan Dumont’s leverage in demanding taxpayer money to build the thing, but they still have land in Irving they could consider using as a threat, as one does.
  • The Buffalo Sabres owners have hired a lobbyist to seek state funding of a $400 million renovation of their arena, good thing New York state has plenty of money for that.
  • The Sphere people want to build another Sphere, this time smaller and in the D.C. suburbs, using a tax increment financing district to siphon off property taxes to pay to build it. That’s okay, though, because Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore say a Sphere would generate $1 billion in economic impact [citation needed], so everything should be fine [citation needed].
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Friday roundup: Trail Blazers, Lightning owners join Devils in asking states to fund their arena upgrades because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

The way this week has gone, you can be forgiven if you just want to avoid the news entirely. If you’ve come here to be cheered up by some less depressing news … that’s never a good idea, but there are maybe some amusing bits, and nobody has gotten killed (so far), so I guess those are pluses!

Feel free to try to find the glass half full in these items:

  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners are about to ask that Oregon hand over all state income taxes paid by home and road players and staff to help fund a $600 million renovation of their 30-year-old arena. (The cost is estimated at $20 million a year, which if salaries rise enough could easily end up amounting to $600 million worth of future taxes.) The Oregonian notes: “Team employees, notably players who earn millions, have been paying into the state’s general fund for decades, dating back to the franchise’s founding in 1970. Will lawmakers have the stomach to divert those funds from essential services to rebuild an arena that is home to a team that will soon be owned by a Texas billionaire?” Then it says that “the income tax dollars the general fund would lose in this proposal will vanish anyway if the Blazers relocate,” which, no they wouldn’t, not if Portlanders spent their basketball ticket dollars elsewhere locally, which the numbers show is what would mostly happen. Securing approval of the tax money before Tom Dundon (the aforementioned billionaire) officially steps in as owner, one source told the Oregonian, “guarantees the Blazers’ future,” though they didn’t say what kind of lease extension Dundon would agree to in exchange, so it’s always possible it would only guarantee the Blazers’ future until it’s time to ask for more tax money again.
  • Hillsborough County is discussing paying for $250 million in renovations to the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s arena in exchange for a six-year lease extension until 2043, which has some Tampa Sports Authority officials worried the Buccaneers and Rays owners may make similar demands if the arena project is approved. Also that would be $41.7 million per year of lease extension, which would be close to the record for most expensive ever.
  • New Jersey’s proposed $300 million Devils arena subsidy only has a few days left of the legislative session for approval, and “some lawmakers,” per New Jersey Digest, have “raised concerns” that rushing a major tax break through in a lame-deck session with a lame-duck governor might not be the best of ideas. Not that state legislatures don’t do it all the time, but not the best of ideas does check out if you’re a fan of transparency and due diligence and all the other democracy things that are out of fashion right now.
  • Kansas officials want to make clear that the state could still build a Kansas City Royals stadium, just not with STAR bonds since the deadline for those expired at the end of 2025, so they’re just for the Chiefs and for Barbie/Hot Wheels theme parks. And the state doesn’t really have many other good revenue sources, says house speaker Dan Hawkins: “It would be tough to use those and develop enough money to really support a stadium, and so, I just can’t see that happening.”
  • The Ohio judge who issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against the use of unclaimed private funds to pay $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium has extended it indefinitely while he hears arguments on whether to issue a permanent injunction.
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Friday roundup: The year that stadium subsidies went completely nuts

access_time personNeil deMause

One year ago today, this site ran an item headlined “Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation,” in response to the Center for Economic Accountability declaring Charlotte the winner of that dubious distinction. The conclusion: The Panthers deal was bad, but there were plenty of other contenders, like St. Petersburg’s attempt (eventually rejected) to give over $1 billion to the owners of the Tampa Bay Rays, the Washington Capitals and Wizards owner landing $515 million from D.C., plus non-sports megadeals for everything from an Eli Lilly drug plant in Indiana to expansion of film and TV production tax credits.

All that seems like a million years ago. The year 2025 will be remembered for lots of things, but one is that it was the year where stadium subsidies blew way past the billion-dollar mark, with Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris landing a stadium-plus deal worth at least $6.6 billion in cash, land, and tax breaks, then Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt following that up with a preliminary agreement for around $4 billion in goodies for a stadium development in Kansas. Otherwise notable events of the past year like the state of Ohio gifting Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million (or more) to move from one part of the state to another and even San Antonio providing $1.3 billion for a new San Antonio Spurs arena project — easily an NBA record — feel like chump change by comparison.

And that’s the bigger concern here: While in a sane world, elected officials would sit down and figure out how much the presence of a sports team is worth compared to having money for public services, or at least how much they need to offer to outbid other prospective host cities, if any, in this timeline it’s more about what the next guy down the road has established as the going rate. It’s impossible to say, for example, how the Chicago Bears owners’ perpetual game of footsie with both Chicago and every suburb within driving distance will turn out, or if Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman will replicate the Chiefs’ tax windfall — but when owners can point to previous deals and argue that giving 99 years of free rent or all future sales tax increases from a 300-square-mile area is just the cost of doing business, it makes it easier for state, county, and city officials to say “sure, I guess, do we at least get a luxury box?”

And on that note, let’s wrap up the final news from 2025, and the early returns from 2026:

  • Kansas state senate president Ty Masterson said the “worst case scenario” for a Chiefs stadium is “nobody buys the bonds, the bonds don’t get sold, the project doesn’t happen,” but it seems far more likely that if nobody is interested in buying the bonds, the state would make its sales tax increment district even bigger than 300 square miles, which seems like it would be considerably worse. Or the state could have to sell bonds at an interest rate of as high as 8.5% to lure bond buyers, which would definitely be worse. Let only your imagination be your limit, Ty!
  • Count newly elected Kansas City, Kansas mayor Christal Watson, who is also CEO of Wyandotte County (counties got CEOs?), among those eager to look the Chiefs stadium deal in the mouth: “If the numbers aren’t there for us to maintain the services that are needed for the community, then we’ve got to reevaluate and renegotiate,” said Watson this week. It ain’t over until it’s over!
  • Meanwhile, Kansas speaker of the house Dan Hawkins says with the clock turning over to 2026, “time’s up” for the Royals to use STAR bonds that were approved last year. Though technically the legislature can still change its mind and approve new bonds until the end of June — if it can find some bits of eastern Kansas that aren’t already part of the Chiefs stadium tax district — this seems like a good opportunity for Missouri officials to recognize that they’re the only bidder for the Royals and drive a hard bargain, though vowing to do an end run around voters doesn’t seem like a great start.
  • The Minnesota Timberwolves owners are still dreaming of a new arena that will feature augmented reality, and Wild owner Craig Leipold wants to make sure he’s in line for arena upgrades too, because “in order to survive in the NHL” you “need to be in a really good building,” and his building is a whole 25 years old and the team is only turning $68 million a year in profits, this is clearly St. Paul’s problem to fix.
  • San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones says she’s not done trying to renegotiate that Spurs deal, on the grounds that “non-binding means non-binding.” She likely needs a majority of the city council to back her up there — San Antonio has a weak-mayor form of government — but props to her for knowing how to read a dictionary.
  • The New England Revolution owners reached an agreement this week to pay Boston $48 million over 15 years to compensate for traffic and transit problems caused by a planned new stadium in Everett, as well as $90 million over 20 years in parks and transit upgrades in Everett. With team owners the Kraft family covering the $500 million stadium construction cost, I’m tempted to say this is actually a pretty fair deal and a sign that at least some local politicians can still drive a hard bargain, though it’s equally like that this is mostly a sign that nobody in the U.S. cares as much about MLS as about the other football.
  • Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is set to be torn down and replaced next year, which will come as a sad note to anyone who read Foul Ball, Jim Bouton’s book on how he helped temporarily save the old ballpark 20 years ago.
  • There’s another interview with me up about the Chiefs deal, which you can listen to here — there doesn’t appear to be a way to link to particular timestamps in a YouTube short, but enjoy the whole thing anyway, it may be the last thing on the platform that’s not AI-generated!
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Cleveland still has no money for Cavs, Guardians upgrades, is resorting to stalling

access_time personNeil deMause

The controversy continues over the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County having to cover more than $400 million in upcoming repair costs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena despite having no money to do it with. And according to Cleveland.com, there’s nothing the local governments can do about it:

Under its lease agreements with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Cleveland Guardians, Gateway Economic Development Corporation of Greater Cleveland is responsible for paying for capital repairs over $500,000 at Rocket Arena and all repairs — big or small — at Progressive Field.

Worse yet, it’s not just genuine repairs that taxpayers are on the hook for; the Guardians leases also contains one of those dreaded state-of-the-art clauses that requires publicly funded upgrades if the Cleveland stadium has fallen behind three-quarters of other MLB ballparks, “as well as any changes required by television networks, the league, insurers or government regulations.” Most recently, this required the city and county to spend $1.3 million to install padded seats behind home place in 2023, on the grounds that all the other kids had them.

Gateway officials have responded by trying to stall on approving the payments, with one board member telling a Guardians official, “We are required to fund it. We are not required to fund it on the schedule that you’re asking.” But ultimately, according to the lease extensions approved by lawmakers in 2004 and extended in 2021, the leases require the city and county to cover these costs in exchange for the Cavs and Guardians staying put through 2034 and 2036, respectively.

The city and county do have a doomsday option, though. As I wrote last December:

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

That doesn’t seem to be the plan so far: Gateway officials are griping to the city and county that they need a bailout — another bailout, following one for $20 million last year that raided funds for a minority business program and other projects — and Mayor Justin Bibb is muttering about creating tax surcharges in the stadium district to help cover costs. This all seems destined to end with the team owners negotiating another round of lease extensions in exchange for a lot more public cash, like how it’s been done one state to the west; you’d like to think that Ohio legislators could be better negotiators than Indiana ones, but if city and county officials had shown any ability before this to write leases that would protect taxpayers, they wouldn’t need the talcum powder.

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Friday roundup: Chiefs to ramp up Kansas saber-rattling, Bears’ Indiana move threat gets cool reception in Illinois

access_time personNeil deMause

Are people still flipping out about Chicago Bears management acknowledging that Indiana is next door to Illinois and they could try to build a stadium there if they wanted? Yep. Does that mostly come down to “fans in Indiana would be happy with a shorter drive and those in Chicago would be unhappy with a longer one”? Yep.

We’ll get back to the Bears in a sec, but first the latest in a more advanced cross-state NFL team location battle:

  • A Kansas legislator says the state’s Legislative Coordinating Council, a joint committee of leaders of the state house and senate, is set to meet on Monday to discuss a proposed agreement between the state and the Chiefs on a new stadium, though the state commerce department cautions that “no final agreement has been reached.” The Missouri Independent says the committee could start the process of approving state-backed STAR bonds at its Monday meeting, though the state already approved those in concept last year, and it doesn’t seem possible to actually sell specific bonds without a specific agreement in place, so not clear on what could actually get decided on Monday. Mostly, this seems to be a way for the legislature to declare that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt has met the required end-of-2025 deadline to be eligible for the bonds — as has Royals owner John Sherman, apparently, despite no concrete stadium plans at all, given that committee chair Ty Masterson’s office said he believes the Royals have met the deadline by being “fully committed” to Kansas. Some sort of announcement of a Chiefs deal on Monday seems likely, but it’s also likely that a lot of details will still need to be worked out, so let’s hold off on the “Chiefs are moving to Kansas” headlines for the — never mind, too late.
  • Back in Illinois, state officials are taking talk of a Bears stadium in Indiana in stride, with State Rep. Kam Buckner (district includes Soldier Field, is opposed to stadium subsidies) calling the team’s move threat “very predictable” and saying “in negotiations, what you do is you create leverage by saying you have more options,” while State Rep. Mary Beth Canty (has sponsored a bill to allow for stadium subsidies in Arlington Heights) asked that the Bears “engage with the General Assembly in good faith, without threats.” State Sen. Bill Cunningham, meanwhile, called giving the Bears a property tax break (but not necessarily all the infrastructure money team execs are asking for) “a good starting point” because it would only be local, not state, tax money, but said “we have more important things to tackle first.” It certainly sounds like the Bears owners can get something out of Illinois, even it not everything they’re demanding; dropping an Indiana move threat may help them get on the legislative agenda, which may be all they want, but there’s still a whole lot of haggling to go.
  • Cleveland’s Gateway sports authority is facing an estimated $150 million in imminent repair costs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, plus another $261 million over the next decade, and has no money on hand to pay for these costs and no plans for how to raise it. Not great! The city and county cover capital repairs while the teams cover maintenance, so there’s still the possibility of haggling over which is which. The government taking on all capital repairs during the teams’ 2004 lease renegotiations still seems like a terrible idea, and Gateway just defaulting on this and daring the teams to break their leases (which expire in 2034 and 2036 anyway) early seems like a reasonable consideration compared to throwing $400 million in good money after bad, but nobody’s talking about that just yet.
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project refuses to die, year after year after year. “NBC Los Angeles reports that during the meeting, project supporters waved signs reading ‘Build the gondola’ while opponents held signs saying ‘Stop the gondola’,” can’t we come to some sort of compromise?
  • Inter Miami‘s new stadium is finally set to open next spring, but the promised accompanying public park space won’t be ready yet, seen that one before.
  • And then there’s Germany, where when a pro women’s soccer team needs a bigger stadium, the team owners buy the one that a recently relegated men’s team is no longer using plays in. It was built way back in 1992, can you imagine how outdated the Getränkehalters must be?
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Stadium questions the media shouldn’t even bother asking

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which states, to save you from having to click through, that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It’s not 100% accurate — sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes even definitely maybe. But most of the time it’s a sign that a reporter spent a bunch of time on investigating a question, realized the answer was boringly obvious, and their editors decided to post the query as the headline instead, hoping to at least get clickthrus from readers curious to find out the details. (Which is pretty much how most headlines are designed to work these days anyway.)

Which brings us to these two recent, I’m going to call them “news stories,” though one is an item accompanying an All Things Considered radio item and the other is a repost of a Substack post:

Downtown Minneapolis is struggling. Would a new Wolves and Lynx arena help?

Pretty easy to guess no here, given that the Timberwolves and Lynx already play in a downtown Minneapolis arena, even if it’s one where, as one fan told Minnesota Public Radio, has “restrooms [that] look like they’ve been there for 20 years.” (Presumably whenever her own restrooms get too old, she moves to a new house?) And in fact, the author of the piece knows the answer, because there’s Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury down in the later grafs saying the answer is no, and it “isn’t some rogue opinion I have. It’s something that’s shared by the entire disciplin. If you ask doctors, ‘Is smoking bad?’ They’ll universally say yes. If you ask economists, ‘Are stadiums bad public investments?’ They’ll universally say yes.”

The article then pivots to talking about how much expensive arenas are to build these days (true), and how the “aging Target Center is mostly upper deck seats” which makes tickets more affordable (possibly slightly true, but probably not so much). It’s not clear why any of this story exists, though the accompanying radio piece does feature T-Wolves co-owner Alex Rodriguez (yes, that one) describing a new arena as “an anchor to the community,” so presumably this was pitched as an investigation of that claim — though if so, sticking in one quote from an economist halfway down saying this question has been asked and answered and then running a headline making it seem like an open question … that’s a choice, certainly.

Then there’s whatever you call this, which ran last week in the Rochester Beacon as a reprint of local reporter Gary Craig’s Substack column:

Is the new Bills stadium really such a bad deal for taxpayers?

Going to go with yes here, because (waves hands generally at everything that has been written about it on this website and elsewhere). But sure, let’s hear how spending $750 million in state money and $250 million in county money to move the Buffalo Bills across the street could be a good deal for taxpayers:

Tucked away in New York’s 2021 analysis of costs for a new Buffalo Bills stadium is this tidbit: “Personal income tax, primarily related to Bills team payroll, is the largest single fiscal revenue source, generating approximately $19.5 million per year for the State of New York.”

That number was likely low then, and with the increasing salary cap in the NFL, is certainly low now. Experts with whom I’ve spoken estimate the annual income tax revenue likely will be upwards of $30 million from the Bills and visiting teams…

These income taxes are numbers not often talked about in the debate over public financial support for a new stadium.

Uhhh, is this for Substack’s new posting-while-smoking-crack vertical? The benefit of getting income taxes from player payrolls is talked about all the damn time by team owners and pro-stadium-subsidy politicians — in fact, here’s then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker doing so about a new Milwaukee Bucks arena 10 years ago. The problem is threefold:

  1. Math: Even $30 million a year in new income tax revenue isn’t enough to cover $1 billion in public spending — it’d be worth a little less than half of that in present value. So even by Craig’s own logic, the answer to his question is yes, it’s a bad deal for taxpayers.
  2. New vs. existing revenue: The Bills already play in Buffalo, so this is income tax money that the state and county will be getting regardless of what stadium they play in. It would only become a windfall if you assume the Bills would have moved without a $1 billion stadium subsidy, which LOL.
  3. The but-for: Even if the Bills did move, the money Bills fans currently spend on tickets would likely be spent on something else within Erie County and certainly New York state, and would go to pay other salaries that would generate income taxes. It wouldn’t be a 1:1 replacement, no — a portion of the Bills salaries are paid by TV rights money, and that would indeed depart — but some of the tax revenue would remain, making the $1 billion taxpayer expense look even worse.

“I’m still trying to do a deeper dive on the stadium financing,” concludes Craig, and maybe he should have finished his research before posting this, or at least before letting the Rochester Beacon reprint his off-the-cuff thoughts. Anyway, hope this helps, not sure honestly why I’m still trying to critique a journalism world that is invariably headed slopwards, I’ll have to do a deeper dive on that impulse someday.

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Friday roundup: What if schools got all the money they needed and sports teams had to hold bake sales to build stadiums?

access_time personNeil deMause

Yes, that story about nobody knowing how much the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics cost because the Olympic committee literally set fire to its financial records is incredible, and yes, I really need to make a fridge magnet about it. This is more a note to myself than to you all, feel free to skip ahead to this week’s speed-round bullet points:

  • Cleveland mayor’s office chief of staff Bradford Davy said of the Guardians and Cavaliers owners’ insistence on more public money for venue upkeep and upgrades that “we are going to have to make sure that those relationships are strong and thoughtful,” but also that “the general revenue fund cannot be held accountable” and the city needs to look for other revenue sources that wouldn’t take away from spending on basic city services. I see where this is inevitably going, just be sure to say no to soufflés.
  • Also in Cleveland news, a federal judge has declined to issue an injunction against the state of Ohio’s use of unclaimed private funds to pay $600 million toward a Browns stadium plus more for other private sports projects, but is letting a lawsuit against the spending to move forward. It’s unclear what will happen if the Browns get their state check and the state then either loses its case or has its unclaimed private fund pool drained by state residents applying to get their money back — look for other revenue sources, I guess, it’s all the rage!
  • A consultant hired by the Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District has issued a report concluding that the Milwaukee Brewers stadium parking lots could hold $700-800 million worth of development, which if fully built out and taxed would supply $18.8 million a year in property taxes. True, the land is owned by the state stadium authority and so is tax-exempt, but maybe the district could cut a deal for payments in lieu of property taxes with some as-yet-unidentified developer, despite “environmental issues” like the parking lots being partly in a flood zone? Anyway, the Brewers’ president of business operations called it a “good first step,” that’s enough to build an entire headline around, print it!
  • Ottawa Senators owner Michael Andlauer has hired a team of lobbyists to push for public money from the federal and provincial governments for the new arena that the team has been fighting for since before their old owner died. It’s not clear exactly how much the lobbyists are asking for beyond money for “infrastructure financing and other government programs,” but the Ontario government does have an $8 billion infrastructure fund sitting right there, which you know must get Andlauer salivating. The local media is also reporting that Andlauer wants a similar deal to the one the Calgary Flames owners got in which about $300 million is coming from the province of Alberta and $537 million from the city of Calgary, but also that the Sens owner “has publicly stated that the organization will not be asking the City of Ottawa for taxpayers’ money.” Say no to soufflés, Michael!
  • Springfield is still looking at building a pro soccer stadium. Which Springfield? All of them, probably?
  • Rhode Island officials have refinanced their Pawtucket soccer stadium bonds with the terrible interest rate and somehow managed to be both paying even more this time and also having the state treasury for the first time be the backstop for bond payments. GoLocalProv reports that “the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation and the Pawtucket Redevelopment Agency have refused to comment on the new financing scheme,” and can you really blame them?
  • If you’ve been craving a supercut of the Buffalo Bills-themed Hallmark movie (horrifyingly not the first NFL-team-themed Hallmark movie) only containing the parts where the male romantic lead talks about how great the new Bills stadium is, Defector has got you covered.
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