Category: San Antonio Spurs

Friday roundup: Browns airport standoff continues, Spurs threaten voters with mascot appearance

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news, a quick note for any site supporters who are still waiting on swag: I haven’t forgotten you, I just have to restock on mailers and stamps, which I have penciled in for tomorrow morning. Thanks for your patience, and I assure you that your fridge magnets will still be timeless when they do arrive. (Because nothing ever changes in the world of stadium schemes, ha ha ha! Ha! Ha.)

But first, here’s the week’s remaining sports subsidy news to entertain and/or depress you:

  • The Ohio Department of Transportation has extended indefinitely its September 1 deadline for the Cleveland Browns owners to appeal their verdict that a new Brook Park stadium can’t be allowed as currently designed because it would infringe on airspace for a neighboring airport. Cleveland airport director Bryant Francis isn’t backing down on his insistence that the current design is a no-go, however, saying, “The FAA confirmed that the proposed height would intrude into protected airspace surfaces by 58 feet,” while adding, “We remain open to collaborating with all parties to find solutions that allow for growth while protecting the airport and the region it serves.” This is hardly the biggest problem with the Browns stadium project — that might just have to do with the at least $600 million in public money it would get from state checks that people haven’t cashed — but in America sometimes bad ideas get rejected because they’re bad, and sometimes they get snail dartered into submission.
  • The Browns’ proposed move is also now facing a second lawsuit charging that it would violate the Modell Law, with the law’s author, former mayor and state senator Dennis Kucinich, adding on to the lawsuit previously filed by the city. It’s actually the third lawsuit over the law, since the Browns owners are also suing the city to block the enforcement of the law, plus the state legislature moved to retroactively make the law not apply to in-state moves back in June, this is going to send a whole bunch of lawyers’ kids through college.
  • The San Antonio Spurs owners are holding a rally tomorrow in support of their campaign to be gifted around $750 million in city and county money for a new arena, and the key guest will be their mascot, who I’m just assuming will threaten to come to your house if you don’t vote for the subsidy.
  • Louisiana is planning to spend $7 million to bring a LIV golf event to New Orleans next summer. To put New Orleans on the tourist map. After spending tax money this year on a U.S. Bowling Congress Tournament, an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, the 2026 Southeastern Conference Gymnastics Championship, and the U.S. Gymnastics National Championships. “In a just world, politicians would have to come up with some reality-based justification for their desire to blow public money on what are effectively sports-adjacent parties,” notes Pat Garofalo in Boondoggle, almost wistfully.
  • The Athletics have submitted a development agreement for their under-construction (?) Las Vegas stadium while securing a permit to pour $87 million worth of concrete to support the lower seating bowl, tipping Schroedinger’s armadillo about 3% more into the “mostly not dead” category.
  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $489 million stadium renovation, mostly funded by the first of a potentially bottomless pool of state tax money, is providing the team owners with more than a dozen event spaces that they can rent out for business meetings and the like. Will taxpayers get a cut of these new windfall profits, given that they’re paying for the bulk of the cost of building the event spaces? You must be new around here, kid, I’ve got some bad news about this timeline…
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Explaining the explainer on the San Antonio Spurs arena funding plan

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s fair to say that media coverage so far of San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt’s plans for a new arena district paid for partly by taxpayer money hasn’t been very good: The San Antonio Express-News has advocated against letting the public vote on how public money will be used, while News4SanAntonio had a reporter point to a chart showing how tax money would be used on the project and say “this doesn’t come from your tax money.” Meanwhile, local news outlets keep beating the drum to threaten that the Spurs could move without a new arena, even while acknowledging that Holt doesn’t have any great options to move to.

Against that backdrop, it’s nice to see a local news outlet, the nonprofit San Antonio Report, attempting an analysis of how the money would work for the Spurs deal. How’d they do? Let’s take a look:

Soon voters will be asked to weigh in on a portion of the NBA arena’s public funding, $311 million in county venue tax dollars, on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Another $489 million is expected to come from the city, which says it can spend the money without a public vote. And the remaining $500 million-plus would be paid for by the Spurs’ ownership.

That’s basically right, though it’s worth noting that the $311 million in county tax money would arrive over three decades, so it would only cover about half that in up-front arena expenses. Present value matters!

Unlike the city, which is using tax reinvestments, Bexar County’s taxing entities will enjoy the growth in taxable value from both the East Side developments and the new downtown sports and entertainment district — money that’s needed for a budget that relies heavily on new growth.

This is a mouthful, and it’s mostly wrong or at best misleading. So let’s unpack it bit by bit:

One part of those city “tax reinvestments” would actually come from a Project Finance Zone, a Texas-specific subsidy where state sales taxes are in and around a redevelopment area are siphoned off to help pay for the development itself. Since this is money that would otherwise go to the state treasury, one could see it as free money for the city — though, obviously, San Antonio residents are also Texas residents, so draining the state budget to help pay for a new Spurs arena isn’t exactly a free lunch.

Another part is from a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, which is just a TIF, redirecting any increase in city property taxes in the redeveloped area back to the developer. And as the Report reports, that’s not free money either: “New housing and development within the zone requires city resources, like police and fire, but the growth in property tax revenue is being directed toward special projects within the zone, instead of boosting the general fund for the entire city.” Translation: The new Project Marvel development that would include an arena would come with lots of new city costs, but the taxes that would normally pay for those added costs will instead go back to Holt to pay for building the arena.

The county money, meanwhile, would come from an existing car rental tax and an increase in hotel taxes, neither of which have much to do with a new arena — it’s unlikely Spurs fans will rent more hotel rooms or cars just because they’ve bought tickets to a sparklier home court — but which are revenue streams the county has available and if you squint they kind of have to do with “tourism,” so they’re getting thrown into the pot. Or will assuming that Bexar County voters approve them on election day in November, which no one appears to have done any polling on of late, but earlier this year support was deemed “tepid.”

And on top of all this, there’s the possibility of a city “infrastructure bond” — to be voted on separately, likely next spring — to provide $220-250 million toward new bridges and highway ramps to support the arena project. (The Report’s explainer doesn’t explain where the money to pay off the bonds would come from.)

So that’s more than $750 million worth of tax money going to the Spurs owner, in exchange for getting a big new downtown development and relief from any fears that Holt will move the team to Greensboro. Is that, like, a good deal? A bad deal? Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

Here’s the entire cast of characters quoted by the paper in its attempts to explain the situation:

  • Rena Oden, an “activist with the COPS/Metro group that opposes the program”
  • Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who wants to “do everything I can to keep the Spurs in town”
  • Pro-arena councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito
  • Houston Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson, who is concerned the promised increased tax revenues may never arrive
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who wants an independent analysis of the project
  • City of San Antonio Chief Financial Officer Ben Gorzell, who says the arena plan is “predicated on not using existing city resources or funds”
  • John W. Diamond, a tax and finance expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, who fails to really explain the infrastructure bond beyond calling it “the whole process on steroids”
  • Councilmember Teri Castillo, who doesn’t want to see money diverted from the city’s general fund

That certainly checks all the boxes of citing both proponents and critics, though it’s worth noting that most of the quotes are recycled from past public statements, so the Report’s reporters didn’t spend much time picking up the phone for this one. And they absolutely didn’t call any of the people who would be the most useful: sports economists or local budget analysts who could discuss what return on investment, if any, San Antonio and Bexar County can expect to get from $750 million in Spurs arena subsidies. Bothsidesing may make your news outlet look “neutral,” but what readers need going into public ballots is information on what exactly they’ll be voting on and how it will affect what government money they’ll have available. Without that, it’s all too easy to see this as a simple referendum on whether the Spurs leave town — which it very much isn’t, but if Holt gets to play it that way without ever having to threaten to leave, it’ll be a win-win for the Caterpillar dealership magnate.

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Dumb reasons to build a stadium with public money just got even dumber

access_time personNeil deMause

Way back in the early days of this site, I used to do an annual “dumbest reasons of the year for building a stadium,” which I eventually stopped doing because they were all just variations on the same theme: the team will move without one, it will bring economic riches to your city, etc. But I may have to revive the tradition for 2025 if things keep going like they are this week, because hoo baby.

First up, we have this from Sports Illustrated, or at least from “Tennessee Titans on SI,” the rebranded FanNation network of blogs that aren’t really SI articles but look like them if you aren’t paying close attention:

The Tennessee Titans are opening a new and improved Nissan Stadium opening in 2027, which will feature a retractable roof.

The new stadium will help the city of Nashville’s chances at hosting a Super Bowl in the near future. … [Titans president and CEO Burke] Nihill believes hosting a Super Bowl will elevate the Titans as a franchise.

“Why not us? In terms of taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises and cities? I mean, you think about what our current reality has been up until now, which is an aging building built pretty basically, surrounded by parking lots, to that future where I think a lot of the energy of our city, especially for locals, will be right out our front door, and we’ll have a lot of ability to play into that,” Nihill said via Freeze.

“If the football team is sustainably great, which I believe it will be, and we do all of these things right? We’re a completely different organization than we are today.”

Like, what even? Yes, new stadiums get Super Bowls, sometimes, at least once before going back to the back of the line. The usual argument for wanting a Super Bowl is that it is a huge boon to the local economy, which is very much is not, but at least we’re used to hearing that.

But the idea that “taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises” — which would be a pretty damn big Mount Rushmore, with 17 cities on it — would make the Titans “a completely different organization” … that’s breaking new ground in stupid. The Nihill quote turns out to be from a longer interview by A to Z Sports, a company whose founding mission was essentially “talk radio, but made entirely of internet, that should go well,” and the Titans CEO wasn’t even talking about Super Bowls so much as how “we’re going to activate that thing like crazy with movie nights in the park and yoga and farmers markets and little concerts” — but honestly the word salad is so intense that I can see where the On SI writer could have gotten lost, though he might have wondered at what kind of sense it was supposed to make. (Ha ha, no, that’s not what he’s paid to do, if he’s paid at all.

Moving on to San Antonio, where the Express-News has been beating the drum for Spurs owner Peter Holt’s Project Marvel development project for a while now, and today the paper’s editorial board takes on the question of whether city residents should get to vote on spending $489 million in tax money on the arena project, and comes to a novel conclusion:

This would be a city election, likely in May 2026, on dedicating $489 million toward the $1.3 billion project.

It would follow a November election in which Bexar County voters will decide whether to increase the county’s hotel occupancy tax and maintain its car rental tax to dedicate $311 million toward the arena, which is proposed to be built on site of the Institute of Texan Cultures at Hemisfair.

To be clear, the city’s contribution is contingent on this vote. If voters reject the county funds, they are rejecting the entire project, city funds included. For this reason, we don’t see a need for a second vote on the same issue.

It’s far cleaner to simply have a vote and let the chips fall where they may. Let the voters decide and then let the world spin.

First off: No, the “entire project” doesn’t die if the $311 million in county funds (really more like $150 million in present value) is rejected; Holt could still take his $489 million in city funds and try to supplement it with some other funding source. But more to the point: Express-News editorial board, you do know that Bexar County (2.2 million people) and San Antonio (1.5 million people) are two distinct places, right? So just because voters in the county but outside the city vote for (or against) using county money on the arena project doesn’t mean that voters in the city will do the same with city money — it’s why they have separate elections for county and city positions, and don’t just let the county judge appoint the San Antonio mayor on the grounds that that’s “far cleaner.”

In both of these cases, the arguments being made are less reasons than pretexts — the Titans CEO wants a stadium so he can make more money on it, not to be on some “Mount Rushmore” of Super Bowl hosts, and the Express-News wants no arena vote because it really wants an arena for some damn reason, and waiting till next May and then letting voters have their say would be subjecting the Spurs owner’s desires to the whims of democracy, and we can’t have that. And hey look, there’s a headline in the San Antonio Business Journal about how San Antonio needs to build an arena for the Spurs because the Seattle Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City, though it’s paywalled and not available on either Wayback or archive.ph, so I can’t determine what exactly its case is. It’s going to be a competitive race this year for Dumbest Reason to Build a Stadium, so get your dumb reasons in now!

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Friday roundup: San Antonio okays $489m arena subsidy to prove “love” for Spurs, plus: invasion of the soccer zombies

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: As expected, the San Antonio city council voted yesterday to move ahead with plans to give $489 million in tax revenues to Spurs owner Peter Holt to use toward a new arena. The actual council action was two votes: One to reject Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’s proposal to pause arena talks until an independent economic review could be conducted, and one to allow the city manager to “complete negotiations and execute a nonbinding Term Sheet,” notwithstanding that a term sheet already exists — it’s unclear what the city manager is authorized to negotiate going forward from here, not to mention exactly what the council has actually committed itself to given that the term sheet is nonbinding. Councilmember Edward Mungia said that “we still have the ability to get out of this deal at any point before other project deals are signed,” but didn’t specify if the council would have to vote to withdraw from the deal or still needs to vote on a binding agreement or what.

Jones, who votes as a member of the city council because San Antonio has that kind of city government, voted against the arena subsidy, as did councilmembers Teri Castillo, Ric Galvan, and Leo Castillo-Anguiano. Mungia and the “more business-friendly” councilmembers, as the San Antonio Report put it, voted in favor: Sukh Kaur, Marc Whyte, Marina Aldrete Gavito, Misty Spears, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, and Phyllis Viagran. As Viagran explained her vote: “You either trust this team … or you don’t. I’ve heard so many people say, ‘We all love the Spurs.’ … But do you really?”

There’s still some possibility of an independent economic analysis down the road, or more hearings to see if public support for the project is still as “tepid” as it was earlier this year. (Jones is also pushing for a public referendum on the city’s spending next spring, but we’ve seen how her proposals go over with the business-friendly councilmembers.) And, of course, Bexar County voters can still throw a wrench into things in November if they vote down the ballot measure that would give Holt around $150 million worth of county tax money on top of the city funds. Regardless, in the first round of the Project Marvel arena battle, the San Antonio council has spoken, and its verdict is “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like half a billion dollars in public money so you can boost your sports team’s profits.”

Who else is loving who this week and how? Never thought you’d ask:

  • Like everyone else, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around MLB’s new set of TV deals that are supposed to be finalized soon, with Apple out and Peacock in and ESPN in on some things but out on others. As far as what it will mean for teams’ media revenues — and, by association, how footloose teams can be about moving into smaller media markets to seek more lucrative stadium deals — it sounds like teams’ cuts of media revenue won’t change much, it’ll just be that ESPN will increasingly be the ones selling the right to watch games, and they’ll be making you pay for an ESPN subscription on top of an MLB.tv subscription to do it. Only 17 years until the last World Series, get your baseball-watching in now!
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula bought his $100 million superyacht in 2021, the year before he got $1 billion in state and county tax money for a new stadium, but people aren’t any less unamused at the juxtaposition. One wonders if this might even have become an issue in New York state legislative hearings on the stadium subsidy, if there had been any.
  • Manchester United seeking public money for their planned stadium project isn’t new news, but it did just get the attention of the Guardian, which called the team’s plan to seek hundreds of millions of pounds to clear land for the stadium a “sinister US tactic.” Which is fitting, given that Man U is owned by sinister Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, though maybe not for much longer.
  • What would happen if a minor pro sports team — say, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds of the USL Championship — wanted to issue renderings of their proposed stadium expansion (to be “paid for with public and private funding, although details have not been provided“) but couldn’t afford the Pro version of Microsoft Stadium Wizard? We have the answer, and it is a hellscape of identical featureless soccer zombies, please enjoy your nightmares:
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San Antonio news sites: $630m Spurs arena subsidy is so great, city can’t afford not to do it!

access_time personNeil deMause

The term sheet for San Antonio’s proposed Project Marvel development that would include a new Spurs arena goes up for a city council vote tomorrow, and to see the local news media headlines tell it, it’s a (checks list of appropriate sports metaphors) slam dunk: The term sheet ensures “no tax impact on families” (KENS-TV)! Voting no “could risk losing Spurs to another market” (News4SA)!

Neither of those things appears to be so much true. The actual term sheet, which is buried at the end of a PDF attached to an item on tomorrow’s council agenda, spells out more than $630 million in tax impact, including $311 million in county hotel and car rental taxes (over 30 years, so more like $150 million in present value) if that’s approved by voters in a November ballot measure, plus $489 million in city bonds (or a bit less if the total arena cost comes in at less than $1.28 billion) to be paid off with property taxes from future development on the site — surely money that wouldn’t be needed to, oh, provide schools for all of the project’s new residents or anything.

As for losing the Spurs, sure, the team “could” move without a new arena. The team owners are making money hand over fist in San Antonio, however, and are currently the 18th-most valuable franchise in the NBA (per Forbes) despite playing in a relatively small market; relocating to Seattle or Las Vegas likely wouldn’t improve those numbers, plus would step on the toes of the NBA’s plans to rake in big expansion team prices from those cities. And Spurs owner Peter Holt hasn’t even hinted at a move away from San Antonio, instead sticking with the usual mealy-mouthed declarations that he sure hopes the team stays put, as if the matter is entirely out of his hands. So who is it warning News4SA about the team leaving, exactly?

Some city council members like District 3’s Phyllis Viagran have serious concerns about delaying a vote for the city to move forward.

“If a pause is approved, I think we are seriously facing losing the Spurs to another market outside of Texas,” Viagran said.

Say no more! Better get the checkbook.

For anyone familiar with Chapter 4 (“The Art of the Steal”) from Field of Schemes, this will all be painfully familiar: promising illusory economic benefits and warning of phantom move threats are two of the eternal staples of sports owners’ subsidy playbook. The only slightly new twist is adding in the argument that spending over $600 million in public money isn’t really public money because it’s money that the Spurs will have touched first, and therefore something something isosceles triangles.

The San Antonio council actually has two items on tomorrow’s agenda, the first being a proposal by Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones to not enter into any term sheet until the city commissions and receives “an independent economic impact study for the arena by a firm with no association with the Spurs organization or ownership” and each councilmember has held public meetings to get feedback on the plan. All indications are that the council majority is going to say “LOL, no, we’re going to approve the 600 mil on the basis of what the clown consultants say” — but just in case any councilmembers might be tempted to think otherwise, it’s nice that the media members of San Antonio’s growth coalition are there to remind them of the company line.

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San Antonio’s arena project consultants aren’t just bad at math, they’re Spurs part-owners

access_time personNeil deMause

We already knew that Convention, Sports & Leisure, the consultants who did the economic impact report for the San Antonio Spurs‘ proposed Project Marvel development, have an abysmal track record on accuracy and are part of Legends Entertainment, whose owners include the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees. The only way the city’s hiring of CSL could look worse, really, would be, oh, maybe if the company turned out to connected to the Spurs themselves, but how likely is —

A background check lists Sixth Street Partners as the parent company of Legends.

In 2021, the Spurs announced that Sixth Street Partners, along with Michael Dell, the Chief Executive Officer of Dell Technologies, became strategic partners of the team.

Not great! It turns out “strategic partner” is business speak for “minority owner,” as Sixth Street owns a 20% stake in the NBA team, San Antonio Chief of Financial and Administrative Services Ben Gorzell defended the arrangement on the grounds that “there is kind of an ethical wall between the work that CSL does and the ownership group” and “we felt from everything we did, and based on our due diligence, they were quite capable of providing an independent analysis and report.” That’s a little hard to fathom given CSL’s resume — recall that these are the same consultants who were forced to reveal on the day of releasing a previous report that two-thirds of the projected benefits weren’t actually projected benefits — but “we hired a company owned by some of the same people asking us for at least $650 million in public money, that seemed like a good idea to us” sounds even worse, so sure, let’s go with “ethical wall.”

In any event, none of this looks like it’s going to prevent the San Antonio city council from fast-tracking the development project, which includes a new arena to replace its 23-year-old one: The council could vote as soon as next Wednesday on a term sheet that would include specific subsidy amounts — none are available now, but surely they will arrive in time for councilmembers to give them a thorough casual glance before rubber-stamping them. After all, even though Spurs owner Peter Holt says the team won’t move without a new arena, KSAT writes, other sports teams have moved, sometimes after not getting a new arena, so clearly it’s a possibility! How much of a possibility? For that we would need to know how many sports teams didn’t move after failing to get a new arena, and that seems like a lot to count, best to not think too hard about it and just sign on the dotted line.

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Friday roundup: Spurs, Bengals owners to seek even more public money, Olympics could cost LA $1.5B for security

access_time personNeil deMause

Congratulations, we once again made it to the end of another programming week, as well as the end (presumably) of the “Will Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris get to pocket billions of dollars of cash and tax and land subsidies?” saga. (Answer: He sure will.) Which cities’ sports funding debates could be the next to absorb the eyes of a nation, or at least the eyes on this website? Let’s run down some contenders from this week:

  • We’ve already covered the ongoing San Antonio Spurs arena debates here this week, but that earlier report on the city council’s Wednesday hearing missed the tidbit that right now the plan is for San Antonio to provide $500 million, Bexar County to provide $311 million (really only enough to pay for about half that in up-front costs, since the money would arrive over 30 years), and team owner Peter Holt to provide $500 million, which is less than the potential $1.5 billion arena cost. Spurs chief legal counsel Bobby Perez said (in the San Antonio Report’s paraphrasing) that’s “something the Spurs would have to figure out,” but that the team would pay for any overruns above the final public price tag, whatever it ends up being, which is maybe not as reassuring as he meant it to be. Perez also said that the team would not consider sharing any arena revenue to help pay the public’s share of costs because Holt will be using it to pay off his own share of costs, the public will just have to make it up in volume or something.
  • The Cincinnati Bengals owners finally signed their new lease with Hamilton County that will include at least $700 million in public subsidies, everybody relax. Though the Bengals and the county said they’re still planning on asking for even more money from the state, exact dollar figure TBD, so maybe don’t relax just yet.
  • Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski wrote that if Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie wants a new stadium, he should pay for it himself, and got a flood of agreement back from readers, including that it’s a bad time to ask for public money “with hospitals closing, SEPTA broke, and schools struggling” and that “many people think that Camden Yards created the Inner Harbor, but the Inner Harbor was booming long before the Orioles left Memorial Stadium. And now the Inner Harbor has collapsed.” Good thing for Lurie that it’s almost certain none of these people will get to vote on any stadium plan, because that’s not how cities east of the Mississippi roll.
  • The owners of Boston Legacy F.C. (née BOS Nation F.C.) faced an August 1 deadline to figure out how they will pay for their share of stadium costs on top of the city’s $100-millionish, but they blew that deadline so now they get a new one of September 15. Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Josh Kraft is accusing Boston Mayor Michelle Wu of not being transparent about the total cost of the women’s soccer project, at the same time as Josh’s dad Robert is fighting with Wu about his plan to build a new men’s soccer stadium for his New England Revolution in neighboring Everett, which Wu has warned could subject Boston to increased traffic, this is the most convoluted HBO Max series plotline ever.
  • When the Los Angeles Olympic host committee promised that the 2028 Games would come at “zero cost” to the city, apparently it didn’t include security costs, which could amount to maybe $1.5 billion. There’s now growing talk of getting L.A. to pull out of the 2028 games altogether, especially now that Donald Trump has threatened to send in the military during the event; that doesn’t sound very likely, but the Unite Here hotel workers’ union has proposed a ballot measure that would require many Olympic venues to get voter approval to be used for the Games, which looks to be mostly a tactic to head off attempts to overturn the $30/hour “Olympic wage” passed by the city council in May — I take it back, maybe this is the most convoluted HBO Max plotline ever.
  • ESPN is about to own part of the NFL’s media package and the NFL is about to own part of ESPN, don’t see any potential problems there. I do greatly look forward to every football highlight on SportsCenter being accompanied by a disclaimer that “the National Football League is a part owner of ESPN,” surely a company with such a great ethical record as ESPN wouldn’t skip over that.
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San Antonio mayor calls for “pause” on Spurs arena, city council says how’s okaying $500m in two weeks sound?

access_time personNeil deMause

The San Antonio city council held a hearing on the San Antonio Spurs‘ proposed Project Marvel arena-and-convention-center-and-other-stuff development yesterday, but while it had been teased as a discussion of CSL’s predictably questionable economic impact report on the project, it turned into a throwdown between the mayor and the council about whether to worry about economic impact at all:

  • Newly elected Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones asked for a “strategic pause on this entire effort” in order to conduct a “full independent review” of the costs and benefits of the deal.
  • Seven out of 10 city councilmembers said screw that, they were ready to go ahead with a vote on the arena project as soon as August 21. “I trust the Spurs,” said councilmember Phyllis Viagran. “I know the Holts. I know they want to be here, and they’re the majority owners. So I’m ready to tell you, Erik, move with the lawyers and continue to get this done and bring it to us for a vote.”

What exactly the council would be voting on to approve remains a little unclear: There’s been talk of using the city’s share of hotel and property taxes, but no word on a specific cost breakdown. City officials have said that the total city subsidy would amount to $500 million, but haven’t provided details; Jones told KSAT that three years into negotiations, “we still don’t have a final number” for how much the project will cost.

Any council vote will be “nonbinding,” so presumably further council votes will be needed down the road to approve a binding version of whatever it is the council thinks it’s giving a thumbs-up to this month. A full independent review of the costs still sounds like a great idea in the meantime, but it also doesn’t sound like the bulk of the council is interested in that, not so long as they have their report from clown consultants in its clear plastic binder.

 

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County sets November ballot on first $150m of Spurs arena subsidies, way more to follow

access_time personNeil deMause

Residents of Bexar County, Texas, will go to the polls in November to vote on raising taxes on hotels and car rentals to help fund a new San Antonio Spurs arena, after county commissioners voted 4-1 to put it on the ballot.

Because we can’t have nonconfusing things, the ballot measure will come in two parts:

The first asks if voters are willing to spend $191.8 million for upgrades and expansions to county facilities on the East Side, including the Frost Bank Center, the Freeman Coliseum and the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo Grounds.

The second question will ask whether to use the remaining funds — up to $311 million — to help fund a new downtown arena for the Spurs.

So if one wins and not the other, will the taxes only be raised partway? Will they still both go up, but the money will only be spent on one of the two uses? San Antonio Express-News? KENS-TV? Anyone?

The tax hike would only raise $311 million for the Spurs over 30 years, so it would only cover about $150 million of up-front arena costs. But not to worry — team owner Peter Holt is also looking for about $500 million in city money from existing hotel and business taxes, and hasn’t ruled out additional asks toward the arena or the larger Project Marvel, which would include a convention center expansion and new hotel and Alamodome upgrades and other stuff, and is expected to cost more than $3 billion in total, of which Holt would commit to putting in about $1 billion. None of those additional subsidies are expected to require public votes.

And how does Holt, who unlike most of his fellow NBA owners is not a billionaire but a mere hundredmilllionaire, justify asking for all this public money for his private sports venture?

“For context, of the 30 NBA teams, the 14 smallest-market teams all have publicly funded arenas. The average is 70% public funds. … The most recent, Oklahoma City, is 95% funded by public funds,” Holt said.

Ah, “all the other kids are doing it.” A classic!

Holt was notably quiet about the Convention, Sports & Leisure consulting report that projected the development could be worth $18.7 billion to the city, possibly because word was starting to get out that the report was, well, let’s call it crap:

The forecast is “jaw-droppingly vacuous” and doesn’t include market, cost or risk analyses, said Susan Strawn, a member of “No! Project Marvel” and former District 1 City Council candidate.

CSL provided no explanation of the data underlying its assumptions and no study of alternative uses for the public funding that’s expected to flow into the district, she said during a press conference Monday outside the Alamodome.

And FoS convention center correspondent (and University of Texas at San Antonio professor) Heywood Sanders adds:

In 2003, CSL forecast that an expansion of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center would boost hotel room night generation from an annual average of 503,000 to 786,000. In 2024, the expanded facility generated 411,315 hotel room nights. It’s never even come close to that 503,000 number again.

Other projections by the consulting firm have also missed the mark.

There’s still a long way to go before all the boxes are checked for this project, and San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has been strongly critical of it, saying Holt should be asked to kick in a share of team revenues. Still, that won’t stop Holt from trying to lock in his first tranche of subsidies in November, before asking for his next few hundred million. Keep that up long enough, and pretty soon you’re talking real money!

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Friday roundup: Commanders vote, Bengals lease, A’s stadium cost all up in the air at this time

access_time personNeil deMause

The D.C. council’s verdict on the $6.6-billion-plus Washington Commanders stadium subsidy still seems to be up in the air at this time: The council now plans to vote today, giving councilmembers a whole 24 hours to read the final stadium bill, which was just released yesterday, after the council had concluded hearings about it without most councilmembers themselves being present, as one does. Councilmember Robert White has already said he plans to vote against the bill and hopes he can get four others to go along with him and block the needed two-thirds majority; council chair Phil Mendelson seems confident that he has the votes to pass the thing, but we’ll all find out together in a few hours.

Meanwhile, let’s pass the time by taking a spin through the other stadium and arena news that unfolded, or didn’t, this week while we were all waiting for the denouement to Bowser‘s Folly:

  • The Cincinnati Bengals‘ new lease remains up in the air after Hamilton County commissioners yesterday approved it, but Bengals execs haven’t signed it yet because they’re still reading the final version. We’ll just have to wait and see whether team officials are willing to accept $700 million–plus in county stadium upgrade funding, or if they plan on asking for even more.
  • The Las Vegas A’s stadium cost is still up in the air, with estimates now around $2 billion, up from $1.75 billion, according to owner John Fisher. Does Fisher have the money to pay to do more than move some dirt around? Did he before? Only he and his accountants, and maybe Rob Manfred, know.
  • The legality of Missouri’s offer of state money for Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadiums is up in the air, after two Republican Missouri state legislators and one citizen activist have sued to block it, arguing that it has too much stuff in it and is unconstitutionally targeted to benefit specific companies and is “a bribe” to keep the teams from moving to Kansas. Whether any of that is actually illegal, it’ll be up to the courts to decide.
  • Denver Broncos stadium plans are still up in the air, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said yesterday, “We’re working hard on a deal, and I think we’re close.” Where the stadium would go and who would pay how much for it remains up in the air.
  • The final city cost of repairing the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is still up in the air, with current estimates standing at $59.7 million plus whatever it costs for new video production equipment, plus tariffs, plus any other sundries. Will the St. Petersburg city council keep approving additional costs? You already know the non-answer to that.
  • The economic impact of a new San Antonio Spurs arena development remains up in the air after consultants said it would be worth $18.7 billion over 30 years, then it turned out they were only clown consultants. Whatever fools the San Antonio Express-News is good enough for government work!
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Field of Schemes