Category: Chicago Bears

Friday roundup: Bears battle drags on, Blazers subsidy heats up, 15 teams now angling for Ohio unclaimed funds cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday! But because of other commitments, I’m writing this from Thursday evening! So if there’s any breaking Friday morning news, complain about it in comments, and we’ll get to it on Monday, which for me will probably be Sunday. You following all that? Doesn’t matter, just read your bullet points, they’re good for you:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Bears face choice which state’s $1B+ in cash to accept, Rays stadium plans face growing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected, the Indiana state senate gave overwhelming (45-4) final approval to a Chicago Bears stadium subsidy package yesterday, and Gov. Mike Braun signed it into law less than an hour later. This is still a very preliminary plan — we don’t know, among other things, how big a stadium tax diversion district would be, which could go a long way toward determining if Bears owner George McCaskey would receive $400 million or $1 billion or $4 billion or what in taxpayer money. With the state government having signed off, though, that decision will now be left up to an unelected state sports authority and the city of Hammond, and neither of those is likely to have the best interests of Indiana taxpayers as a whole in mind. (Not that state legislators were necessarily thinking about that either, but at least they’re supposed to, if I’m reading the representative democracy FAQs correctly.)

At the same time, an Illinois house committee responded to events across the state border by moving forward a “megaproject” bill that Bears execs have said they require for any new stadium in Arlington Heights. The bill would allow localities to exempt any project costing over $500 million from local property taxes and instead allow it to pay a lower payment in lieu of taxes rate that developers would negotiate with the local government; for projects worth over $2 billion, like the Bears stadium, the negotiated tax rate would be allowed to be as low as zero. Property tax guru Geoff Propheter estimates the value to the Bears from this measure would be about $67 million a year, which would amount to just over $1 billion in present value. (CORRECTION: Propheter emails to say the $67 million a year was already translated into present value, so this could actually be a $2 billion tax break.)

If the bill succeeds — Chicago-area legislators are trying to block it, as they would, since there’s nothing in it for their constituents — it could also, notes Jon Styf at The Center Square, lead to data centers or battery farms demanding similar tax breaks. And because the value of those projects would count toward the local tax base without paying their usual share of local taxes, other property tax owners would end up getting soaked to cover the difference — something that should put in a slightly different light Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s comments yesterday that Indiana is setting itself up for “massive increases in taxes” while Illinois is having “really positive discussions” with the Bears.

This is going to be a difficult choice for Bears execs, given that there are lots of unknowns with both states’ offers — Illinois has also still yet to decide on how much in infrastructure money to provide to an Arlington Heights Bears project — plus the question of where the Bears owners actually think it would make more sense to play in terms of selling tickets. Fortunately for McCaskey, there’s no deadline to make a decision, so he can sit back and hope the bidding war continues to escalate. For a team owner whose options only a few months ago were a rock and a hard place, to be fielding multiple billion-dollar-plus offers is a pretty impressive an accomplishment, guess leverage really does work!

And this week in the rest of the sports extortion world:

  • Members of the Tampa Sports Authority have some questions about a proposed Rays stadium, namely how the authority will staff a stadium if Gov. Ron DeSantis goes ahead with slashing the property taxes that fund its budget, where the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County would come up with about $1 billion worth of stadium funding when the county has $1.5 billion in unmet transportation needs, and whether the planned Rays complex would include any much-needed affordable housing. Replies hazy, ask again later!
  • Meanwhile, Rays officials are planning public visioning sessions for their proposed Tampa stadium project, stock up on post-it notes!
  • The Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority has asked for $100 million in state unclaimed funds money to help pay for a $400 million Columbus Blue Jackets arena upgrade, joining the Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Guardians, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Cincinnati Bengals as teams lining up to tap that state slush fund, it’s like you can’t even put out a sign reading “FREE MONIEZ!!!” anymore without billionaires lining up to take it.
  • Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told a local business and real estate conference, “We won a World Series, Stanley Cup, hosted an All Star game for MLB and MLS. We’re going to have the NFL Draft. And we will have the Super Bowl, so I think that qualifies as the sports capital.” The result was “a big ovation,” according to WTOP, though whether this is because business leaders don’t understand how sports works or will cheer anything that results in one of their number pocketing a $7 billion check is left as an exercise for the reader.
  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno determined that his team’s fans don’t care about winning by issuing a survey that didn’t including “winning” among the categories fans could pick as a priority, that’s one way to justify only signing players who are clinically dead.
  • Speaking of Jon Styf, he and I had a long talk about the proposed Bears subsidies this week in which I concluded, after seeing NFL owners’ standard stadium subsidy demands climb from $1 billion to $2-6 billion in the course of just a year, “It makes me wonder why teams don’t just ask for $10 billion or $1 trillion. Clearly it’s not like there’s any point at which legislators will start saying ‘No.’” Apologies in advance for giving them ideas.
Share this post:

Bears owner set to get multibillion-dollar Indiana stadium offer, now will he take it?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana bill to approve taxpayer funding of a new Chicago Bears stadium in Hammond passed the state house by a 95-4 vote yesterday, and it seems inevitable that it will pass the senate as well and be signed into law by Gov. Mike Braun by the end of the week. At which point … what, exactly?

Senate Bill 27, as the Indiana stadium legislation is known, would create a sports authority with the power to sign an agreement with Bears ownership to provide a huge pile of public money — hotel and food and beverage tax surcharges, a ticket tax, and property, sales, and income and other tax money from an omni-TIF district of indeterminate size — toward the construction of a new stadium. (Economist Geoff Propheter has estimated the total public cost at more than $4 billion, but also says there’s no way to truly know the full number without knowing the size of the tax diversion district.) It would be up to Bears owner George McCaskey to then decide whether to actually sign such a deal with the state, which could happen at any point in the future, at the state stadium board’s discretion; the city of Hammond would then have to vote to create the stadium tax district and the ticket tax.

Why would McCaskey turn down such a lucrative offer? Lots of reasons: He might not actually want to move the Bears so far from their fan base in Chicago’s western suburbs. He might not want to have to put up the reported $2 billion he would have to for a Hammond dome (though it’s likely he’d recoup a bunch of that via the public tax money). Or he might think he can get a better deal in Illinois.

And “better” doesn’t necessarily have to mean involving more public cash. Don’t forget that in 1999, Robert Kraft announced he was moving the New England Patriots to Hartford, Connecticut before switching gears and remaining in Massachusetts. And while it has since been reported that this happened after Kraft discovered it would take longer than he’d hoped to demolish a steam plant on the proposed stadium site, it’s also true that in the meantime he’d used the threat of a move to Connecticut both to convince the state of Massachusetts to give him a somewhat increased subsidy, as well as to arm-twist the NFL into letting big-market teams use money they would otherwise have to share with the league to instead pay for stadiums that would them to stay put in their current markets. (The NFL’s initial version of its G-3 stadium program, in fact, covered the top six TV markets at a time when Boston was #6; it was created by a committee whose chair was Robert Kraft.)

If McCaskey is just leading Indiana on in hopes of winning a bigger dowry from Illinois, he’ll get his first evidence of whether it’s working when an Illinois state committee meets tomorrow to vote on letting Arlington Heights bestow property tax breaks on a Bears stadium pr0ject. That in itself is not likely to get a stadium there done — Bears execs have insisted they also need $855 million in state money for things like new roads and commuter rail changes — unless, of course, this is another Patriots situation where the NFL owner will be happy to grab whatever concessions he can get in the place he wants. If he’s even decided what he wants, of course, and there’s no rule saying he has to until it’s time to put pen to lease paper

That’s a very long-winded way of saying that this is likely only the start of the Bears stadium battle, not the end. Do try to keep that in mind when you read headlines late this week declaring that the team’s move to Indiana is complete; we’ve seen those before, and they don’t always work out the way everyone expected.

Share this post:

Bears hedge on Illinois vs. Indiana decision as public cost of Hammond stadium remains moving target

access_time personNeil deMause

When the Illinois legislature canceled Thursday morning’s planned hearing on a property tax break bill for a Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, it turns out, it wasn’t just a bureaucratic scheduling glitch. Rather, the legislature did so at the request of Bears president Kevin Warren so that the bill could be revised — or, as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker intimated, maybe just because “Indiana had asked them to say that they’re going to move forward with the negotiations in Indiana.” (Indiana officials had demanded some kind of commitment from the Bears before moving ahead with their own stadium financing package.) Either way, the Illinois bill is supposed to be resubmitted at a new hearing later this week.

Sports Mockery claims (citing no sources whatsoever) that Bears owner George McCaskey was “livid” with Warren for committing so heavily to Indiana, leading to the Bears president issuing a statement Saturday that “we continue to work with Illinois’ leadership and appreciate the progress being made.” All of which has led to even more speculation that McCaskey and Warren are mostly trying to play the two states off against each other to drive up the level of public subsidy, which of course they are, Chicago sports owners practically invented that game.

Indiana’s state Legislative Services Agency, meanwhile, issued a fiscal impact statement on Friday that starts to spell out how much each of the tax streams for a Bears stadium in Hammond, Indiana would cost state and local taxpayers:

  • The state would create a stadium tax district in Hammond that would divert all new property tax, income tax, and sales tax within the district above what’s currently collected there to paying off the stadium, for up to the next 35 years. Since no one knows how big the district would be or what would be built within it, there’s no way to know how much this redirected tax revenue would amount to; the fiscal note observes that other similar districts in the state divert as much as $10 million a year, but then immediately adds that “the amount of revenue deposited in the fund is
    indeterminable and will depend on the plan for the designated district,” which is legislativese for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  • A 1% food and beverage tax surcharge in Lake and Porter counties, on top of the state’s 7% level, would generate an estimated $12-18 million a year, or possibly more if a stadium district leads to more local food and beverage sales.
  • Doubling the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10% would generate “at least $5.4M annually,” again possibly more if hotel stays go up thanks to a stadium.
  • A 12% ticket tax would generate about $12 million a year.

(In addition, that previously reported bit that “the stadium board will retain all revenues from operation of the capital mprovement” appears to actually mean all net tax revenues from the stadium (“all excise taxes and net income from operation of the capital improvements”), which is far less exciting than it sounded when it appeared Indiana might actually get a cut of stadium revenues.)

How much would all those redirected tax revenue streams add up to? Given all the unknowns it’s impossible to say, plus the fiscal note doesn’t indicate if and how these annual tax expenditures are expected to rise over time. Discounting the ticket tax because that mostly ends up being paid by teams, we have a baseline of around $27 million a year, which would come to around $440 million in present value; but, of course, those unknown subsidies from a stadium tax district could easily add hundreds of millions if not billions more if Indiana diverts taxes from a big enough area, as Kansas is planning on doing with its infamous 293-square-mile district for the Kansas City Chiefs.

All of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is expected to be signed off on by the Indiana legislature this week, while Illinois considers if and how to respond. Getting some more certainty about, at the very least, how big Indiana’s stadium tax district would be before holding a vote seems like the absolute bare minimum of due diligence, but it’s unclear if anyone will attempt that in the five days left before the legislative session ends; blank checks are seldom a good way for public officials to go into a stadium negotiation, but it sure looks like where things are headed.

Share this post:

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

Meanwhile, in other news this week:

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

Indiana offers multiple piles of tax money for Bears stadium in Hammond, total price tag TBD

access_time personNeil deMause

The Indiana state house ways and means committee approved a bill for a Chicago Bears stadium this morning after what was surely minutes of discussion, and while it still needs approval from the full house — and the latest changes from the full senate — it reportedly now has somewhat more detail than the “form a sports authority and figure it out later” bill previously passed by the senate:

  • The site of a new stadium would be in Hammond, not Gary or Portage. Sorry, guy who thought he could build an entire $5 billion stadium with “non-football revenue”!
  • According to NWI.com, “Senate Bill 27 also now details on how a Hammond stadium would be financed, including tax revenues from a special stadium district in Hammond, a 12% ticket tax on all stadium events, potential countywide 1% food and beverage taxes in Lake and Porter counties, doubling Lake County’s innkeeper’s tax, and a variety of other funding mechanisms.” That’s different from the SB27 approved by the senate last month, which only said that a sports authority could use “proceeds of local excise taxes” and “applicable proceeds of food and beverage tax and innkeepers tax.”
  • There’s no total price tag provided for all those taxes, though Indiana speaker of the house Todd Huston reportedly says it would be “similar to Lucas Oil Stadium,” which received $620 million in public money toward its $720 million construction cost.

Bears management has responded with a statement that this represents “the most meaningful step forward in our stadium planning efforts to date” and they “look forward to continuing to build our working relationship” with Indiana. We’ll see if that’s enough of a commitment for house members approve the bill at a final vote a week from tomorrow, as they’ve previously demanded “sign off” from the Bears before okaying the money, so as not to be used as mere leverage against Illinois.

As all the articles say, this is a developing story, so I’ll be updating later today if anything else happens, including over at the Illinois legislature where a hearing is being held today on allowing property tax breaks for a potential Bears stadium in Arlington Heights. Much still to be determined, but if Bears CEO Kevin Warren wants at least the appearance of a bidding war, he seems to have got one.

UPDATE 10:50 am ET: The Illinois committee hearing scheduled for this morning was canceled before the Indiana house committee even met (thanks, commenter Sam Smith!), so one half of the erstwhile bidding war will have to wait a bit, at least.

UPDATE 2:20 pm ET: A Bears spokesperson has released a statement: “Hammond is the site we are focused on. Work to be done.” That is somewhat short of a commitment, but maybe it’ll be enough for Indiana legislators to start making out a wedding registry.

UPDATE 6:02 pm ET: “Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston said the state’s proposed package involves about $1 billion in public funding” — nope, no source on that or methodology about what that includes, the Indiana Capital Chronicle didn’t even have time to put a period at the end of the sentence, this is that fast-breaking a story!

Share this post:

Bears face Thursday deadline to commit to Indiana move, somehow this is pressure on Illinois to pass stadium subsidies?

access_time personNeil deMause

Deadlines are a funny thing. When you’re trying to demand something, whether it’s stadium subsidies or more literal ransom money, telling your mark that the clock is ticking is a great way to impose a sense of urgency, hoping to get them to panic and do something foolish out of fear of what could happen otherwise. But at the same time, you need to have an actual threat to go with it — saying you’re going to shoot the dog only works if you’re willing to go through with it, or at least you can make people believe you’re going to go through with it. If you’re only bluffing, a deadline can work against you as well.

For the Chicago Bears owners, the threat on the table is to move to Indiana, and there are two deadlines coming up there: The February 27 adjournment of the Indiana state legislature, and before that a decision this Thursday by the state house ways and means committee on whether to advance a bill to create a sports authority to build a new stadium somewhere in the northwest corner of the state. You would think this would be putting pressure on team execs to decide on whether to commit to a move — especially with Indiana legislative leaders saying they won’t approve a bill unless the Bears owners promise to actually go through with crossing state lines. And yet, this is still being presented in some quarters as pressure on Illinois to take action on its own possibly $1 billion subsidy package for a stadium in Arlington Heights:

  • The Chicago sports news site Sports Mockery says Illinois faces “a decisive moment by the end of February,” as Indiana “has been rolling out the red carpet” to lure the Bears.
  • Arlington Heights Mayor Jim Tinaglia said he’s confident Illinois officials are “wide awake right now” about the need to respond to the Indiana threat.
  • National sports news site Clutch Points reports that a hearing in the Illinois legislature this Thursday on a bill to let Arlington Heights give property tax breaks to a Bears stadium “represents a major juncture” what with “Indiana reportedly exploring relocation possibilities.” (Clutch Points also refers to the hearing as a “court date,” so maybe “news site” is overstating things a bit.)
  • Fox59 reports that the city of Portage has “upped the ante” with a proposal for a $5 billion stadium complex to be entirely funded by “non-football event revenue,” LOL.

If anything, it seems like Bears officials are the ones who should be sweating: If Indiana decides not to take up the sports authority bill in the next 48 hours, their best chance at leverage to scare Illinois leaders into coughing up tax money disappears. At this point, team owners look like they’ll need to decide on whether to pull the trigger on an Indiana move before they know what subsidies Illinois is or isn’t offering — and before knowing what Indiana is even offering, beyond a sports authority that would have the power to spend tax money, if somebody found some to give to it. That’s a pretty fine tightrope to walk, and it’s going to be fascinating to see how Bears execs approach it. Maybe they should hop on a flight to Iowa tomorrow, just in case.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends read stadium news coverage, Bears’ list of places not to move to keeps growing

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the things you learn if you read enough articles with the word “stadium” in them, as I am condemned by an ancient mummy’s curse to do, is how very many news reports are just about nothing. For every article that tells us some actual information, there are easily five to 10 that are just meant to fill pixels with something easily reportable, regardless of whether it qualifies as “news,” let alone “reporting.”

Just this week, we’ve had: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is in favor of the Tampa stadium plan that his co-bosses the Rays owner wants and he’s “optimistic” about getting it done; a Baltimore soccer stadium is “gaining momentum,” according to a headline describing a press conference by Baltimore’s mayor, who didn’t actually even say that; Denver Broncos president says team leaders are “laser-focused” on building the tax-subsidy-funded stadium in a rail yard they already said they want; the Broncos president says actually the rail yard is only the “preferred” site and team execs are still considering other options; Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner A-Rod says a new arena is a “necessity” for the 6th-in-the-Western-Conference, $3.6-billion-valued franchise “to compete”; Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says he’s determined to build a new Royals stadium that will create “economic development” in a way that’s “fair and transparent for our taxpayers,” no details provided.

That’s a whole lot of Important People giving press conferences in order to get their message out in the news media, which the news media is happy to oblige for them. For normal people, meanwhile, the only option is to try to get space on an op-ed page, if you can convince the op-ed editors that you should be allowed to have an opinion that diverges from that of Important People. It’s also an awful lot of reporters’ time spent on this when they could be trying to investigate all the open questions about what these stadium deals would actually entail for taxpayers and why elected officials are pushing them — but asking questions takes up valuable time that could be spent transcribing press statements. As the old journalism adage goes, “if your grandmother says she loves you, take her at her word and put it on the front page, so long as she owns a local sports team.”

Enough whining about the news media, time to attempt to do some actual reporting by, uh, seeing what’s in the news media:

  • The Chicago Bears have almost as many places now in neighboring states wanting to be their new home (without offering any money toward it) as they do in the Illinois suburbs: In addition to Gary, Indiana, there’s now Portage, Indiana, plus the entire state of Iowa. While the Bears moving to Iowa sounds like a joke and probably is, at least there’s a bill there to provide actual state tax credits toward a stadium; in Indiana, meanwhile, even the bill to create a stadium authority with no funding attached now isn’t going to move forward, Indiana legislators say, until the Bears owners first commit to moving there if it does. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders might want to just bide their time and see if all the new Bears move threats evaporate just like the last round did, though it sure sounds like they’re more interested in throwing state money at the problem while the move-threat iron is hot.
  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer still wants the major stadium renovation he asked for last April before he’ll sign a five-year lease extension, and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan has assured Glazer that the county’s plan to divert more than a billion dollars in tax money to a Rays stadium won’t get in the way of diverting money for the Bucs. In exchange for only a five-year extension, by the way, it would only take about $220 million in subsidies to break the record for priciest per-year lease extension in U.S. sports history, you can pretty much take it to the bank that that’ll be the plan.
  • On the subject of that Baltimore soccer stadium, D.C. United owners said on Thursday that they’re planning to build a 12,000-seat venue on the site of Carroll Park Golf Course, to host a minor-league MLS Next Pro franchise and a pro women’s team owned by former NBA star Carmelo Anthony. And by “planning to build” I of course mean “hoping to receive $216 million in state money to build.” One of the state lawmakers sponsoring bills to provide the cash says “the stars have aligned” now that Carmelo Anthony is on board, maybe somebody should call a local economist to see if studies have found that involving Carmelo Anthony increases economic impact? If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what they’d say if they could ever stop laughing.
  • Foxborough, Massachusetts officials say they may not issue a permit for men’s World Cup games to be played at the New England Patriots stadium in June unless someone helps cover $8 million in security costs that the town is currently faced with paying, Asked why Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose team is worth an estimated $9 billion, couldn’t just cut a check, FIFA World Cup Boston 26 organizers said the Krafts are offering up the use of their football stadium for two months in “peak period” of the NFL offseason, what do you want from them, blood?
  • The Center Square is a libertarian-leaning news site that has generally been pretty skeptical of stadium subsidies, so for it to run the headline “Seahawks’ Super Bowl win temporarily jolts local Seattle economy” is pretty notable — or would be if the gist of the actual article weren’t “U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims Seattle will benefit from the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, economist Victor Matheson says one study found a short-term bump in per-capita income from Super Bowl-winning cities but it may have just been a spurious finding because ‘when you test 100 different things, even if all those things are random, one of them is going to end up being the best.'” At least the Center Square called an actual economist, unlike those corporate stooges at Al Jazeera in their article on how the Super Bowl will be a windfall for the San Francisco Bay Area despite the 49ers not being in the game and also economists consistently saying no it won’t be.
  • If Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can’t get money to build roads and pedestrian bridges around his new Brook Park stadium from the state of Ohio, he’ll ask for $25 million from the federal government instead, there’s got to be someone to stick with the bill that isn’t named Jimmy.
  • Also in K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas news, marginally more newsworthy edition: The mayor wants to cut spending on everything except a Royals stadium and more cops.
  • Plans for an Indianapolis MLS stadium have gone from on hold to pretty much dead, according to Indiana legislative leaders, though in stadium deals just like in comic books, only Uncle Ben ever stays dead for good.
  • The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics just applied for another billion dollars in building permits for their planned Vegas stadium, everyone gets that applying for a permit doesn’t mean you’re actually committing to spend the money on the project, right? Maybe requiring personal seat licenses to buy some A’s tickets in Vegas will help raise the needed funds to employ the permits, anything is possible.
  • Nope, nobody got back to me from Wyandotte County about how their Kansas City Chiefs stadium subsidy numbers were arrived at, I’ll just assume it was the traditional “dart board and add lots of zeroes” algorithm.
  • If you have time to kill next Thursday at 3 pm Eastern/noon Pacific, tune in to Alissa Walker’s Torched Talk with me and Chris Tyler from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy on whether it’s worth it to Los Angeles to host the 2028 Olympics, and what the city could do to try to extricate itself if it’s not. Zoom link is here, calendar it now, see you then!
Share this post:

Pritzker’s office met with Bears, Goodell to talk stadium spending, everybody speculate wildly!

access_time personNeil deMause

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker continues to drop hints about possible state involvement in funding a new Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, and the assembled media continues to Kremlinologize about it:

  • The Chicago Tribune, citing “sources familiar with the discussions between the Bears and state of Illinois officials,” reported that both sides have been meeting regularly since early December and discussing both state infrastructure funding and approval of local property tax cuts for a Bears project, as well as possible guarantees by the team to make games more affordable.
  • Pritzker spoke twice with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell last month, though the governor’s office declined to comment on what was discussed.
  • At an event to announce Illinois’ launch of STAR bonds — state bonds repaid by siphoning off future sales tax revenue from a development district, most recently seen funding $2.775 billion toward a Kansas City Chiefs stadium project —  Pritzker noted that while STAR bonds can’t currently be used for sports venues, the legislature could always change that: “We’re not specifically looking at it that way — perhaps the Bears are.”
  • At the same event, Pritzker said of the STAR bonds, “We’re not going to do anything that’s bad for the taxpayers here. I mean, I am not… we’re not throwing money at building a stadium. For anybody.” He then added on the potential of the Bears moving to Indiana, “I’m always concerned about making sure that we’re attracting businesses or keeping businesses in the state of Illinois”; asked if he would consider offering enticements for, say, the St. Louis Cardinals to move to Illinois, Pritzker replied, “I am trying to attract businesses, yeah. You said ‘any world?’ Yeah, like every world in which we are trying to attract businesses—and that includes teams—but businesses to the state of Illinois.” (Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III, asked for comment on this, said his team remains focused on renovating its current stadium and “Illinois is not on our radar,” though you have to imagine putting Illinois on Missouri’s radar when it comes time to ask for renovation money is very much on DeWitt’s radar.)
  • “People familiar with the discussions” tell CBS News that “representatives from Gov. JB Pritzker’s office, at least two Illinois state lawmakers, village leaders, and the Bears have met multiple times a week since December to discuss legislation to help the Bears with their proposed stadium in Arlington Heights” and they’re getting close to an agreement. Pritzker confirmed that there’s “progress that’s been made,” including on infrastructure spending “and other things that are sort of available to any business that is growing or building something new in the state of Illinois that’s putting people to work.”

New highway ramps and moving a commuter rail station aren’t typically things available to any business, so we’ll have to wait and see if Pritzker is talking about a smaller state infrastructure spend than the Bears owners’ $855 million ask, or if he’s trying to have his “not throwing taxpayer money at a stadium” and eat it too. All the good tea never gets spilled, this world needs some better people familiar with discussions, stat.

Share this post:

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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