Category: Baltimore Ravens

Friday roundup: Rays promise “intimate” stadium with ginormous upper deck, Cleveland running out of tax money to pay for Cavs and Guardians upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)

  • Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
  • Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
  • Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
  • I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
  • A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
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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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Inside the Ravens lease: Maryland taxpayers on hook for potentially endless stadium upgrades, including rebuilding from scratch if necessary

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to the quick work of the Maryland Stadium Authority’s public records request officers, I now have a copy of the Baltimore Ravens‘ new 15-year lease extension that they’ve agreed to sign in exchange for getting to tap into $600 million (and up — more on that in a second) in state funds for stadium upgrades. Let’s dive in and see if it can help us answer some of the questions that were left unanswered when the lease deal was officially announced last week:

Is this really $600 million in state spending as originally announced last April, or could it be a whole lot more?

Section 7.01 specifies that the MSA can “have outstanding at any one (1) time up to Six Hundred Million and No/100 Dollars ($600,000,000.00)” in bonds. So that confirms what was first reported last September: As old bonds are paid off, the state can turn around and sell new ones so long as the total debt stays under $600 million, making this a virtually bottomless pool of money that the Ravens owners can access. (If you’re wondering what this looks like in practice, see the entire career of Robert Moses, which relied heavily on establishing a debt cap and then spending the same money as many times as he saw fit, without ever having to go back to ask the government to allocate more.)

What kind of capital projects will the Ravens owners be allowed to use the state money for? And will they be allowed to use that to cover items that they would otherwise have to spend their own money on as maintenance costs?

The actual list of what state money will be spent on will, it appears, be decided jointly by the Ravens owners and the MSA, neither of whom have any incentive to be conservative about doling out state cash, since the bottomless slush fund is already sitting there. The lease does, however, spell out in particular a list of “Initial Capital Works” already agreed on, which runs for four pages (see Exhibit 4 at the end of the lease) and includes: new “fan hospitality structures,” a new parking garage, “enhanced suite level lobbies,” new audio and video and “branding” on the concessions concourses, new carpeting and furniture in the stadium clubs, moving the press box to the top of the stadium and replacing it with new private suites, replacing elevators and HVAC, upgrading all the video production facilities to 4k, new ribbon ad boards, and a whole lot more.

As for whether that will enable the team owners to skimp on maintenance: Probably, if only because you don’t have to repair old elevators when you can replace them with new ones. There’s also a requirement that if the stadium is “damaged or destroyed in whole or in part by any Casualty,” the state is on the hook for rebuilding it, and while I’m not saying Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti would resort to blowing up his own stadium in order to get a brand-new one, the past history of NFL owners probably means we shouldn’t entirely rule it out.

Will the Ravens owner be outright prohibited from moving the team for the next 15 years, or just have to pay a penalty if they do so?

If the Ravens try to leave — termed “relocation default” in the lease — the MSA can either seek a court injunction to stop it or force the team to pay liquidated damages. That’s fairly solid, but obviously it’d be up to the courts to determine whether the team could be forced to stay, or exactly what the team owners would have to pay if they did skip town.

Since the lease won’t be allowed to expire while there are still outstanding stadium bonds, does this mean the stadium bonds will need to be short-term ones, no longer than 15 years? Or that the team will be tied to Baltimore for longer if the MSA decides to sell longer-term bonds?

The term of the lease is 15 years, full stop, “unless earlier terminated or extended,” so it’s not like the Ravens can be forced to stay indefinitely while the bonds aren’t yet paid off \. There is a clause saying that “in no event shall any Bond Maturity Date extend beyond the then-current Expiration Date,” so from the sound of things any new expenses incurred toward the end of the lease will need to be funded by super-short-term bonds — which would create a lot of pressure on the state budget to pay them off fast with higher annual payments.

Add it all up, and there’s a little bit of “not quite as bad as it could be” along with a whole lot of “yep, just as godawful as we were afraid of.” I am not enough of a bond expert to guesstimate how much money Maryland taxpayers could be out in total by the time all the self-replenishing bonds are sold and re-sold, but it seems likely it could easily cross the $1 billion threshold, especially if the Ravens do a five- or ten-year lease renewal that would give them more time to request additional spending. And even at just $600 million for 15 years, we’re talking the most expensive per-year lease extension subsidy in sports history — all for new carpets and “hospitality structures” that will get well-heeled fans to open their wallets to pay the Ravens owners more for club access. Being an NFL owner is nice work if you can get it, let’s just leave it at that.

 

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Friday roundup: Ravens lease extension would be priciest ever, Royals could be right behind

access_time personNeil deMause

Four full-length posts in three work days already this week, and still there’s more news that got left out! Guess 2023 isn’t going to lack for sports subsidy shenanigans after an eventful 2022, even if the U.S. House spends the entire year trying to figure out how to swear its members in.

While we all wait for noon to tune back in to C-SPAN, some bullet points to keep us occupied:

  • Did I neglect to mention in yesterday’s report on the Baltimore Ravens lease extension that at 15 years in exchange for $600 million in renovation money, the $40 million a year cost makes it the most expensive sports team lease extension in history, blowing past the New Orleans Saints‘ $30 million a year and the Indiana Pacers‘ $24 million a year? To make up for that, you can hear (and watch a slightly blurry) me expound on it at length to WNST’s Nestor Aparicio. (In other Ravens news, my request to the Maryland Stadium Authority for an actual copy of the team’s new lease was met with a reply of “Thank you for contacting the Maryland Stadium Authority. This email acknowledges receipt of your public information act request,” so it may be a while before we get to see that.)
  • The Kansas City Star editorial board, after stumping for a new downtown stadium for the Royals, now warns “there is much we don’t know about the plan.” You mean who would pay for the possibly $1-billion-plus in construction costs that Royals owner John Sherman doesn’t want to cover? Yes, that, but mostly the team needs to vow to stay put for 30 years or else “voters will rightly reject any tax for the ballpark.” That would be, as you know if you didn’t skip past the bullet point just above and can do simple math, one of the priciest lease per-year lease extensions in sports history, but the Star editors are apparently all about defining success downwards.
  • Louisville City F.C. got a bunch of money from the city for a new soccer stadium in 2017, with promises that new development around the stadium would generate enough new property taxes to make it a win-win. You can probably guess how this is going, but in case you’re a rose-colored-glasses wearer who somehow stumbled onto this site, here’s a WDRB article with lots of photos of the stadium surrounded by nothing but empty lots, plus team co-owner Tim Mulloy talking vaguely about how “we’re sitting on a couple of opportunities right now that we’re very excited about.”
  • City leaders in Augusta, Georgia want to build a new arena for concerts (and, I guess, a minor-league hockey or basketball team if the city ever gets one again) and pay for it with a 0.5% sales tax hike, which Mayor Pro-Tem Brandon Garrett says is a great idea because it “takes much of the burden off of property tax owners and puts the burden on sales tax.” That’ll be great news for the 53% of Augusta households that are homeowners, and somewhat less good news for the 100% of Augusta households that pay sales tax; guess Garrett hasn’t learned about tax regressivity during his formative time as a billboard sales manager.

 

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Maryland approves Ravens lease extension in exchange for $600m in renovation cash, details still hazier than one would like when $600m is at stake

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected, the Maryland Board of Public Works — aka outgoing governor Larry Hogan, outgoing comptroller Peter Franchot, and treasurer Dereck Davis — voted unanimously yesterday to approve a 15-year lease extension for the Baltimore Ravens under which the team will continue to pay no rent, and will get access to a $600 million–plus state fund for stadium upgrades. When news of this first emerged earlier this week, we asked exactly how the Ravens would be allowed to tap that slush fund, whether they could use it to offset their maintenance and operating costs, and what this would mean for the owners of the Orioles, who are seeking their own lease extension and similarly sized slush fund, among other things. So let’s take a look at the actual meeting minutes and see what they say:

The General Assembly passed House Bill 896 (enacted as Chapter 60, Acts of 2022) which among other things, increased the [Maryland Stadium] Authority’s bond issuing authority for sports facilities at Camden Yards to $1.2 billion, to be evenly split between the baseball and football stadiums and facilities directly related to the use or operation of each. The new law requires the Comptroller to distribute up to $90 million annually to the Authority for payment of debt service on bonds for the stadiums (up to $45 million per year for debt service for each stadium).

Okay, most of this we knew: The state already approved the extra $600 million apiece for the Ravens and the Orioles. If the annual payments from the state are capped at $90 million, that would seem to limit the size of the slush funds — which otherwise can be replenished with new bond sales as the old ones are paid down — but then, the MSA has other money on hand, so maybe it actually wouldn’t.

Amended § 10-644 of the Economic Development Article of the Code requires as a condition precedent to issuing bonds for either stadium, that the Authority shall have negotiated a lease or a renewal or extension of a lease, approved by the Board of Public Works, that will not terminate prior to the maturity date or payoff of any bonds issued for the stadium.

Aka “nobody gets any money until they sign a lease extension.”

In no event shall the term expire before the maturity date of any bonds issued.

So, all of the stadium bonds will need to be short-term ones, no longer than 15 years, and likely a good bit less if the Ravens owners don’t decide on $600 million in renovations immediately? Or the Ravens will be tied to Baltimore for longer if the MSA decides to sell longer-term bonds? This language is not entirely helpful, and since the minutes don’t include the actual lease language, it’s hard to say for sure what this means.

Capital works projects that will be eligible for use of bond proceeds are described.

Funds for emergency repairs and certain capital works at the stadium are established, with required contributions specified.

Likewise, these would be good descriptions to actually include in the minutes, not just point to with a “see other document not included.” In particular, it would be nice to know who will be contributing what to the “funds for emergency repairs,” since repairs are one of the few things that the Ravens ownership are normally required by their lease to pay for.

The Ravens may not relocate. In the event of a relocation default, the Authority shall have the right to pursue all legal remedies, including but not limited to recovery of liquidated damages tied to the amount of any outstanding bonds.

That second sentence does not, in fact, mean “the Ravens may not relocate,” but rather “if the Ravens move in the next 15 years, they’ll have to at least repay the remaining bond debt.” That sounds like a big penalty now, but if the team wants to move in, say, year 13 or 14 — or just threaten to in order to get more public money — covering a couple of years of bond payments isn’t likely to be a huge obstacle.

I’ve reached out to the MSA to see if it’s possible to get the actual lease language, and will report back here if it turns up and answers any of these burning questions. I’m also going to be on Baltimore’s WNST today at 10 am ET, if you feel like tuning in to hear us discuss the known unknowns.

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Ravens set to keep paying zero rent in exchange for $600m+ in state renovation money

access_time personNeil deMause

The Baltimore Ravens renovation subsidy deal has followed a weird path, as these things go: First, last April, the Maryland state legislature approved $600 million in bonding capacity for future Ravens upgrades, along with $600 million for the Orioles, $400 million towards infrastructure around the existing Washington Commanders stadium, and $200 million for minor-league baseball stadiums, all without any specifics on what the money would be spent on. Then it turned out that the money was just a slush fund — a slush fund that wasn’t limited to $600 million per team, because as one round of bonds is paid off, the state can sell new ones to fund more renovations — and that the actual specifics would be negotiated once the team owners agreed to lease extensions.

Now the Maryland Board of Public Works, which consists of the governor and state treasurer and comptroller, is set to vote tomorrow on a 15-year Ravens lease extension with two five-year options:

The Board of Public Works agenda item noted that the new agreement was negotiated “in anticipation” of a request that the board issue bonds “for improvements and renovations to the football stadium in the near future.”…

Both [Ravens spokesperson Chad] Steele and the stadium authority declined to specify what improvements the Ravens have planned.

Um? So it seems that the Baltimore stadium slush funds really will be just unlimited, unspecified slush funds: In exchange for sticking around for another 15-25 years, the Ravens will get to spend at least $600 million in state money on (from the bond bill) “the preparation, relocation, demolition and removal, construction, renovation, and related expenses for construction management, professional fees, and contingencies” related to sports facilities at Camden Yards. Neither the Baltimore Sun nor the Baltimore Banner mentioned in their coverage how the state stadium authority would decide what to let the Ravens spend the money on, or if the state will be required in the lease to fund anything the Ravens ask for that falls into those broad categories.

For their part, the Ravens owners will continue to pay $0 a year rent while collecting all revenues from their state-built and -owned stadium, though they will keep paying for maintenance and operating expenses — something that raises red flags when you consider that they’ll potentially be able to get out of some maintenance costs by simply renovating away the item in question and billing the state for it. One hopes there would be something in the lease preventing this kind of loophole, but since the Board of Public Works’ posted meeting documents don’t include the actual lease, just a summary, there’s no way to know for sure yet.

The Orioles owners, meanwhile, are working on their own lease extension in exchange for their own renovation slush fund, but haven’t gotten there yet. Could the fact that the O’s current lease is different — the team pays rent, but not maintenance and operations, a holdover of it having been set up before the 1986 Tax Reform Act made it harder to sell federally subsidized stadium bonds that would in part be paid off by team rent — be making the Angelos family look for ways to find a comparable loophole to the Ravens? We’re deep into speculation here, but it’s worth asking, if anyone covering tomorrow’s vote has the time and energy to ask any questions. I know it’s a lot to expect, but it is kind of what journalism is all about.

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Friday roundup: Billionaires all over get cash for their stadiums and arenas and car plants and movie shoots (I got a rock)

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! Ready for a heaping helping of news about America’s elected officials and business leaders working together to ensure smart investments of public dollars that will build a better tomorrow? If so, I am sorry to inform you that you have accidentally clicked on the wrong website, but if you stick around you may be rewarded with some grim laughs, or at least some links to old comic strips.

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$1.2B slush fund for Orioles and Ravens may actually be bottomless

access_time personNeil deMause

There hasn’t been much new detail on the state of Maryland’s $1.2 billion stadium slush fund for the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens since it was passed in April and then revealed that actually spending the money was contingent on new leases. But a report by The Center Square, the conservative news service formerly known as Watchdog, sheds a little more light on the situation, sort of:

In April, Tom Kelso, chairman of the Maryland Stadium Authority, in an exclusive interview with The Center Square, said he viewed the bills “as evergreen.”

“We don’t anticipate spending $600 million at one time on either stadium,” Kelso said at the time. “You would get to that level as projects are conceived, developed, and built, but it would take several years of upgrading and reinvest. In a larger concept, reinventing portions of the stadium. Every time there is a new bond issue, the lease would have to be extended to last as long as the bond for the most recent project.

“It is not a one-time, $1.2 billion expense. It allows the stadium authority to borrow up to $1.2 million. As those bonds are paid down, it creates the capacity to borrow back again.”

The article ends there, so we’re left to read between the lines on a bunch of things:

  • If the state doesn’t “anticipate spending $600 million at one time on either stadium,” then are we to understand that it’s still up for negotiation how much money the Orioles and Ravens owners would get in exchange for a lease extension? (The MSA promised to “inform the citizens and taxpayers of Maryland when each agreement is completed and presented for approval,” which, uh, yeah, that’s the minimum required by law, to reveal proposals once they’re being voted on.) Shouldn’t these negotiations be a bigger deal for public discussion, since giving a team owner, say, $500 million for a ten-year extension is very different from $50 million for a 50-year extension?
  • “Every time there is a new bond issue, the lease would have to be extended to last as long as the bond for the most recent project.” So the lease extension will be based on how long the financing of the bonds lasts? That seems exceptionally dumb — as anyone who’s bought a home knows, how long you take to pay it off is purely a bookkeeping question around whether you’d get your payments out of the way fast or spread them out over time, and has nothing to do with how long you plan on living there — and would seem to encourage the team owners to want as much money in each bond issuance as possible, if it’s going to require the same length of lease extension in exchange.
  • “As those bonds are paid down, it creates the capacity to borrow back again.” So it’s not $1.2 billion in bonds, it’s a permanent revolving fund with a $1.2 billion cap? Let’s go to the bill itself:

    Unless authorized by the General Assembly, the Board of Public Works may not approve an issuance by the Authority of bonds for sports facilities at Camden Yards, whether taxable or tax exempt, that constitute tax supported debt if, after the issuance, there would be outstanding and unpaid $1,200,000,000 face amount of bonds for the purpose of financing the preparation, relocation, demolition and removal, construction, renovation, and related expenses for construction management, professional fees, and contingencies of sports facilities at Camden Yards.

    That is indeed what it seems to be saying, then, but it’s not at all clear what limits, if any, the MSA has on issuing bonds so long as it doesn’t have more than $1.2 billion in stadium debt outstanding. (Presumably it can’t sell more bonds than it can pay off with lottery proceeds, right?) So there’s no easy way to say precisely how big the Orioles and Ravens stadium slush fund is, but “more than $1.2 billion, maybe a lot more” seems like a reasonable conclusion.

So there’s some potential good here — the state of Maryland hasn’t committed to spend $1.2 billion on Orioles and Ravens stadium renovations just yet — and some potential bad — the limit on state spending on the two teams isn’t actually $1.2 billion, it is, apparently, the sky. Once again, if there are any journalists still rattling around the Baltimore area who are allowed to write about actual news, this would be well worth investigating further, preferably before the endless money pipeline gets up and rolling.

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Friday roundup: A’s stadium plan gets a win, Maryland’s “pro-stupid” ticket kickbacks, and, oh yeah, the death of democracy

access_time personNeil deMause

Some of you, if you read here back in April about New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s commitment of $1 billion in public money to a new Buffalo Bills stadium and about how New Yorkers of all stripes were overwhelmingly opposed to it, may have wondered if handing over tax money to billionaires would come back to haunt Hochul at election time. Well, the Democratic gubernatorial primary was this week, and: Not so much, as Hochul won in a landslide over challengers Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi, who both criticized the stadium deal, if mostly after the fact.

This is one of the big questions about stadium deals: If voters generally don’t like them, why do they keep electing politicians who do? I explored this in my latest article this week for Global Sport Matters, and the answer is money is more powerful than people, mostly:

So why are politicians so quick to kowtow to team owners’ requests, even against the wishes of their own constituents? [Villanova University sociology professor Rick] Eckstein says he thinks they probably fear the loss of campaign funding more than the loss of votes, especially when, with enough campaign funding, you can just run ad campaigns to win those voters back…

The unrelenting pressure on legislators is only heightened by the sports media, which can make a stadium deal seem more important than shown by objective data, whether economic impact figures or polling numbers. “There’s this complete misconception of how popular sports is,” Eckstein says. Nearly half of Americans don’t consider themselves sports fans, he notes — but those who do are more likely to be male and have high incomes. “It’s important to people who happen to have more money, more power, more resources,” he says.

Those damn elected officials, always chasing the next buck! Good thing our system of democracy has checks and balances so that other branches of government can counter those with deep pockets who want to run roughshod over public opinion — er, never mind.

On that sobering note, here’s the rest of the week’s news:

  • The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission voted 23-2 last night to remove Howard Terminal’s designation as a port facility, which opens the door for Oakland A’s owner John Fisher to use it for a stadium-centered development project. This is being called a huge — sorry, HUGE — win for Fisher, and it is in that without it he would have had to give up on his Howard Terminal stadium plans. But it’s also not entirely unexpected, and anyway the commission didn’t actually approve his stadium plans, just approved allowing him to apply for a permit for them, plus he still needs final approval from the city council and for someone to find $360 million under sofa cushions to pay for the rest of the traffic upgrades Fisher wants. Easy-peasy!
  • Hey, remember when the state of Maryland gave the Baltimore Orioles owners (whoever that turns out to be) $4.5 million from the state’s share of Paul McCartney tickets for no good reason? Then you will perhaps enjoy the news that the Maryland Stadium Authority has now given the Baltimore Ravens owner $150,000 from an Arsenal-Everton soccer friendly match for no good reason. Maryland Treasurer Dereck Davis says he’s “seriously considering” asking for legislation that would prohibit the authority from doing this stuff, adding, “There’s a difference between being pro-business and being pro-stupid. And I’m not pro-stupid.”
  • Tennessee already approved state sales tax kickbacks for a new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium, and now it’s time for the Lookouts owners to drop their other planning shoe: the announcement of an $89-94 million stadium that would get $79.4 million in tax money, including both those sales taxes and also a tax-increment financing district to kick back property taxes from the area around the stadium as well. The Lookouts would pay rent starting at $1 million a year plus cover maintenance costs, which team co-owner Jason Freier called “extraordinarily high for a minor league team” and which Mister Math says would still only be a small fraction of his stadium costs, so quit doth protesting too much, hmm?
  • Could the Chicago Bears owners build a minor-league baseball stadium to host “four to six teams of undrafted college players” (read: unpaid player-interns) next to their new Arlington Heights football stadium? Do they really even have the money to build the football stadium? Nobody’s saying, but that won’t stop the Chicago Tribune from speculating wildly, that’s just what journalism is now.
  • A developer in San Antonio is looking to buy land for building a baseball stadium, which would be paid for by … nobody actually knows, nor does anyone know whether this would be for a potential MLB team or for the minor-league Missions, the article just ends there, this is also just what journalism is now. See what Rick Eckstein means?
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Maryland approves $1.8B in stadium subsidies one day after New York approves $1B in stadium subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

Anyhoo, time to come down from the daily Buffalo Bills watch and take some time to decompress from the mad rush to a billion-dollar-plus subsidy in under two weeks, let’s take a look at today’s news for WHAT TH—

I am pleased to announce that over this weekend and on the eve of Opening Day in Baltimore, the Maryland State legislature passed an historic initiative committing $1.2 billion in public funding from the State of Maryland for reinvestment in and reimagination of the Camden Yards Sports Complex. This marks the second-largest public commitment of funding to a Major League Baseball public-private sports partnership, second only to the 2009 construction of the new Yankee Stadium.

That’s an oddly phrased flex, Baltimore Orioles CEO John Angelos — “We got the public to cough up more money than anytime since the Yankees snookered New York out of even more” — but the basics of it are more or less accurate: The Maryland legislature over the weekend approved $600 million in bond capacity for renovations to the Orioles’ stadium, and another $600 million for renovations to the Ravens‘ stadium. They also okayed $400 million for “infrastructure” around the Washington Commanders‘ stadium in Prince George’s County, though according to the Washington Post, “early conversations between the county and the stadium authority” would “curtail” the cash from being used for things like team offices and a training center; and also approved $200 million in minor-league baseball stadium money, because it wouldn’t be fair to leave the Delmarva Shorebirds out of the fun.

What will the Orioles and Ravens owners do with their loot, given that both have stadiums that are well-liked and are 30 and 24 years old, respectively? They don’t know yet, and they don’t have to know: The legislature didn’t approve bonds for anything in particular, it just granted the Maryland Stadium Authority the right to sell $1.8 billion in bonds for stadium thingies, to be repaid by future state proceeds from lottery ticket sales. (Or, if people stop buying lottery tickets between now and 2052, state general funds. Gamble like your state finances depend on it, Marylanders!) It’s a set of stadium slush funds, in other words, that the teams can draw from for whatever they like — any Commanders curtailment by the county excepted — so long as the Maryland Stadium Authority approves. (Spoiler: The Maryland Stadium Authority will approve.)

The Maryland stadium deals share more in common with the Bills deal than just a billion-dollar-plus price tag: In both cases, governors pushed through legislation in a matter of days at the tail end of the legislative session with little public debate. The Bills subsidy has its slush-fundy aspects, too — New York state’s “maintenance” funding can be spent on things like security costs if the Bills owners want. (Spoiler: The Bills owners will want.)

It wasn’t that long ago that people were legitimately asking whether the golden age of stadium subsidies had passed, now that Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke had built a multi-billion-dollar stadium largely with his own money, and the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A’s owners were struggling to get public cash for their stadium dreams. Then, in one weekend, upwards of $2 billion in government money went toward paying for goodies for billionaire sports team owners. I think it’s fair to say that we’re only going to see more stadium demands from other team owners in the near future: The ante has been upped, and the only thing that can stop this or even slow it down is if the nation’s legislative officials collectively put their hands on the public purse. (Spoiler: … you know.)

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