Category: NFL

Friday roundup: Hamilton County spends $30m on Bengals parking land, Oakland Coliseum may get second life as soccer venue

access_time personNeil deMause

Note to reporters seeking help with your research into sports economics issues: I’m more than happy to talk with journalists from all over the political spectrum, as the great stadium swindle is, as has been discussed here time and again, one that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a monopoly on. But if you’re asking for my assistance, maybe don’t include a link to a page with a report your site did saying anti-trans legislation is about “banning males from competing on female sports teams” — if you can’t keep at least one foot on the ground of factual accuracy, what you’re doing isn’t journalism.

Speaking of factual accuracy, here’s your weekly news roundup, fact-checked as well as I can do myself while my fact-checking department is, apparently, out on a long lunch or something:

  • Hamilton County may still be negotiating a lease extension with the owners of the Cincinnati Bengals, but that hasn’t stopped the county from spending $30 million to buy a parcel of land next to the Bengals stadium to use as additional parking and green space. “The Bengals have forgiven us for our [game day] payments,” explained Hamilton County Commission president Denise Driehaus. “It’s about $30 million total. That happened to be the asking price for this property. And so, in essence, the Bengals are paying for the property, and the county owns it.” That “in essence” is doing a lot of work there: From what I can tell from this report, it was back in 2018 Bengals management first agreed to hand over the disputed game day payments, which is money the team owners wanted the county to provide to cover operational costs of holding home games, in exchange for parking — though if they were “disputed” it’s not clear that this was ever team money to begin with.
  • Remember how, just last month, the owners of the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer teams said they wanted to build a temporary stadium before maybe eventually moving to a permanent stadium at Howard Terminal? Forget all that, they were just pulling our legs, now they want to remain at the Oakland Coliseum for “a longer stay.” Guess resident opossums are only an existential threat to baseball teams, not soccer teams?
  • Your occasional reminder that when the Los Angeles Dodgers owners do renovations to their stadium, they spend their own money on it. That likely has something to do with the fact that they have some of the highest attendance numbers and highest ticket prices in baseball, so they benefit the most from upgrades — though it does raise the question of whether, if less popular teams are asking to be subsidized for renovations that won’t pay for themselves, if that’s really about needing renovations or just wanting an excuse to ask for taxpayer money.
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren has upgraded from “steadfast” to “adamant” that his team will break ground on a new stadium in 2025. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
  • The St. Petersburg city council has approved funding for the repair of … Al Lang Stadium! The Tampa Bay Rowdies, who play at Al Lang, are owned by Rays owner Stu Sternberg, so at least St. Pete officials can’t be said to be holding a grudge.
  • The Super Bowl’s coming to New Orleans, everyone get ready to benefit from that cushy NFL spending that will provide … $12/hour jobs to assemble the stage for the $10 million halftime show? Well then.
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The Bengals stadium talks have descended into dadaist poetry

access_time personNeil deMause

Negotiations between Cincinnati Bengals execs and Hamilton County on a lease extension continue, and as a bunch of emails that emerged last week reveal, they’ve been at times contentious: “It is very clear that we are talking past each other” is one typical missive. Yesterday Hamilton County commissioner Alicia Reece chimed in on the dispute, and uh:

“Our people can get in that room, come back with some changes to this lease, and have a win-win so we can present this to the taxpayers,” Reece said. “Will that be easy? No. If I’m them, I’m hugging the zero down. I’m hugging to give me all the resources. I’m hugging them. I would tell you what’s wrong with this lease. This is a good deal, but the taxpayers did speak. They did vote to have two stadiums, but they never voted for this. And this is what they’re angry about.”

Is “the zero down” a mortgage thing? A football thing? Are the people hugging it taxpayers or Bengals negotiatiors? WKRC-TV included video of Reece’s statements, and the actual transcript (transcribed by me) is only marginally clearer:

“Our people can get in a room, come back with some changes to this lease, and have a win-win and be able to present this to the taxpayers. Now, will that be easy? No. Because if I’m them, I’m hugging to the zero down. I’m hugging to give me all the resources. I’m hugging this lease. I would tell you, ‘What’s wrong with this lease? This is a good deal!’ But the taxpayers did speak. They did go to have two stadiums, but they never voted for this.” (She holds up a sheaf of papers, presumably the proposed lease.) “And this is what they’re angry about.”

With all the focus on the vibes, there’s been little revealed to the public about what’s actually being discussed for a lease extension, which is on the table because the Bengals’ historically sweetheart lease is expiring in June of next year, and the team needs to decide by this June whether to extend it by two years. (The team can extend it for four more two-year periods after that if it wants.) Reece has previously indicated her interest in putting a billion-dollar roof on the team’s stadium and maybe paying for it with state money or NFL money or who knows what. The last proposal from the Bengals negotiators that I can find is one from 2023 where the county would spend $300 million on renovations in exchange for a five-year lease extension, which at $60 million a year would be easily a new record for most expensive lease extension — and would only kick the can down the road until the year 2031. Hugging to the zero down is looking better and better.

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Have Chiefs/Royals stadium talks torpedoed K.C. border war “truce”? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

There was a lot going on yesterday, but Kansas City’s NPR station still had time to get out a big think piece — reprinted from local nonprofit news outlet The Beacon — on what the Chiefs and Royals stadium battles mean for the region’s eternal economic border war between Missouri and Kansas. How did KCUR and The Beacon do? Let’s drop in and see:

The two states had for years engaged in a bloodletting competition to lure businesses to their side of the Kansas City region — handing out lucrative incentives to move a corporate headquarters just a few miles across the state line.

These deals brought no new jobs to the region. They sacrificed millions in taxes that could have gone to hire more teachers, pave more roads or invest in public safety. They did nothing to improve the regional economy.

It was, as many called it, a race to the bottom.

So far, so good, though Kansas City is hardly alone in this regard.

Suddenly, that race came to a halt. In 2019, the governors in both states recognized the futility of these battles and agreed to stop the poaching. Since then, most economic development officials in the region say, the truce has worked.

Sort of? The 2019 truce only applied to payroll tax kickbacks, and even then was seen as fragile given that it was “binding” only until one state or the other chose to walk away, as reported at the time by oh hey look it’s KCUR!

A recent study conducted by Brookings Metro underscores why the states shouldn’t waste those resources. The study found that the Kansas City region’s economic output is almost evenly split on both sides of the state line, an anomaly among other multistate regions.

What’s more, the metro’s total GDP significantly boosts each state’s economy. Of Missouri’s total GDP, nearly a fourth comes from the Kansas City metro. Kansas, in turn, gets more than a third of its total from our region.

This is where the article starts to get weird: Kansas and Missouri shouldn’t be throwing public money to lure businesses back and forth across the state line because … the K.C. metro area is evenly split between the two states? Notably, that’s not even what the linked Brookings study says about the K.C. border war, which is the more lucid argument that “both states attempted to move jobs and businesses in the Kansas City metro area to their side of the state line, resulting in zero net new jobs for the region—at taxpayers’ expense.”

But if a place like Wyandotte County has a chance to use incentives to attract a business, why shouldn’t it? In fact, even with the truce, the county and its neighbors across the region still strike deals with businesses in nearby cities and counties.

Uhhhh, because it results in zero net new jobs for the region, at taxpayers’ expense? Also, what happened to “the truce has worked”? Can we get a fact-checker in here?

The difference today, said Greg Kindle, CEO of Wyandotte Economic Development Council, is those businesses are the first to broach the idea of a move. And even then, they aren’t, he said, asking for anything more than what the county typically gives to qualifying businesses.

Consider Mies Family Foods, a family-run business that will be moving from Missouri back to Kansas, where it got its start. Earlier this year, Mies was looking for a larger site and turned to Wyandotte County because that’s where the owners live.

The county offered Mies its standard 50 percent tax abatement. That, coupled with an attractive site near Interstates 70 and 635, was enough to convince Mies to make a $15.6 million investment and bring 51 employees to Kansas. When the abatement ends, the property will generate $200,000 a year in taxes.

“You look at that and say, does that qualify as a border war?” Kindle said. “Well, they had a connection to Kansas and wanted to move.”

Oh, okay, the county is handing out tax breaks to everyone, including companies owned by people who would want to move to your state regardless and are just happy to pocket the cash as a bonus. That’s … better? Kindle seems to be trying to go with “better,” I think?

If you’re wondering why The Beacon chose to ask the head of the local public-private pro-business advocacy group about whether giving public money to local businesses is a good idea, you clearly weren’t the editor of this piece, because that’s the only kind of source heard from here: People quoted include the CEO of K.C.’s regional business marketing arm, the CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the aforementioned Wyandotte economic development council CEO, a Kansas state official who voted to spend $28 million on the 2026 World Cup even though it’ll be held in Missouri, the CEO of K.C.’s World Cup bid group, and one of the Brookings authors. Any other experts in or critics of interstate bidding wars or the economics thereof didn’t get a call for comment, so we’re left viewing the end (?) of this truce (?) through a lens of “actually, it’s all fine, probably.”

As for the Chiefs and the Royals, though they’re the hook for the headline, they don’t make that much of an appearance in the article itself, though it does note that “on balance, the subsidies offered to major league sports franchises rarely, if ever, deliver that boost.” That’s followed, however, by a digression about how stadium employees would likely live in both states either way — true enough, but kind of beside the point if the whole issue is that paying to move businesses back and forth across state lines is a net zero for the region as a whole — and then this:

And the region, certainly, does not want to lose either the Royals or the Chiefs. [Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Joe] Reardon said that even if one or both teams move to Kansas, the truce will remain because the region will have kept its prized teams.

You heard it here first: Without tax kickbacks, the Chiefs and Royals could move to Greensboro or someplace, according to the head of the organization dedicated to obtaining tax kickbacks for its members. Great journalism, everybody — who needs meddling billionaires when we have reporters who’ve been trained to follow their lead on who is and isn’t worth talking to?

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Friday roundup: City sues Browns over Brook Park vaporstadium, Broncos go all Bears on suburban move threats

access_time personNeil deMause

Weeks keep happening, and we keep making it to the end of them! (Well, most of us.) If you ever need a break from the general state of everything, you might want to check out this other project I’m involved in, where you can immerse yourself in great live music of the recent past to gird yourself for the present. Or just experience whatever exactly this is.

Back now, all musicked up? Good, because there’s some news waiting for you and it’s not going to stay hot forever:

  • As promised, the city of Cleveland officially sued the Cleveland Browns under Ohio’s Art Modell Law this week to force team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to offer the team for sale to local owners before trying to move it to the suburb of Brook Park. The Haslams already preemptively sued to block the Modell Law, so now this will be in the hands of the courts, though it’s also in the hands of the state legislature that is being asked for maybe $1.2 billion to help build a Brook Park dome, hey guys, I think I came up with a way to save a bunch on lawyers’ fees!
  • Denver Broncos co-owner Greg Penner said Wednesday that “We haven’t ruled out anything at this point” in terms of a new or renovated stadium to replace or upgrade their 24-year-old one, adding, “We’re still looking at options on the current site, around Denver.” If that sounds suspiciously like “We’re kicking the tires of local governments to see what our leverage is,” congratulations, you’ve passed Chicago Bears 101!
  • Speaking of the Bears, Illinois house speaker Chris Welch said he might consider having the state pay for some infrastructure costs of a new NFL stadium, so long as the team owners build one at the Michael Reese Hospital site that they first rejected before saying they might reconsider. Fox 32 Chicago further reports that “Governor JB Pritzker is open to talks with the Bears regarding the Michael Reese site” (according to “sources); if the Bears execs’ plan is really “keep throwing things at various walls until we see what sticks,” this might be just the opening they’ve been hoping for — now, how to define an entire stadium as “infrastructure”?
  • The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal … I probably shouldn’t even finish this sentence, but in the interest of the completeness: Mr. Bowtie says that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg needs to find a way to get a stadium built in his current city or else sell the team, and that the situation is “not identical” to the Athletics moving out of Oakland, because Tampa-St. Pete is a large market and the Rays have a stadium offer in hand while the A’s … well, they’re just different, okay? This is probably just Rosenthal going off for his own reasons, but he does spend a bunch of time discussing how MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is taking a “different approach” with the Rays than the A’s, so there’s some chance the consummate baseball insider is sending a message on behalf of MLB leadership, in which case maybe Sternberg will take the hint and stand down from his “Thanks for the billion dollars, what else you got?” gambit.
  • Retiring Miami Mayor Francis Suarez gave a farewell speech in which he stood before the under-construction Inter Miami stadium — as well as an American flag and two John Deere tractors, because Florida — and declared the “the best sports deal in America.” Mmm, maybe not quite that actually, but we have some lovely parting gifts.
  • Remember that time San Diego almost had a floating ballpark? Wait, that was never really going to happen? Shh, it makes a great story.
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Friday roundup: Chiefs hire clown consultants for fan poll, Bears try to conjure stadium money with magic words

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”

We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.

Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:

  • Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
  •  Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
  • The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
  • Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
  • Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
  • The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
  • There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”
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Friday roundup: Browns move forward on moving forward on making plans for getting money for Brook Park dome

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to 2025! (Looks around.) Hey!

  • The Cleveland Browns owners took a major step forward toward moving to a new stadium in Brook Park by issuing a statement that they have “officially execut[ed] a clause” that will allow them to “tak[e] steps forward” to buy the land for the site. As if that’s not an indication of a promise of an intention enough, Jimmy and Dee Haslam are also planning to work with “our public partners on the project” to cover the remaining funding gap of $1.2 billion, a mere detail!
  • The Baltimore Banner has ideas for how the Orioles should spend the $600 million (plus!) in renovation money the team was gifted by the state of Maryland, and one of them is “Make Eutaw Street a year-round destination,” but it turns out Eutaw Street — the public street that is now effectively owned by the Orioles — is already open year-round, just nobody goes there. Also, maybe the Banner could have suggested its list of proposals when the state actually could have made it a condition of the taxpayer funding? Ah well, next time.
  • Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi points out that spending $91 million in public money on upgrading a public soccer field for BOS Nation F.C., while claiming it’s really to benefit city schoolkids who will get to play there when the team is on the road, is maybe a little disingenuous when nearby Lowell recently renovated its high school soccer field for just $8 million.
  • Been wishing you could read an article portraying city staffers who worked nights and weekends to get the Jacksonville Jaguars $775 million renovation subsidy done as “the real heroes” while calling it “a local government version of a two-minute drill in football” and “a hurry-up offense” and important because if hadn’t gotten done in the summer, the team’s terrible record this fall might have reduced support for the plan? The Jacksonville Daily Record has got you covered!
  • If you would like to serve on Las Vegas’ new Baseball Stadium Community Oversight Committee to oversee the Athletics stadium’s community benefits agreement, assuming the Athletics stadium is ever built and there ends up being a community benefits agreement, applications are open!
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Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”

There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:

All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.

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Cleveland mayor says he’ll enforce Modell Law over Browns’ proposed Brook Park move, let the lawyering begin!

access_time personNeil deMause

Two months after the Cleveland city council declared it was considering employing Ohio’s “Art Modell law” to block the Browns from moving to suburban Brook Park, Mayor Justin Bibb sent a letter to Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam saying, yup, he intends to do that thing:

Bibb wrote that the team has not provided an opportunity for the city or others to purchase the team, which is required by law. Bibb went on to say if the opportunity becomes available, the city plans to assemble a group of buyers or a single buyer from the area to purchase the team to prevent them from moving out of downtown.

Bibb ended the letter with a deadline, saying the team had until Jan. 9, 2025, to respond to the letter. If the Browns don’t respond or the team states that it doesn’t plan to comply with the law, the city will take “appropriate legal action.”

The Haslams have already sued in federal court to have the Modell law declared an unconstitutional violation of the federal Commerce Clause, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has filed to intervene in the Haslams’ suit on the side of enforcing the law. It’s not immediately clear what “appropriate legal action” Bibb intends to take, but clearly this is upping the legal ante here.

According to Bibb’s own letter, the Modell law applies to any “owner of a professional sports team that uses a tax-supported facility for most of its home games and receives financial assistance from the state or a political subdivision thereof,” which clearly covers the Browns, and prohibits them from “playing most of its home games elsewhere” without providing the six-month notice, which … does the six-month clock start relative to when the team announces it’s moving, or once it starts negotiating to move, or figures out where on earth to get the money for its proposed $2.4 billion stadium, or what?

Haslam Sports Group spokesperson Peter John-Baptiste issued a statement saying the team was “reviewing the correspondence from Mayor Bibb” and asserting that the Modell law and the city’s actions “create uncertainty and do not serve the interest of Greater Cleveland,” which is not exactly a legal argument. There’s going to be a lot to hash out in court, certainly.

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Friday roundup: 2024 was the year cities said “no” to stadium subsidies, and team owners said “actually, yes”

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the last weekly roundup of 2024! It was a bit of a slow week thanks to the holiday, when even team execs and elected officials (though not always journalists) tend to take a break from stadium and arena shenanigans and focus on eating overpriced peppermint bark or whatever.

It was a weird year in the sports subsidy world: Kansas City voters rejected a sales tax hike to fund stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs, only to have the team owners get the state of Kansas to approve $1.4 billion or more in public bonds for new stadiums there, though they haven’t yet committed to taking the offer; the Virginia legislature rejected a $1 billion–plus subsidy for a new Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, only to have Washington, D.C. provide more than half a billion in renovation money; Illinois state officials said repeatedly that they weren’t interested in funding a new Chicago Bears stadium, only to have team execs keep coming back with even more proposals for new stadiums; Florida elected officials rejected an already-approved Tampa Bay Rays stadium before later unrejecting it. Or maybe it’s not such a weird year, given that the two constants since the whole great stadium swindle started back in the 1980s have been the populace being steamed about huge piles of their tax money going to wealthy sports owners and the wealthy sports owners coming back with “we’re sorry to hear that, but we would still like the huge piles of money.” They will fight eternally.

But let’s look forwards, not backwards! Time to clear away the remaining news items and get ready for 2025:

  • The city of Boston signed a lease with the NWSL club BOS Nation FC to play at the city-owned White Stadium, which will be rebuilt at a cost of around $200 million, of which taxpayers will cover $91 million or more. According to Boston Business Journal, the team will “keep the bulk of revenue from matches” aside from 10% of in-stadium advertising revenues and 3% of concessions revenue, while paying $400,000 a year in rent (rising by 3% each year) and a $1-per-ticket surcharge. (The renovated stadium will also be available for use by Boston public school teams on days when BOS Nation FC doesn’t need it, though presumably they won’t need things like the restaurant and beer garden being planned for the pro team.) There is no possible way taxpayers won’t take a bath on this unless every single soccer ticket buyer spends around $1,000 on concessions, which seems a bit ambitious.
  • WJLA-TV interviewed businesses near the current Washington Commanders stadium — well, a cashier at one brunch restaurant — to find out what they think of the team maybe moving to a new stadium in D.C., and she replied: “We’re busy on Sundays. I think the Commanders fans, they bleed into our Sundays. They’re in the areas. These are popular shopping areas. Definitely probably going to see an increase post- or before the games.” Definitely probably! No need to interview anyone else, slot that in for the 6 pm news.
  • George Petak died. You know, this guy. Out of respect for his family and friends, I will not make any jokes about potential efforts to recall him from heaven.

That’s all she wrote! See you back here on Monday.

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RFK land bill sets up bidding war for Commanders, this can’t be good

access_time personNeil deMause

The budget bill that passed Congress late Friday night and forestalled a government shutdown did not include a provision handing over the RFK Stadium site to Washington, D.C., but a separate measure passed early Saturday morning, and everybody is excited! The Washington Post called it “a stunning win” and “a political miracle,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said the bill was important to “get control of this land so that we can make it productive,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (yes, that guy) called it a “historic moment for our nation’s capital,” and even Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said the bill means his state “is going to be better in the future than what it is right now” because of promises from Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris to pay for the demolition of the team’s old stadium and contribute to redevelopment of its site.

Not mentioned in any of this, of course, is who would pay how much for a new Commanders stadium, on the RFK site or elsewhere, and that’s where things get potentially dicey. Moore has said he’s looking forward to competing to keep the Commanders, and Harris is still considering sites in Virginia as well. That spells bidding war, and the last time we saw one of those in the D.C. area, it didn’t end well: Even after Virginia lawmakers turned down the Wizards and Capitals‘ demands for a billion dollars for an arena in Alexandria, D.C. officials still approved more than half a billion dollars for renovations to their current arena, apparently just out of happiness to be allowed to spend anything at all. Bowser already indicated that she’s provided unspecified concessions to Maryland politicians to get the land transfer through — could be trading an air national guard squadron, could be something else, nobody’s saying — and it’s anyone’s guess what could be offered to Harris, especially when Bowser has clown consultants claiming a Commanders stadium would be worth as much as $1.26 billion in LOLeconomic output.

None of which has anything to do with whether the RFK Stadium site makes more sense for being centrally located and easy for fans from all regions to get to, or less sense for being centrally located and a waste of valuable public land, or anything else separate from the potential subsidies, because these deals are almost invariably all about the potential subsidies. More to be revealed in the 2025 legislative sessions, no doubt.

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