Category: San Antonio Spurs

Judge okays moving ahead on Spurs arena deal that could cost $500m+ in tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

One sports stadium patsy leaves, one enters: Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who last month declared that he would put a hold on any public referendum on using taxpayer money for a new San Antonio Spurs arena until somebody figured out how much it would cost, now says ah, hell with it, let’s get this show on the road:

The Commissioners Court voted 4-1 Tuesday to allow Sakai to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the city of San Antonio and the Spurs that would create a framework for them to discuss holding a future venue tax election.

“This is just a starting point to collaboratively assess, explore and evaluate,” Sakai said. “There is no deal. There is no agreement.”

No, it’s not an agreement, but an MOU would be an agreement, so an agreement is very much what Sakai is now working on. The San Antonio Express-News reports that an arena deal could include two piles of tax money: county hotel taxes and county car rental taxes, which would be worth $397 million if the county hotel tas remains at its current 1.75% or $449 million if it’s raised to 2%. The newspaper neglected to indicate if those numbers are present value or cumulative over many years, and if so how many years. (RIP, editors, you had a good run.)

So let’s try to do some quick calculations: The county hotel tax amounted to $21.3 million in revenue in 2023, while the car rental tax was $12.2 million. Extend that out over 30 years, and you could pay off about $500 million in arena costs by siphoning off the taxes to pay for a new arena rather than keeping them to spend on other public needs — and likely more than that if hotel and car rental spending increases over time.

But wait!

Sakai and other county officials emphasized they also have a responsibility to maintain the Frost Bank Center and Freeman Coliseum, which are estimated to need at least $100 million worth of upgrades and help improve the surrounding area.

The tax has been used in the past for projects like San Antonio River improvements, performing arts and amateur sports facilities.

“That pool of money is the pool of money you have to do all of those things,” [Bexar County Manager David] Smith said.

Presumably all of that pool of money has until now been used to do other things, so really any money spent on an arena would come at the cost of not doing other stuff. It would be nice to have a list of where that money is going currently, but again, this is 2025 journalism we’re dealing with here, we need to temper our expectations.

All of this would still need voter approval in November, because Sakai missed the deadline for a spring referendum by waiting until now. At least that gives San Antonio residents nine months to ask some pointed questions — local journalists can start things off if they want, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

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Texas judge blocks Spurs arena subsidy vote until somebody can explain how much it’ll cost

access_time personNeil deMause

Good news, everyone! Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai says he’s not going to put a tax subsidy for a San Antonio Spurs arena on the May 3 ballot, because nobody knows how much tax money would actually be involved:

State law allows the county to raise the hotel portion of the tax to 2%.

Asked Tuesday if raising the tax was part of the discussion, Sakai said, “Those are all preliminary questions that need to be addressed.”

At least, there won’t be a public vote until November at the earliest, by which time the judge (yes, Texas counties are run by judges, it’s left over from when Texas was its own country) hopes to have those questions answered: “We are moving forward to find the win-win solution in this complex issue that we call the new Spurs arena.”

Finding a “win-win” in funneling an unknown but huge amount of money to the local NBA owner to replace a 22-year-old arena seems like a challenge, especially when one main argument for is “locals bring visitors because of the authenticity,” but sure, okay. The basic principle of “maybe people should know what they’re voting on before they vote” is a good one, so here’s hoping that Sakai actually gets Spurs owner Peter Holt and the city to cough up some financial details before moving ahead with a public ballot measure. If nothing else, it might make those polls Holt has been doing of San Antonio residents on the arena plan more valid if there’s an actual dollar figure involved.

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How not to write a sports arena editorial, San Antonio Spurs division

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the key factors in perpetuating the billions-of-dollars-a-year system of public subsidies for private sports stadiums is what’s been dubbed the sports-media complex: the way that local news sites in most cases parrot the arguments of team execs and local elected officials for devoting taxpayer money to new sports venues. There are a bunch of reasons for this, from news outlets’ reliance on team access for reporters and team-related ad spending to the media’s inclination to uncritically repeat claims made by powerful people — Joanna Cagan and I were writing about this as early as 1998. The upshot is that voters, when they even get any kind of say in these deals, are usually working from information that is heavily skewed toward what the people who stand to benefit from stadium subsidies are saying, whether it’s true or not.

To see how this works in practice, let’s check out today’s San Antonio Express-News editorial on the prospect of a May vote to direct tax money toward a new arena for the Spurs:

Winning May vote for Spurs arena combines county venue tax, private funding

Okay, that is just a terrible headline. Is county tax money and private funding required in order to win the May vote? Is the May vote a winning idea, because it would include both tax money and private funding? How much of each would be combined? Why does a vote to spend tax money on a Spurs arena qualify as “winning,” as opposed to a more neutral term like “passing”? The whole thing seems designed to confuse readers more than enlighten them, which is not the traditional goal of journalism.

May is absolutely the right time for a public vote. A May election provides ample time for debate and discussion. A vote would serve as a capstone to Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s tenure. … Finally, with the Spurs’ lease agreement at Frost Bank Center set to expire in 2032, should a public vote fail, there would be plenty of time to bring a revised plan to voters.

So voting on (or for?) an arena deal would be a “capstone” for the mayor, because what longtime local politician wouldn’t want their legacy to be “tried to send a bunch of tax money to the local nepo baby rich guy“? And no worries that voters might not agree, because if they say no, there’s plenty of time to ask them again and see if they can be convinced to say yes.

Should Bexar County dedicate its venue tax — on rental vehicles and hotel rooms — toward the new Spurs arena? Yes, it absolutely should. But commissioners should do this with a negotiated guarantee from the Spurs and the city for investment in around the Frost Bank Center.

It absolutely should! Because reasons! But only if the Spurs owners agree to “invest” enough in and around the arena to make up for the cost of … how much would this be costing the city again?

Should the Spurs make a major contribution toward a project that will exceed $1 billion? Yes, absolutely.

The whole project will cost over $1 billion, okay. (Actually previously reported as maybe as much as $4 billion total, but who’s counting?) But what deal exactly does the Express-News think voters should be voting on, or for? The only attempt to estimate how much hotel and sales tax money San Antonio could divert to pay for arena costs is “holy sh*t that’s a lot of money” (actual quote from an actual economist!), so it would be nice for the paper to provide some numbers, but that’s apparently outside the scope of the editorial board.

One criticism of a potential new arena is that the Frost Bank Center would sit empty, but the reality is that if the Spurs were to move (and we are not suggesting that will happen), then the Frost Bank Center would still be empty and the surrounding area would still lack economic development.

So building a new arena would leave the city’s 22-year-old current arena vacant and redundant, but that’s okay because if the Spurs moved, to somewhere, which they won’t, but they could, to somewhere, then the arena would be vacant anyway. Checks out!

The best path forward is for a May vote on a new arena downtown, with a commitment to a new economic development approach to the area surrounding the Frost Bank Center and a sizable contribution from Spurs ownership.

And from city taxpayers, a contribution that is … what’s 100% minus “sizable”?

Newspaper editorials are always weird and maybe a bad idea overall: They simultaneously give newspaper editors a soapbox where they can throw all pretense at accuracy and fairness out the window, while simultaneously making it seem like the paper’s news coverage must be objective, because it’s not the editorial page. But to the extent that there is any point in the things, it’s that newspaper editors are supposed to know stuff, by virtue of being in charge of reporting the news all day, so when they say something is a good or bad idea, they know what they’re talking about. When instead they just use that public stage to repeat what Important People are whispering in their ears … I’m not sure what it is, but it sure ain’t journalism, and it sure ain’t earning the public’s trust.

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium deal falls apart more completely than their roof, San Antonio considers massive tax subsidy for new Spurs arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry that this has turned into Tampa Bay Rays week here, but stuff keeps happening. And last night, perhaps the most happeningest stuff happened, with the St. Petersburg city council meeting and 1) voting 4-3 to approve spending $23 million toward repair of the Tropicana Field roof; 2) voting 5-2 to put off selling $450 million in bonds for a new stadium and surrounding infrastructure; then 3) voting 7-0 to undo the vote to spend on fixing the roof, after Rays co-president Brian Auld declared “our agreement effectively died” with Tuesday’s county commission vote to delay issuing bonds and “I don’t believe we can make the economics around this arrangement work any more.”

A new council vote on the city bonds is now possible for January 9, assuming the county re-votes to approve its own bonds on Dceember 17. But even in the unlikely event that that happens, two new anti-stadium city councilmembers will have taken office by then, making city approval unlikely. Plus there’s increasing expectation that Rays owner Stu Sternberg will officially cancel the stadium plan anyway in the interim; Auld said that he didn’t even care about the roof repair vote, saying wasn’t confident repairs could be completed by 2026 he would “have more certainty” working out a settlement with the city instead. (Auld also apologized for “the tone” in which team execs’ letter before Tuesday’s county vote declaring the stadium deal “suspended” was received, saying it wasn’t meant to be a threat — whatever it was, it clearly backfired.)

This is crazytown, especially when you consider that this whole thing was set off by the four county commissioners who joined two prior stadium deal opponents in voting to delay the stadium bond sale in October, in order to be all respectful of the losses to Hurricane Milton and everything, apparently without considering that they might lose their pro-stadium majority on election day before their next meeting. As unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, it looks like unless Sternberg and his cronies can find a way to flip one county commissioner by December 17 — and threatening to move the team sure didn’t do the trick — everything is going back to square one now, with Sternberg shaking trees to see if anyone else wants to give him $1 billion for a stadium somewhere, while MLB has to go back to sitting on its hands waiting for this mess to be resolved before discussing expansion. Not to mention that without a repaired Trop, the Rays could be playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Tampa, even as the Oakland A’s are playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes at you fast.

Meanwhile, that wasn’t even the only big city council meeting about sports venues yesterday: In San Antonio, the city council held hearings on using tax money to help fund a potentially $4 billion redevelopment including a new Spurs arena. I didn’t watch the meeting, but fortunately University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoff Propheter did and liveposted about it on Bluesky, so let’s just revisit some of his highlights:

Leading finance mechanism for the district will be a hotel tax and sales tax TIF that will span 3 mi from the district center. The zone can capture all of the 6% hotel tax and 6% sales tax. Holy sh*t that's a lot of money that can be captured. Doesn't mean they will use the full amount.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:02:39.800Z

Without evidence, the assistant city manager says that most people that went to a Bad Bunny concert at the Alamodome weren't from Bexar County. Did they survey every attendee and double check their addresses against IRS or DMV records?

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:12:25.690Z

"locals bring visitors because of the authenticity"…I don't understand what this means.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:17:22.930Z

Showing potential funding sources…and as usual, tax expenditures aren't on the list. When you give tax breaks, you are spending money. We know the team and others will end up with tax breaks. Those should always be part of funding discussion.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:18:51.102Z

courage: how does more tourists lead to better homelessness solutions? better housing solutions? better paying jobs–not just low wage ushers or retail workers? How many residents will be able to attend a spurs game compared to today or stay at a hotel in the district? great questions.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:30:35.069Z

courage strikes me also as cautiously optimistic, which puts the council tally at 8-3 if a vote were held today is my guess. I'm assuming the mayor would support.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:33:16.645Z

and the special session is over. Overall thoughts: lots of ideas, nothing concrete, and a lot of silly reasoning. A sport entertainment district is not a novel idea despite some members believing so. Members seem to believe that diverted tax dollars to the project don't hurt existing services.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:38:41.620Z

 

After all that, do we still have the stamina for the week’s bullet points? Let’s try a couple, at least:

  • Athletics owner John Fisher pulling out of his stadium deal with Oakland to instead move to Las Vegas (maybe) might have blown up his plans to get discounted land in Santa Clara for a San Jose Earthquakes practice facility as well, with the city board of supervisors slamming the brakes on the deal after retiring supervisor Joe Simitian said he’s “not convinced [the Earthquakes] would be a good-faith partner” and warned that the sweetheart land deal represented “essentially a $100 million giveaway to a private enterprise.”
  • Speaking of Oakland, the city finance department issued a warning last Friday that the city is on the brink of bankruptcy and can’t count on money from the on-hold sale of the Oakland Coliseum to bail it out — then reversed course and quietly replaced that report on the city’s website with a new, less apocalyptic one.
  • This week was so nuts that a piece of the Dallas Cowboys roof falling off barely even makes the small print. Team owner Jerry Jones doesn’t want a new stadium, at least, or else we know where this would be headed.
  • And we haven’t even gotten to voters in Forsyth County, Georgia approving a TIF district to kick back tax revenues to pay for $225 million in bonds toward an NHL arena, assuming Forsyth County, which is 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, can land an NHL team. We will revisit this if an Atlanta expansion team gets past the dreaming stage, or if this firehose of Rays stadium news ever stops, whichever comes first.
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Friday roundup: Two counties plan Royals tax votes, plus fresh subsidy schemes for Spurs, Wild, Jazz, Bengals, [headline capacity reached, stack overflow]

access_time personNeil deMause

No time or energy for niceties today, let’s get straight to the firehose of news:

  • The Jackson County Legislature plans to vote Monday on putting a measure on the April ballot to extend a 0.375% sales tax surcharge for 40 years to fund new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects, even though neither team has decided what kind of stadium projects they want, let alone agreed to lease terms that would determine what if anything the county would get in return. (Jackson County Executive Frank White counters, “You don’t want to rush into something that the taxpayers have to be responsible for for 40 years without getting some equitable agreement with both teams,” but nobody appears to be listening to him.) Meanwhile Clay County appears to be readying its own sales tax hike ballot measure, only with a much larger (as yet undetermined) sales tax surcharge rate because Clay County has fewer people and so less sales. Bidding wars, man, they can’t be beat — I really need to see if I can get New York and New Jersey to compete to see who’ll agree to renovate my kitchen.
  • The San Antonio city council approved a plan to siphon off any future increase in hotel tax revenues from within three miles of the city’s convention center and spend it on convention center upgrades, a renovation of the Alamodome, plus possibly a new Spurs arena. Estimates are that the hotel tax money could come to $222 million, but it’s not clear if that’s present value or over time, and anyway the whole thing is just a guess at how much will be spent at area hotels in the future and what it’ll be spent on is still TBD, but suffice to say there’s a slush fund now should anyone want to tap it.
  • St. Paul Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher says city officials want to spend “several hundred million” dollars on upgrading the Minnesota Wild‘s arena, and when he says wants to spend, he means he wants the state to spend it, not his city. The Wild’s current 23-year-old arena is “aging,” reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and while it’s true that all 23-year-olds are aging just like the rest of us, that’s not usually what the word means.
  • Utah Jazz ownership is exploring building a new arena and entertainment district south of Salt Lake City, and city officials are already preparing a counteroffer to keep the Jazz downtown, playing different parts of a metro area off against each other in a bidding war is absolutely the flavor of the month.
  • As Hamilton County prepares to spend another $39 million on upgrades to the Cincinnati Bengals stadium under their infamous state-of-the-art clause, county board of commissioner president Alicia Reece says she’d like the team’s next lease to require the team owners to pay more of the costs than the 4% they’ve kicked in so far: “You need to put some skin in the game for our team. Give us some respect.” No official word yet on whether Bengals ownership will be insisting on a no-respect clause in any new lease.
  • Tampa Bay Rays co-president Brian Auld says team officials won’t agree to accept $600 million in public money for a new stadium if it would require changing the name to the St. Petersburg Rays because they “want to make sure that this entire project screams inclusive welcomeness.” That’s it, perfect sentence, no notes.
  • I guess “Experts disagree on economic impact of 2023 Super Bowl in Arizona” is better than just reporting the bogus economic impact claims in a press release without rejoinder, but it’s still bothsidesing when the weight of the actual evidence is that the actual impact is a tiny fraction of what the NFL claims.
  • What will the Baltimore Ravens owners be spending their $600 million-and-more in state subsidies on? For starters, a bunch of high-end clubs including an “ultra-premium field-level experience” connecting  to an “exclusive members-only club featuring a speakeasy.” No reports yet on whether it will include a fire pit where well-heeled fans can actually burn taxpayer money.
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Friday roundup: Oakland sends MLB owners gift boxes, personalized baseball cards to forestall A’s Vegas move

access_time personNeil deMause

As we come to the end of another programming week, let’s pause briefly to wish a happy 25th birthday to Good Jobs First, the corporate subsidy watch group that Greg LeRoy founded the same year Field of Schemes launched. Neither this site nor our book would exist without LeRoy, whose 1994 report “No More Candy Store” was a constant reference as we got up to speed on the then-new phenomenon of companies, whether sports teams or auto plants or computer chip factories, demanding giant piles of public cash in exchange for relocating to or remaining in a city. Happy birthday, GJF, and I hope neither of us still needs to be doing this another 25 years from now.

And now, the news:

  • With MLB owners preparing to vote on whether to approve the Oakland A’s relocation to Las Vegas, opponents are turning up the pressure to try to get eight owners out of 30 to vote “no.” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao sent a letter to 15 potentially swayable owners on Wednesday, pointing out that her city is offering more than $900 million in infrastructure money for a stadium project at Howard Terminal and pointing out that owners would be giving up a potential $2 billion expansion fee in Vegas if they let John Fisher move the A’s there for free. Also included were “Stay in Oakland” gift boxes provided by a local bar apparel company named for the Oakland Coliseum’s nickname of the Last Dive Bar, which include an A’s cap, a “Summer of Sell” DVD, a “Keep the Athletics in Oakland” postcard, and a personalized baseball card for each of the 15 owners. Meanwhile, the A’s released new renderings of their planned Vegas stadium, but apparently released them only to MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who described them on an investor call as “spectacular” and left it at that. Fisher’s agreement with Tropicana Las Vegas to buy their site for his stadium is only good if MLB votes for the relocation by the end of the month, so expect a lot of dueling fruit baskets when owners meet next week.
  • Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who holds sway over spending decisions in San Antonio because San Antonio is weird, says he’s open to the idea of the Spurs moving to a new downtown arena so long as team owners do something to boost job development in the East Side location of its old arena. “We will bring exciting new projects in this area and incentivize business developments to harness the potential that exists,” said Sakai, which is awfully handwavy, so we’ll just have to wait to see if he has anything in particular in mind or this will just end up with the Spurs buying local schools some new basketball nets.
  • Here’s a report by Kansas City’s NPR station claiming that it would cost as much to repair the Royals‘ Kauffman Stadium as to built a new one, based entirely on a 2022 report by Populous, the company that is hoping to design and build the new one, nope, no conflict of interest there.
  • The Las Vegas Sphere concert arena lost almost $100 million in its first three months, LOLDolan.
  • Would it be cheaper for Baltimore to condemn and buy the Orioles rather than give them possibly $1 billion to sign a new lease? Sure, say local activists Andy Ellis and — hey, it’s Bill Marker, he was another early interview for our book, hi, Bill! Anyway, even they say the condemnation route is a longshot, but it’s still worth noting that the city has other potential responses available to O’s owner John Angelos than “Sure, how much should we make the check out for?
  • And speaking of Baltimore, here’s me being interviewed by Nestor Aparicio yesterday about the whole Orioles (and Ravens) mess, and how they’re just following the playbook that other team owners have laid out, though given that John Angelos’s dad Peter helped get the ball rolling on stadium subsidies back in the late ’80s, they can probably lay a claim to intellectual property rights.
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Slow news day leaves nation’s journalists stumping ever more desperately for new stadiums and arenas

access_time personNeil deMause

Some days it’s hard to decide what to write about here. There’s always some kind of stadium and arena news burbling beneath the surface, depending on what you consider “news,” and if I tried to write about it all every day, it would leave me no time for anything else, not to mention nothing left over for the Friday roundup, and then where would we be on Fridays? So instead I scroll through the news feed and wonder, is it worth writing about this Guardian article about the Oklahoma City Thunder?

Oklahoma City Thunder are the team of the future. But where will they play?

OKC have a host of young stars who could help them challenge for the NBA title. The only problem may be finding a long-term home

I mean, it’s a dumb premise, to be sure: The Thunder have a bunch of good young players and a pile of draft picks, but they play in an arena that is (checks) 22 years old, and it’s “a bare bones building” or maybe “a bare-bones building” (the Grauniad‘s copy editors can’t seem to decide) according to (checks) the head of the local chamber of commerce, and so CRISIS! Rehash some numbers about how much other cities have spent on NBA arenas, discuss who would pay for one in Oklahoma City (checks: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), and sum up by restating your premise (“So as fans look to a bright future for the Thunder, there remains a looming uncertainty over where the NBA’s potential next great team will actually play”), cut, that’s a wrap, time to file for your first freelance check in seven months, it’s a rough journalism market out there.

Or maybe the San Antonio Business Journal’s article about how the Spurs have one really good young player but are stuck playing in a non-downtown arena that is (checks) 21 years old thanks to “a lack of political consensus and a willingness to settle” and how there’s “increasing chatter” about a new downtown arena but no consensus or even a hint of a plan in how to pull that off” and architect Janet Marie Smith once said that getting development around a baseball stadium requires planning “to allow for that organic growth to happen” and what does this have to do with, you know what, never mind, just keep on going, there’s almost enough words here to make an article, just reach into your “conclusions” folder and pull out something like “It’s free advice that Alamo City leaders should certainly consider,” now hit publish, time to go see if there’s any breaking human resources news that is also your beat.

But maybe neither of those seems like quite enough for their own post? What, then, about D.C. councilmember Charles Allen’s cleverly contrarian op-ed “Yes, D.C. needs a stadium deal. But not at RFK“? Which turns out not to be, as the Washington Post’s headline writers seem to have thought it was, possibly without having read the whole thing, about how D.C. needs to build a Commanders stadium somewhere other than the RFK Stadium site, but rather about how what D.C. really needs isn’t a football stadium but a basketball/hockey arena to replace the one the Wizards and Capitals play in that is (checks) 25 years old and is “showing its age” in unspecified ways that don’t require spelling out in an op-ed. Anyway, if the teams moved to (checks) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, “it would send the message that we’ve given up on the downtown of the nation’s capital: Who wants to open a new store or restaurant or convert a commercial property to apartments in an empty, destabilized Chinatown?” And nothing says “stabilizing” to D.C.’s Chinatown like a new or renovated arena!

On second thought, maybe none of these are worth writing about, or asking you to read about — is it really necessary to pay attention to every slow-news-day article that the nation’s remaining news outlets throw at the wall? On the other hand, if I write about this today, then if tomorrow’s another slow news day, I can punt on posting then and just skip straight to the Friday roundup and be done for the week. That’s free advice that I should certainly consider.

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Spurs “exploring” new downtown arena, because old one hasn’t been renovated in 7 years

access_time personNeil deMause

Way back in 2001, when Orlando Magic owner Rich DeVos was looking for a new arena to replace his then-12-year-old one, I asked sports economist Rod Fort what he thought the expected shelf life was for a new stadium or arena. His tongue-in-cheek answer: “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year.”

Which brings us to the present-day San Antonio Spurs:

The San Antonio Spurs, their future suddenly brighter after landing No. 1 draft pick Victor Wembanyama, are exploring the idea of developing a downtown arena, sources say.

At the same time, the San Antonio Missions’ new owners are pushing for a new baseball stadium in the inner city…

Co-locating the teams’ facilities, the thinking goes, could bring a year-round stream of fans to the central business district, which is struggling to recover from the COVID pandemic, and touch off a wave of new restaurant and bar openings.

“The thinking” has some ’splaining to do, as even coupling an arena with a minor-league baseball stadium is unlikely to touch off a wave of anything. And given that the Spurs’ arena has only been open since 2002, and received $110 million in renovations in 2016, it seems crazy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars — of team or public money, no one’s saying yet — just to encourage a few restaurants to open. For that price, you could just pay people to open restaurants and cover their losses.

This all remains exploratory by at the moment: Eddie Aldrete, a consultant who worked on the campaign for the current arena, and who got in the San Antonio Express-News article about all this despite saying he knows nothing directly about plans by the Holt family for a new downtown arena, said, “I think they’re doing some preliminary research to see if it would make sense. They wouldn’t want to start the conversation if the math doesn’t add up.” I mean, unless the math only adds up if most of the money is coming from taxpayers, right? Then you can totally start the conversation. The Spurs’ lease isn’t up for another nine years, but the NBA could move to expand into NBA-hungry cities like Seattle as soon as 2025, so no time like the present to create leverage.

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Friday roundup: Helicopter rides for rich fans, pricey bridge prices, and why Deadspin mattered

access_time personNeil deMause

In case anyone hasn’t been following this week’s Deadspin drama, pretty much the entire staff has resigned over the past two days, following Tuesday’s decision by CEO Jim Spanfeller to fire acting editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky because the staff had responded to Spanfeller’s edict to “stick to sports” by posting a ton of excellent non-sports content. A few last posts have gone up the last couple of days, some to burn off features that were already scheduled to run and some to take classically Deadspinesque digs at management for burning down a popular website seemingly out of spite for continuing to do exactly what it had been doing for years before they bought it.

This is very bad news for journalism and America and humanity, and not only if you, like me, will miss the site’s potshots at our Big Wet President. There’s a popular notion that sports is just a fun diversion where the “outside world” of politics has no place — and that, as I hope the entire 21-year history of this site has made abundantly clear, is an extremely dangerous notion, because it means that concerns over what taxpayers are being charged for places to play sports or what athletes are being paid to play sports or who is allowed to speak out on what issues involving sports are dismissed with a Can’t we just watch the game? But games are serious — and lucrative — business, and can’t be divorced from the greater culture, any more than we should be just watching movies as pure entertainment without attention to the bigger issues involved. Deadspin was dedicated to erasing those lines and allowing its writers to address whatever they felt needed addressing at the moment, whether it was the meaning of who you’re seen sitting with at a football game or what we’re getting stuck in our rectums each year, and until and unless a successor emerges to pick up the torch, the world will be a sadder, dumber place.

(Already yesterday I read about Josh Hamilton’s arrest after his daughter said he threw a chair at her — a phrasing I owe to this excellent Deadspin non-sports article, incidentally — and wished I could read Deadspin’s analysis of it. Then I read about John Wetteland’s arrest for reportedly sexually assaulting a four-year-old child, and thought I wonder if maybe men’s sports should just be banned altogether at this point given the kind of behavior it encourages and realized Deadspin was probably my best bet for reading that take, too. It’s going to be a long however many weeks or months until something arises from Deadspin’s ashes, if that ever happens.)

Anyway, on to the weekly muddling of sports and politics:

  • The Indiana Pacers‘ arena will still be named after the bank that stopping paying for naming rights in June until the team has found a new naming-rights sponsor, which seems weird at first but actually makes total sense: It costs money to change the signage so why do it twice, and also the value of naming rights goes down with each new iteration of a corporate moniker that dilutes the name’s image for the public — quick, tell me what the Oakland Coliseum’s official name is these days — so calling it “Pacers Arena” or whatever for a few months might get fans to start calling it that permanently, and we can’t have that. And if you’re wondering why the Pacers get to sell naming rights to a building that was built entirely with public dollars and is owned by the public: It’s Indianapolis, Jake.
  • St. Louis’s new MLS stadium finally has a site picked out — Market Street near Union Station, if you’re scoring at home — and new renderings as well, though they look pretty much like the old renderings except for the one that is just a closeup of a kid riding on his parent’s (?) shoulders. The state of Missouri has received approval to sell 22 acres of land for the stadium to the city’s Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, which will then lease it to the MLS team for … oh, that doesn’t seem to have been reported. Just look at the pretty pictures and don’t worry your head about that nasty money business.
  • A public city database in Atlanta is indicating that the city’s $23 million pedestrian bridge for the Falcons actually cost $41.7 million, but the city insists it’s really just that they entered the same checks multiple times. I’m not sure “spent $23 million on a pedestrian bridge for a football team and also can’t do basic bookkeeping” looks much better, honestly.
  • The San Antonio Spurs — whose mascot is for some reason a kangaroo, is that a kangaroo? — have installed four new helipads so that fans can buy helicopter rides to games, which really tells you everything you need to know about 1) who sports teams are interested in marketing to these days and 2) just how ridiculously much money rich people in America have to burn these days.
  • Fresno FC owner Ray Beshoff has declared he “will almost certainly be relocating the team” because he hasn’t been provided with a new soccer-only stadium, unless “in the next two or three weeks if people come to the table with ideas or suggestions that we think are tenable.” This will come as a huge shock to fans who’ve been dedicated followers of the USL team since (looks up team on Wikipedia) March of 2018.
  • The San Francisco 49ers are raising ticket prices by 13% but giving season ticket holders free food and soda, which I guess means 49ers fans will be spending most of games from now on pigging out on all-you-can-eat nachos instead of watching the action on the field. Also, you can’t get the free food if you buy tickets on the secondary market, only if you’re the original season ticket holder. Or, I guess, borrow the season ticket holder’s free-food card? Or have a season ticket holder go up to the counter for you and get your nachos? I don’t live anywhere near Santa Clara and hate football, but I am very excited at seeing how fans figure out how to game this system.
  • Still nobody is sure which minor-league teams MLB will threaten to eliminate as part of its plan to restrict minor-league affiliates, or what criteria MLB will use for deciding who shall live and who shall die or whether MLB is even serious or just trying to scare minor-league players into not demanding they be paid minimum wage. I really should write about this for Deadsp — crap.
  • It rained at the Buffalo Bills game last weekend, so a local country music station ran a poll asking listeners: “Would you be in favor of a roof stadium or no?” Not included: any mention of what a roof would cost, or what WYRK has against the word “roofed.”
  • The corporate newspaper that helped gut a free daily by selling it to people who immediately laid off most of the editorial staff ran an article this week asking if the new New York Islanders arena will make it harder for the nearby Nassau Coliseum to draw events, but I’m not going to link to a union-busting-enabling outlet that put the article behind a paywall anyway, so let me just answer the question here: Duh, yes!
  • A former assistant to Inglewood Mayor James Butts has changed her testimony in the lawsuit against the Los Angeles Clippers‘ proposed arena, and Inglewood officials are asking that her revised testimony be rejected because they say she’s in “cahoots” with Madison Square Garden, which opposes the arena because it doesn’t want competition for its own arena nearby. Elephants, man.
  • The DreamHouse New Mexico Bowl has been canceled, because alleged film production company and title sponsor DreamHouse turns out not to exist, but rather to be a scam perpetrated by “a relentless self promoter who lies about nearly everything he says he does.”
  • A giant water droplet named Wendy has made a video suggesting that Washington’s NFL team should move back within city limits. Sorry, Sean Doolittle, this is actually the most 2019 Washington thing ever.
  • The Sunshine Coast Pickleball Association is seeking funding from the city of Sechelt for a new pickleball stadium. I don’t actually know where Sechelt is and am only dimly aware of what pickleball is, and I’m not going to ruin the perfect sentence above by looking either thing up.
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Spurs could fight Raiders move to San Antonio, unless they’re cut in on the deal

access_time personNeil deMause

Now this is getting interesting: Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis may or may not be serious about considering moving his team to San Antonio, but regardless, apparently the city’s existing major pro sports team is agin’ it:

In the wake of Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis’ whirlwind tour of San Antonio, sources with knowledge of the visit said Spurs Sports & Entertainment would be against the Raiders, as they are currently structured, relocating to South Texas…

Spurs shareholder Charlie Amato indicated that SS&E harbors concerns about its long-term financial health should it be forced to compete with another major league franchise for sponsorships, suite sales and ticket sales.

The solution, Amato said, would be for SS&E to have controlling interest in the Raiders or perhaps any other major league franchise that wanted to move to San Antonio.

This could mean just about anything: That the Spurs owners genuinely want to block an NFL franchise from coming to town, that they’re just angling to get a piece of any such team (after all, if the town’s really not big enough for two teams in terms of corporate sponsorships, how would having them both owned by the same people help?), or that Amato is just mouthing off and doesn’t really speak for SS&E. Regardless, it’s potentially a major stumbling block to a Raiders relocation, since if there’s one thing that can contest the political clout of the 800-pound gorilla that is a pro sports team, it’s another 800-pound gorilla.

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Field of Schemes