Category: Cleveland Browns

Ohio really does plan to fund Browns and other stadiums by seizing billions in money it owes to private individuals

access_time personNeil deMause

Remember how the Ohio legislature proposed borrowing $600 million from the state’s unclaimed property fund to use on a new Cleveland Browns stadium and repaying it with money from an omni-TIF collecting all kinds of tax money from in and around the stadium, and then the bill passed and it was described as providing “$600 million for the proposed Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park using unclaimed funds,” and I said it wasn’t really because that was just where Ohio would be borrowing the money from temporarily? Well, about that:

The $600 million for a new Cleveland Browns stadium that the state is raiding from the state’s unclaimed property fund won’t be repaid to the fund, and the state will eventually seize any unclaimed funds held longer than 10 years….

Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer initially reported that under the plan, first proposed by Senate Republicans, such tax revenue would be used to return the $600 million to the state’s unclaimed funds account, which includes private property from things like inactive bank accounts, old safe deposit box holdings, and uncashed checks and insurance policies.

But, in fact, money seized for the new Sports and Cultural Facility Fund will never be returned to the pot of unclaimed funds.

And beginning in 2036, any unclaimed funds that have been held by the state for 10 years will automatically be diverted to the new development fund for construction work on other sports stadiums and cultural facilities around Ohio.

That’s, uh, real different, Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer! Under the final budget bill, the news sites report, stadium-related taxes will continue to flow into the state’s general fund as usual, meaning Ohio actually will be funding a new stadium for the Browns — and possibly new or upgraded buildings for the Cincinnati Bengals and Columbus Blue Jackets and who knows who else — by seizing money it’s been holding on behalf of people who left it in inactive bank accounts, old safe deposit box holdings, uncashed checks, or the like, and handing it over to sports team owners.

If you think that sounds of dubious legality, you’re not alone: Attorneys including former Ohio attorney general Marc Dann (never mind for the moment how he became former) have filed a class action suit on behalf of the owners of the unclaimed funds, saying “that’s private property that the state has decided to take for itself.” Previous to the new law, anyone with money in the accounts could claim it in perpetuity — instead, Ohio will now be able to seize anything left in the fund for ten years, and use it to pay off the sports stadiums.

States laying claim to unclaimed property after a set period of time is actually pretty common in other states, where it’s known as “escheatment,” (The word comes from an Old French term for inheritance, not from the word “cheat,” though I’m sure plenty of people will still make that connection.) Northern Kentucky University law professor Ken Katkin told WLWT that “there’s a lot of smoke here, but I think there’s no fire,” and said he expected the class action suit would face an uphill battle.

Even so, there’s another question here, which is what happens if enough people start filing claims for their unclaimed money that Ohio doesn’t have enough left to pay for its unending series of stadium projects? That’s pretty unlikely for just the Browns — the fund currently sits at a staggering $4.8 billion, and Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is only asking for $600 million of it — but if enough team owners eventually demand a cut, and publicity about the unclaimed property fund leads enough people to start reclaiming their money before the ten-year clock runs out, it could eventually be an issue.

For now, though, Ohio legislators look to have found a way to funnel billions of dollars of public money to private sports team owners without breaking the state budget, by taking the money from an escrow account where it was holding it on behalf of private individuals. Even if courts end up ruling that’s just legal escheatment, it’s money the state could have used for literally anything else — but sports team owners were shouting the loudest, so they’re the ones who end up getting the benefit of all those uncashed checks.

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Friday roundup: Commanders warn DC council “Don’t make Trump come in there,” plus Blue Jackets could join the line for Ohio subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

Okay, that’s done, Friday roundup, let’s get to it:

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Friday roundup: If not for John Fisher schadenfreude, we wouldn’t have any freude at all

access_time personNeil deMause

Hello, Canadians, and Americans who couldn’t find a way to get out of town for the holiday weekend! This Friday roundup is handcrafted especially for you!

I wish the news were better, but we have to go with what we’ve got:

  • The latest bad news from Sacramento: So few people want to go to A’s games that tickets are selling for a fraction of what they were at the start of the season, leaving season ticket holders with a massive case of buyers’ remorse: “It is really rough,” one told SF Gate. “I’ve given away a bunch of them. I’ve given them to friends. The other day, I set a record: I sold $90 seats for 12 bucks. So, it’s kind of pretty bad.” At least worries that season ticket holders will miss out on playoff games if they’re not playing in Sacramento are probably moot: The A’s can’t see a playoff spot with a telescope right now, and that’s even before they trade their best pitcher because he keeps complaining about how much their stadium sucks.
  • Speaking of the A’s, I got quoted a lot in this Guardian article on their LOLgroundbreaking in Las Vegas, check it out if you enjoy John Fisher schadenfreude. Economist J.C. Bradbury is also cited as speculating that the A’s could end up in Salt Lake City or elsewhere next season, which he rushed to clarify doesn’t mean he thinks SLC is a long-term solution either (“too small,” yup, checks out).
  • Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie needs to make a decision on whether to build a new stadium to replace their 22-year-old one, says CBS Sports, because “the clock is ticking due to the lease expiring in seven years” and no no no no that is not how leases work, you can renew them, I just can’t even. Lurie hasn’t actually said anything about wanting a new stadium beyond being asked if he’d like a roof on one and saying he’s “torn,” but rest assured that the sports media is going to keep up the pressure for one regardless.
  • The Niagara Reporter took a look at Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino’s plans to build a $200 million hockey arena and determined that to meet its revenue projections it would have to attract a junior league hockey team (as yet uncertain), host 60 concerts a year (typical similarly sized venues average 12 to 20), and host 60 youth tournaments a year, which the Reporter deems “impossible” — and even then still would fall short of meeting the city’s $13 million a year in debt service.
  • “Pioneer League’s Northern Colorado Owlz fold after playing start of season in Colorado Springs following being evicted from their Windsor stadium for ‘health and safety’ reasons and are replaced by new Colorado Springs team with all of the same Owlz players and staff” is quite the story, if only for all the interesting questions it raises about when a sports franchise is no longer the same sports franchise. Also Colorado Springs already had a Pioneer League team, and they’re called the Rocky Mountain Vibes? So very many questions.
  • In case you needed more reason to block the Daily Mail from your news feeds after it was banned as a source by Wikipedia for being unreliable, this article (Wayback link, they don’t deserve the traffic) headlined “NFL team finally given green light to build new $600 million stadium” when it’s a $2.4 billion stadium and the Cleveland Browns owners still want another $600 million to go with the $600 million in state money they just got should be the icing on the cake.
  • How are subsidies going in the non-sports world, you ask? Well, California just raised its tax credit for film and TV production from $330 million a year to $750 million, meaning 35% of all filming costs in the state will now be covered by taxpayers. This has worked out extraordinarily poorly for states in the past, and stories of wasteful tax expenditures continue to pile up, but elected officials keep on insisting it’s necessary to keep economic activity from leaving the state, sound familiar?
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Ohio governor signs $600m state subsidy bill for Browns stadium, $600m more in city/county cash still pending

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that was anticlimactic: After insisting he was opposed to the state legislature’s plan to pay $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium by using an omni-TIF, Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill to do just that last night, either because he knew any veto would get overridden or because he just didn’t care enough to fight about it. (The state budget bill that DeWine signed also changed the state’s Art Modell Law to no longer prohibit teams from relocating in-state.) The $2.4 billion stadium project in Brook Park is now all set, except for all the ways it isn’t set at all:

  • Former Ohio attorney general Marc Dann and former state representative Jeff Crossman announced plans to file a class action suit against the state borrowing the money from its unclaimed property fund, which Dunn called an “unconscionable, unconstitutional, and blatantly illegal confiscation of Ohioans’ private property.”
  • It’s still unclear what will become of the $600 million in city and county money that Browns owner Jimmy Haslam previously said would be part of the stadium funding, Cleveland19 reports that “the Browns would fund the remaining $1.8B to complete the project, also covering overruns,” while News5Cleveland reports that “they’re looking to taxpayers to cover up to $1.2 billion of the tab for the stadium,” good work, local news teams!

This is a bit of a trend, it seems, state governments ponying up for public cash before local governments have decided on their share: We just saw this happen in Missouri with the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, which got around $1.5 billion combined in state funding last month while awaiting even more money from whichever city and county they end up playing in. The difference with the Browns is that they didn’t even have an offer from another state that Ohio needed to worry about matching — in fact, Haslam had previously said he would stay put in Cleveland if the state turned down his request. There’s bidding against yourself and then there’s bidding against yourself, and Ohio really broke new ground here, good work, local legislators!

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Ohio passes $600m in veto-proof Browns funding, revises Modell Law to allow in-state moves

access_time personNeil deMause

The Ohio legislature indeed passed a budget yesterday that included $600 million of state money for a Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, as promised. But the final vote also shifted the playing field in two significant ways:

  • The votes in each house were by more than 60% supermajorities (23-10 in the senate, 59-39 in the house), meaning that even if Gov. Mike DeWine vetoes the stadium provision, the legislature now has the votes to override it.
  • The budget includes changes to the Art Modell Law prohibiting Ohio teams from moving out of their host cities without permission if they received public stadium money, instead limiting it to a prohibition on teams moving out of state. This would presumably head off any lawsuit against the Browns moving to Brook Park.

This obviously changes things significantly, cutting off the two main avenues for stadium opponents to block Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s plans to relocate to a new domed stadium on Cleveland’s outskirts. But it also raises one new potential problem: By borrowing money from the state’s unclaimed property fund in order to do an end run around Cuyahoga County — which was originally slated to issue bonds, except county executive Chris Ronayne is a Browns move opponent — it could face different legal challenges that the state would be unconstitutionally using private funds without compensation. (SI reports that some former Democratic legislators have already threatened to file such a suit.)

And even with the $600 million in state cash, Haslam would still come up a bit short of the $2.4 billion he’s seeking to build a Brook Park dome. The Browns owner is committed to spending $1.2 billion, the state would provide $600 million by kicking back every tax under the sun collected in and around the stadium site, and the city of Brook Park would supposedly siphon off $422 million in income, parking, and ticket taxes and send it to Haslam for stadium costs. That leaves $178 million that was supposed to come from county hotel and rental car taxes, except, once again, Ronayne is expected to try to block that; it’s possible that Haslam could just cover that portion and be happy with his $1.022 billion in state and city tax money, but all that is as yet uncertain.

But potential new lawsuits and remaining funding holes aside, Haslam’s plan to get Ohio taxpayers to pay him more than a billion dollars to move the Browns from one part of the state to another just took a giant leap forward — even though Haslam said he wouldn’t move his team out of Ohio even if he didn’t get the stadium money. Maybe savvy negotiators don’t need leverage after all? Don’t tell Jerry Reinsdorf, you’ll just give him ideas.

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Ohio legislature to send $600m Browns subsidy bill to governor, dare him to veto it

access_time personNeil deMause

Good news, everyone! The Ohio state legislature has decided to vote today on a way to pay for $600 million in state costs for a Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, and the solution is: Borrow it from the state’s unclaimed funds account and repay it over time by siphoning off tax revenues collected in and around the stadium.

WKYC-TV describes this as “provid[ing] $600 million for the proposed Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park using unclaimed funds,” which it isn’t really — it’s the same omni-TIF deal as the legislature proposed back in March, just with the initial money being borrowed from the unclaimed property fund. This primarily would get around one major stumbling block in the original plan: The state wanted Cuyahoga County to sell bonds that would be repaid by the omni-TIF, but county executive Chris Ronayne hates the idea of helping the Browns move to Brook Park, so having the state loan itself the money gets around that issue.

That just leaves the bigger stumbling block, which is that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still hates the TIF plan and prefers his own plan to raise sports gambling taxes and use that money instead. The stadium funding package is part of the state budget, but DeWine has the power to make line-item vetoes, and could do so if the legislature passes it today and sends it to his desk.

The main real news here, then, is that it’s finally decision time for DeWine: Shoot down the legislature’s plan to gift Browns owner Jimmy Haslam with $600 million in state tax money in hopes of reviving his alternative plan for gifting Haslam with a different $600 million, or acquiesce in order to get the stadium across the finish line. Either would arguably be terrible ideas — two different state budget analysts have warned that there’s no evidence that Ohio would be able to recoup the money by new spending at the stadium, which makes sense when you consider that it would mostly just be hosting the same events as the Browns’ current stadium, only a few miles to the southwest. There’s also the question of the other $600 million in city and county money that Haslam wants from increased county hotel and rental car taxes and city income, ticket, and parking taxes, but everyone seems to be planning to cross those bridges when they come to them, so: Bring on The Decision 2025: DeWine’s DeLemma!

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Friday roundup: Arizona senate votes to give $500m to D-backs owner for stadium upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

At 10 pm last night, the Arizona state senate voted 19-11 to approve spending $500 million in state money on stadium upgrades for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The bill had been passed by the state house in February but had stalled in the senate as Gov. Katie Hobbs and other bill proponents tried to round up enough votes for passage.

What did Hobbs agree to change in order to win over reluctant senators? Not a whole hell of a lot, at first reading:

  • The city of Phoenix’s contribution will be capped at $3.5 million a year in sales tax money, a little over half what Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego had estimated her city would be on the hook for under the original bill.
  • An increase in Maricopa County contributions to match the city’s cost.
  • No use of state income taxes from team employees, as was proposed in the original bill.
  • A provision by which if the Diamondbacks owners don’t spend $250 million of their own money on renovations, the state legislature can repeal the stadium subsidy and leave the team responsible for paying the full debt.
  • Probably other stuff, I’m still reading the bill.

It’s a weird laundry list, especially all the rejiggering of which level of government will contribute what — Gallego apparently demanded a city cost cap before she would sign off on the bill and thus flip some Democratic senate votes to yes, but the contribution amounts needed to still be tied to sales tax receipts to maintain the Casino Night Fallacy, so instead we get this odd mishmash of set dollar figures and dedicated tax revenues.

In any event, the overall thrust of the legislation is the same: A half-billion dollars will be pulled from city, county, and state sales tax revenues that would otherwise go to the general fund, and will now instead be siphoned off and sent back to D-backs owner Ken Kendrick to use for renovations to Chase Field. In exchange, Kendrick will agree to a new lease to keep the team in Phoenix through … oh, sorry, that hasn’t been determined yet, he insisted on the state approving public funding first before agreeing to what he would provide in return, because that’s totally how reasonable negotiations work.

The bill still needs to go back to the state house for a re-vote on its amended form, and then on to Hobbs for her signature, but those look like mere formalities at this point. Add Ken Kendrick to the list of billionaires who got commitments for several-hundred-million-dollar taxpayer checks this year because local officials were either too afraid of the possibility the team would move, too besotted with the alleged economic benefits of a team, or too beholden to lobbyists and campaign contributors to say no. Representative democracy: It’s not going great!

Lots of other stuff happened this week before last night’s vote in Arizona, let’s get to that:

  • Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett has finally agreed to lease provisions in exchange for the $850 million in arena money he got from the city a year and a half ago, and they’re pretty skimpy: The team will pay about $2.4 million a year in rent, rising with inflation, and agree to a $1 ticket surcharge to go toward a capital improvement fund; anything above that for maintenance and operations will be on the city to provide. Also, Bennett will keep all the proceeds from sale of the new arena’s naming rights, plus will get exclusive rights to buy and develop the arena site, with the sale price going back to him to pay for his arena. “Worst arena deal in history” is a high bar to clear, but Oklahoma City seems determined to be in the running for it.
  • The mayors of both St. Petersburg and Tampa say they’re happy the Tampa Bay Rays are up for sale, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor calling it “a very positive step” and saying her city’s “bid is dusted off and we’ve sharpened our pencils,” while St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said he’s “excited about the possibility of new ownership” and focused on ” the fulfillment of the economic promises made to the historic Gas Plant District community.” The preferred Tampa site is also being targeted by the owner of the Tampa Bay Sun women’s USL team for a possible soccer stadium, but as nobody has the slightest idea how any of this would be paid for, it’s a little early to start worrying about competing stadium requests.
  • Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne and some county councilmembers are shouting at each other about whether a Brook Park Cleveland Browns stadium would be an affront to Cleveland or a windfall that’s too good for the county to pass up. Not that Cuyahoga County’s position matters all that much, but with the Ohio state legislature still in its staredown, somebody’s gotta provide the juicy quotes that drive the click machine.
  • The New York Times’ Athletic sports site is excited that sports stadium subsidies are now also for the ladies, if you needed any more reasons to stop reading the Times. (They offer games-only subscriptions, you don’t have to give up Spelling Bee!) The Kansas City Star editorial board, meanwhile, is worried that Missouri’s recently proferred (but not yet accepted) stadium subsidies for the Chiefs and Royals has too many unknowns and that spending public dollars on sports teams is “deeply regrettable” if also “sadly, the world in which we live,” if any of that makes you more interested in reading the Kansas City Star.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred will be at the Athletics‘ stadium site groundbreaking in Las Vegas on Monday, this is gonna be the best Potemkin village ever!
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Friday roundup: K.C. area officials debate throwing more tax money at Chiefs and Royals, as does San Antonio for Spurs, etc. etc.

access_time personNeil deMause

Six posts already in the first four days of the week, and still there’s more news that didn’t make the cut? Legislative season is brutal, man — I can’t wait for it to be over so we can get back to things like wondering if St. Petersburg is going to finish fixing the Tampa Bay Rays stadium roof by next season. (Probably maybe, apparently! There’s one item off the list already!)

And on with the show:

  • Kansas City, Missouri Mayor Quinton Lucas says he thinks he could fund the rest of a Royals stadium without having to go to voters to approve a new sales tax hike, by using “a different set of tools and entities, so much like you’ve seen the discussion in Kansas” — so that would involve kicking back existing sales taxes, presumably, instead of extending a sales tax surcharge? Meanwhile, Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte says if the Royals choose to build a stadium there, the county might hold a vote on a sales tax hike. None of this is going to get resolved by the end of the month, the time by which Kansas’s offer of state sales tax money for Royals and Chiefs stadiums expire; the Kansas legislature could vote to extend that deadline, but it looks like Kansas officials may be tired of being the teams’ spare-tyre lover: Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins says he doesn’t want to do that: “We gave them a year to get it done, and in a year, you know, they kind of keep messing around, going back and forth, and you extend it, and that’s what they’ll do. You know, the pressure is off. Then it could take another year and come back again.”
  • Bexar County voters could be asked to cast ballots in November on a 0.25% hotel and car-rental tax hike to raise about $175 million for a new San Antonio Spurs arena. This would only be one of many public revenue streams used to pay for it, presumably — the arena is expected to cost between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion and Spurs owner Peter Holt won’t commit to how much he would chip in, just keep those subsidies coming until Holt says “stop,” thanks.
  • A 16-page slide deck from April on proposals for a new Cincinnati Bengals stadium lease has been revealed through a public records request, and some of the items include: $308 million in county spending on stadium upgrades from an existing escrow account, in exchange for the Bengals owners extending their lease through 2031; maybe a lease extension through 2036 if the county kicks in another $300 million by 2028; the Bengals paying $1 million a year rent either for the next five years (what the team wants) or for the rest of the lease (the county’s proposal); and a Bengals request to get half the tax revenue the city of Cincinnati gets from “stadium operations” to help cover stadium maintenance. And what about the question of extending that state-of-the-art clause requiring the county to build holographic replay systems if they’re ever invented, anything? No mention of that, really? Not that it matters, as this slide deck is two months old and there’s still a ton of haggling to go, but would have been nice to at least include one slide on it, just saying.
  • The Ohio Capital Journal describes the current debate over a Cleveland Browns stadium as state legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine “disagree[ing] on how to pay for it. Gov. Mike DeWine proposed increasing the taxes on gambling and Ohio House lawmakers favored issuing state bonds,” and no, Ohio Capital Journal, “issuing bonds” is not a way to pay for something, any more than taking out a mortgage is a way to pay for a house, it’s just a way to finance something but you still have to pay for it later, go back five spaces and lose a turn to think about what you have written.
  • The Connecticut state legislative session may have ended without passage of $127 million for a minor-league soccer stadium (plus other stuff) in Bridgeport, but the legislature did pass approval for Bridgeport to set up a TIF district to redirect its own tax revenues to pay for up to $190 million in development costs. This’ll surely go just great, remember how well the Bluefish worked out? Connecticut United is set to begin play in MLS Next Pro next season, probably not Bridgeport but somewhere.
  • This week was so hectic that I never got around t0 reporting on Marc Normandin’s excellent Baseball Prospectus essay from Monday about how Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s agreement to sell the team somewhere between 2029 and the time the sun burns out is timed to increase the savvy negotiator‘s leverage, since 2029 is when the team’s current lease expires, plus prospective buyer Justin Ishbia is a minority owner of the Nashville S.C. MLS team, and hint, hint, Nashville. The 89-year-old Reinsdorf seems determined to go to the grave leaving some juicy leverage for his son, or at least to cement his legacy as the most hardball extortionist of all time, guess you have to make your own fun when you realize you can’t take it with you.
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Ohio senate approves $600m for Browns stadium, will go up against assembly’s and governor’s $600m subsidy plans

access_time personNeil deMause

Not to be outdone by Missouri, the Ohio state senate yesterday approved $600 million in state funding for a new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park. This now gives the state three conflicting plans for how to throw money at Browns owner Jimmy Haslam:

Since the Ohio house and senate passed two different bills, they will now go to a conference committee of members of both houses to hash out a compromise. Then it will go to the governor for his signature — which could be tricky, because DeWine has said that he doesn’t like the stadium tax diversion scheme, and would much prefer his own gambling tax plan. State senate finance chair Jerry Cirino told the Ohio Capital Journal that he’s “pretty confident” that the governor “will look at our approach,” which either means he’s gotten word that DeWine won’t veto the bill or he’s performatively trying to conjure that result into being.

All this has to be decided by July 1 — and even then, there’s still the city of Cleveland’s lawsuit charging that moving the team to the suburbs would violate the state’s Art Modell Law requiring that teams that got taxpayer-funded stadiums be offered up for sale to local owners before being moved. There’s even more steps to go yet than in Missouri, in other words — but in Ohio as there, the disagreement is more about who’ll throw money at the local sports billionaire and how, not whether to do it at all.

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Friday roundup: DC hires same clown consultants for Commanders deal who screwed up DC United math

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the weekly news roundup, a commenter asked me a question yesterday — I mean, I think they may actually have been trying to troll me, but it was in the form of a question — about how it could be better for Missouri to risk the Kansas City Chiefs moving to Kansas and losing all the tax revenue that comes with games. After initially going the “because economists say so” route, I tried to write up an actual detailed answer, and I want to include it here, because I, at least, found it instructive to see how quickly these kind of “sports stadium pay for themselves through economic activity” arguments fall apart once you subject them to actual math:

I found where your numbers are from, and they’re not from any economic impact study by the sports authority or an independent auditor or anyone else. They’re from a consultant hired by the Chiefs, who declared that the team and the stadium “generate $28.8 million in direct, indirect and induced tax revenue for the State of Missouri annually.” (The supposed $572 million is just “economic activity,” and the $28.8 million is the presumed taxes on that; if you include both, you’re double-counting.)

So, we already have Missouri spending $500 million in order to save $28.8 million a year, which would be a negative return on investment right there. But where does that $28.8 million figure come from? The Chiefs consultants, Econsult Solutions, only released a one-pager with no footnotes or other methodology, so we have no idea.

Most importantly, we have no idea if Econsult included money that would otherwise be spent elsewhere in Missouri if the Chiefs left. Is that all of it? No, of course not. Is it enough that it would reduce the $28.8 million a year in new taxes to a level where Missouri would be better off if the Chiefs left? Given that Missouri would be better off even if the real number were $28.8 million a year, yeah, that’s a near certainty.

But there’s an easier way to figure this out than guesstimating where people would be spending their money in some hypothetical situation: Look at cities that have gained or lost teams, and see what happens to local tax revenues. Innumerable economists have now done this, and found that the resulting losses are somewhere between 1) nothing and 2) next to nothing. (It’s actually worse than that: Some cities brought in *more* tax revenue without a team.) And that’s cities — the numbers are going to look even worse for states, since you can’t even make it up by stealing tax revenues from the suburbs.

No matter how you slice it, the numbers show that at the price points we’re talking about, $500 million and up, there is no way on earth for local governments to do better with the teams than without. You can wish it were otherwise — and team owners will certainly hire people to claim that it’s so — but good luck finding any data to support your case.

And now, on to the news:

  • Speaking of economic impact reports, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser just released one for her proposed Commanders stadium that would cost the city upwards of $7 billion, and you’ll never guess who wrote it: That’s right, Convention, Sports & Leisure, everyone’s favorite Dallas Cowboys–and–New York Yankees–owned clown consultants! I have no plans to go over it in detail (though the page with the large heading spelled “MULTPLIERS” does stand out), but I am obligated to point out that the last time D.C. hired CSL to do a stadium study, it was immediately revealed that about two-thirds of the projected city benefits weren’t benefits at all, forcing the consultants to put out a letter “clarifying” that its 400-page report didn’t actually say what it said it said. That CSL they got hired again by D.C. to do their next big stadium study is either a sign that Bowser wasn’t paying attention in 2014 (when she was a city council member) or that stadium consultants aren’t getting hired for the quality of their work, but rather for how reliably they report what team owners and elected officials want to hear, yeah, that’s undoubtedly the one.
  • Sports economist Geoffrey Propheter read far enough into the CSL report to find this knee-slapper: “Suppose I attend a conference in Denver, get a hotel room, and eat a Subway. According to CSL, the Subway gets to count my conference fees, room fees/taxes as economic impact. And so can the conference and the hotel. So now all my spending gets counted x3. Please stop being terrible at thinking.”
  • The Chiefs and Royals owners may now have blank checks from the state for up to 50% of their stadium costs (or will once the Missouri state house passes the bill and Gov. Mike Kehoe signs it, which should happen soon), but they still want even more city and county money to pay for their stadium dreams, and that could require more public referendums. The Kansas City Star reports that the two teams are likely looking at separate ballot measures after a combined one failed spectacularly last April; no word yet on when these would happen, but the teams are clearly going to have to ask the state of Kansas to renew its offer of state money for stadium there beyond its June 30 expiration date, or else “We must outbid the evil barbarians from beyond the western realm!” is going to have somewhat less impact on election day.
  • The plan by Ohio state senators who accepted tons of campaign donations from Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to raid the state’s unclaimed funds account to borrow money for a Browns stadium may be stoking outrage from residents about what one called “legal theft,” but it’s doing wonders for publicizing the existence of the unclaimed funds and getting Ohioans to start claiming them.
  • Also, the Browns’ stadium hasn’t even been approved yet, and it’s already racking up cost overruns: The city of Brook Park just asked for $71 million in state road improvements for the planned stadium site, on top of the $1.2 billion in public money that’s already been proposed.
  • Want to read an article about how a min0r-league baseball stadium has “revived a struggling downtown” in a South Carolina city, while quoting only the mayor, the team owner, and the stadium developer? Sorry, I’m going to link to it anyway.
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