Category: Denver Broncos

Friday roundup: Mets casino gets bill, Angels deal lurches from grave, news outlets everywhere need editing help, stat

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to everyone for helping us make it through another week! (I’m assuming here that it’s you readers who someone make time progress; I don’t actually know that much about science.)

Here’s what’s been happening that we haven’t talked about yet:

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Friday roundup: What would you do to keep the Bears, Orioles, Broncos, zambonis?

access_time personNeil deMause

I got places to be, so let’s get right to it:

  • Someone asked Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos at a Martin Luther King Jr. event where he was announcing a $5 million donation to a local college fund about his family’s future plans for the team, and he responded by angrily saying that that was “not an appropriate subject matter for this day” and anyway “My family owns over 70 percent of the team … Number 2, we’re not going anywhere, Number 3, the principal owners are Georgia and Peter Angelos, and Number 4, you see what we’re doing here in the community.” So, it’s appropriate to ask questions about the $5 million you’re giving away while seeking $600 million-plus in stadium renovation money if it makes the team ownership look good in your staged MLK Day press event, but not if it’s about when you’ll actually sign your lease, got it.
  • Nine Chicago mayoral candidates were asked at last night’s debate if they would fight to keep the Bears in the city, which is kind of a loaded question (fight how? with money cannons, or with pugil sticks?), and answers included: asking for state funds to get the team to stay, opposing using state funds to get the team to stay, being willing to negotiate, being willing to build a dome over Soldier Field, being willing to explore other sites in the city, getting another NFL team to replace the Bears if they move to Arlington Heights, giving up on doing anything as too late, and “I came from a family of 10, and I certainly know how to negotiate when you’re in the house with one bathroom.”
  • Apparently that $170 million arena subsidy for the Indy Fuel got approved when I wasn’t looking, because the city of Fishers (no, not that one) just held a groundbreaking for it. (Though I suppose it’s possible they held a groundbreaking without finalizing the funding yet. Somebody out there research this if you want — what part of places to be didn’t you understand?) Anyway, here’s a rendering of the new place that seems to have been created by someone who only had access to the CW Additional Cast clip art pack.
  • The Denver Broncos owners are about to start surveying fans on what they’d like in a “reimagined” stadium, including things like “how you feel about escalators versus elevators.” How fans feel about not spending a crapton of money to replace or renovate a stadium that opened in 2001 will presumably not be included in the survey.
  • “Do The San Jose Sharks Need A New Stadium Built?” asks FanSided’s San Jose Sharks blog, which apparently isn’t a big enough hockey fan to know that NHL venues are typically called “arenas,” not “stadiums.” Anyway, their answer appears to be “the door that the zambonis use got stuck during a game, so sure, maybe.” Is there a way to appeal to get a site delisted from Google News for not actually having anything to do with news, do you know?

 

 

 

 

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Friday roundup: NFL funds its teams’ stadiums too, but still wants plenty of public cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It was the NFL owners’ meetings this week, which meant a whole lot of headlines about how the league is providing money toward new or renovated stadiums for a bunch of its teams: $295 million for Dallas Cowboys upgrades, $200 million toward a new $2.1 billion Tennessee Titans stadium, and $100 million for Denver Broncos upgrades. All this is coming via the NFL’s G-4 program, funding that is often termed loans but, since it gets “repaid” with ticket sales money the teams would normally have to share with the league, it’s really grants.

If you’re wondering why the NFL goes through the trouble of shuffling money around this way — asking for a cut via revenue-sharing and then handing it back for stadium projects — it’s complicated. G-4 evolved from G-3, which was originally created way back in 1999, when Robert Kraft was threatening to move the New England Patriots from Boston (well, Boston-ish) to Hartford. The NFL, which had recently seen the Houston Oilers move to Nashville and the Los Angeles Rams move to St. Louis in search of new stadium deals, appointed a committee to see if there was a way to discourage owners from abandoning larger cities for smaller ones, thus hurting the league’s ability to demand top dollar for national TV rights. To lead this committee, the league appointed one Robert Kraft.

You can probably see where this is going: Kraft’s committee approved a plan whereby the NFL would allow teams to withhold some revenue-sharing money if it used it to build new stadiums — but only for teams in the top six markets. The 6th-largest market at the time just happened to be Boston, and Kraft became the first recipient of funds under the league’s new G-3 provision.

Immediately, other team owners claimed it wasn’t fair that the Patriots, one of the richest teams in a league full of rich teams, were getting to use their money to build a new stadium that would benefit mostly them, and so G-3 (and its successor, G-4) was expanded to the entire league. This didn’t make a ton of sense in terms of keeping teams in big markets, but it did make for lots of spending on upgrades, so it was in the league’s interest, maybe, at least if the upgrades brought in more money than they cost, which was more likely to be the case when there was a pile of public money involved too.

To that end, G-3 and G-4 were designed to require “public-private partnerships,” meaning the NFL would only kick in if local taxpayers did first. But somewhere along the way, the league started bending that rule: While the Titans, for example, are supposed to get more than a billion dollars in tax money for their new stadium, the Broncos are getting just $12 million, and the Cowboys nothing — so a more accurate reading of the rule might be “public-private partnerships, or be Jerry Jones.”

And that’s The Story of G-4, or How NFL Stadium Funding Got Weirder Than Mere Billionaires Ripping Off Taxpayers Would Have You Expect. It’s not great news, exactly, since it doesn’t mean team owners are asking for any less public money, but it does go to show that sports leagues do have ways of funding new venues without demanding tax dollars, if they wanted to, which they don’t, because why wouldn’t you want tax dollars? Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.

Was there other news this week? You betcha:

  • The Buffalo Bills stadium still hasn’t gotten a final environmental signoff from the New York state legislature or a community benefits agreement between the team and the county, but it has over a billion dollars in state and county money, so the rest can (and will) wait till 2023 sometime, don’t you worry.
  • The state of Ohio just got around to approving its $30 million share of spending on stadium upgrades for the Cleveland Guardians, to go along with $255 million from the city and county. That’s been expected all along, but it’s still worth taking note of, especially when building the stadium in the first place only cost $350 million (in 1994 dollars, but still).
  • Speaking of the Titans, their newfound antagonist, metro councilperson Bob Mendes, has proposed reducing the state’s spending on their stadium from $500 million to $450 million and spending the other $50 million on children’s services. That’s probably mostly a rhetorical gambit to show that, no, this isn’t money that has to be spent on a stadium, it could go to kids if the state decided to do that, but also a way of pointing out that if a stadium would really generate $3 billion in future tourist taxes like its advocates claim, why not spend the upfront money on more pressing needs and give the Titans owners any surplus that comes in later? That’s not likely to go over well with team execs, but like I said, rhetorical gambit, it’s more to make a point than actually get approved, so well enough played, Bob Mendes.
  • We Are NY Horse Racing released an economic impact study claiming that upgrades to Belmont Park will produce “billions of dollars in economic impact” and I’m sorry, I can’t finish this sentence without laughing, go read the stenography journalism yourself.
  • More new Tampa Bay Rays stadium renderings, this time for a proposed stadium on the Tampa side of the bay, though they’re not detailed enough to make much fun of. The roof does have some weird wrinkly thing going on, which presumably has something to do with skylights, but given that we’re extremely likely never to hear of this proposal or this design ever again, I’m having a hard time getting into it.
  • And finally, enjoy this story of a St. Louis suburb that destroyed its bond rating by building a practice rink for the Blues then ran out of money to pay for it, because of COVID or something, definitely not because a $55.7 million hockey practice arena could never possibly pay for itself. (If the article is paywalled after the first few paragraphs, just let a bot write the rest for you, it’ll probably be as reliable as most local newspaper reporting anyway.)
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Friday roundup: Tennessee, Tennessee, ain’t no place sports team owners hungry for public cash would rather be

access_time personNeil deMause

More stadium news this week from Knoxville and Chattanooga and Nashville, which has had this song stuck in my head all morning. That’s preferable to this one or certainly this one, though, so no complaints.

  • The Chattanooga city council signed off on $80 million in bonds for a new Lookouts minor-league stadium on Tuesday, notwithstanding that economists and even some local political leaders had said it was a terrible idea and 60% of local residents opposed it. The cost will be paid off by $49.8 million in property taxes kicked back from 470 acres around the stadium site, $17.5 million in lease payments from the team, $5 million in kicked-back sales taxes and $3 million in parking fees — assuming all that money comes in as projected, or else Chattanooga taxpayers will be left holding the bag. Also, reports The Center Square, “the property for the stadium, estimated in the announcement to be worth $10 million, will be donated to the stadium authority as part of the deal,” which sounds good until you realize that the stadium authority will now be the proud owners of land it can’t use for anything because it has a private baseball team’s stadium sitting on top of it, and also can’t collect property taxes on it now because it’ll be public property. At least Chattanoogans don’t have to worry about their baseball team moving for 30 years, at least, unless there’s an opt-out clause hidden somewhere in that lease, sorry for being the voice of doom this morning, but it’s why you pay me the big bucks.
  • Construction also started this week on the Tennessee Smokies‘ new $74.5 million stadium in Knoxville, which is likewise getting almost entirely funded by the public. (That whole “threaten to contract teams in order to extort stadium money” thing really is working out great for MLB!) WVLT’s news story on this includes the tidbit: “Both mayors Indya Kincannon and Glenn Jacobs approve the expanded TIF District. They said it’s because of the overall revenue the stadium is expected to bring to the area which is totaled at $480 over 30 years.” Typo or truth in advertising, you make the call!
  • Completing our Tennessee trifecta, here’s a Tennessean article answering “the top five questions” about the new Titans stadium subsidy plan, conducted entirely by quoting the team’s CEO. Oh, does the Tennessean want you to pay them first before you can read the team’s PR statements? Just go read Nashville councilmember Bob Mendes’ rewrites, then, they’re better anyway.
  • Thanks to a clause in the 1998 voter initiative that approved public funding of the Denver Broncos‘ stadium, local governments will be getting a share of the proceeds of the team’s $4.65 billion sale to Walmart heir Rob Walton. The original deal guaranteed a 2% cut of any franchise sale would go to seven Denver-area counties and cities and towns within them; former owners the Bowlen Trust got to subtract $247 million in team debt and $2.4 billion in capital contributions over the years, so the public is left with just a $41 million check. Still, good work by the 1998 government negotiators to get $41 million back on a $289 million public expense just 24 years later, which represents a return on investment of … okay, negative 85.81%, but it is better than nothing, which is what most government negotiators negotiate for, so half a gold star, anyway.
  • Does anybody anywhere even care that the Cincinnati Bengals‘ stadium is now going to be named after some payroll management company? Or that the local phone company has bought the naming rights to a stadium gate? That the Bengals now have a sponsorship deal to have an official canned cocktail? All of these were news articles, for some reason, which also for some reason failed to mention that the county taxpayers who paid for the stadium’s construction won’t see any of the proceeds from all these deals, though one did suggest that they might help fund $500 million in renovations the owners want — history doesn’t actually show that owners having more money makes them more likely to pay for their own stadium costs, but one can dream.
  • Hagerstown, Maryland, is spending $70 million in state money to build a new Hagerstown Suns minor-league baseball stadium, and it will have to spend millions of dollars on land acquisition first. Is that part of the $70 million, or on top of it? Baltimore Sun, anyone there find that out and feel like putting in the article? No? Just an 18-year-old photo of Willie Mays for some reason? Season 5 of The Wire was too kind, in retrospect.
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Friday roundup: The rich get richer, subsidies for me and not for thee, and other American truisms

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a week, so we’re going to get straight to the news. If you want to check out what I’ve been doing in my spare time, though (other than this website), you might want to play my text adventure game Improv: Origins, which just placed 4th (out of 18) in an interactive fiction competition. It has superheroes, socioeconomic commentary, and oh so many rubber bands…

Anyway, stadium news is what you came for, stadium news is what you get:

  • The Denver Broncos‘ sale to Walmart heir Rob Walton for $4.65 billion is expected to be approved by the NFL next week, in what would be a record price for a U.S. sports franchise. The Las Vegas Raiders are selling a minority stake in their team for a price that would value the whole team at $6.5 billion. While it shouldn’t escape notice that Walton is thought to be looking to get public money for a new stadium and Raiders owner Mark Davis already did, it’s also worth noting that pretty much every NFL team is soaring in value thanks largely to massive national TV contracts — so while “these dudes are filthy rich, they don’t need our money” is legit, “these dudes are getting filthy rich by building stadiums on the taxpayers’ dime” is only partly true, since it’s just one factor increasing the filth.
  • Americans for Prosperity is calling on Arlington Heights to pass an ordinance barring it from provide “corporate welfare” to the Chicago Bears, which is ironic to say the least given that Americans for Prosperity is a mouthpiece for the Koch brothers (well, the alive one, anyway), who have collected more than half a billion dollars in corporate welfare themselves. Though maybe it’ll pass, and one shouldn’t look strange bedfellows in the mouth, but nobody ever said one shouldn’t point out their hypocrisy.
  • This article claims that the $279.5 million in California state money that the Oakland A’s owners want for their Howard Terminal infrastructure funding is definitely going to be used for that, which Mayor Libby Schaaf already claimed last year, but I for one will wait till I see the receipts. Anyway, still lots more public money that needs to be found under sofa cushions before the project can be a reality.
  • Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff says MLB’s new minor-league stadium requitements could cause San Antonio to lose the Missions if it doesn’t upgrade their ballpark, and it’s not worth renovations that could cost $5-10 million when you could build a whole new one for $75-150 million. I’ve read it three times, that what he said, you try to make sense of it.
  • The Baltimore Orioles‘ Camden Yards changed sports architecture (arguably for the better) and sports stadium funding (inarguably for the worse). That’s nothing new — it’s a large chunk of Chapter 1 of Field of Schemes — but if you want to read a whole lot more words to that effect, some of which are “But here we get to the crux: Camden Yards is not categorically salvific,” The Ringer has got you covered.
  • “Rays president offers new stadium details” promises the St. Pete Catalyst headline, which the article reveals to be: “It is inappropriate for me to get into some of the confidential details of those discussions.” They really don’t make details the way they used to.
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Walmart heirs buy Broncos, everyone waits for them to demand new stadium since current one is almost 21 years old, already

access_time personNeil deMause

The Denver Broncos have new owners, with Walmart heir Rob Walton, his daughter and son-in-law, and an assortment of other rich folks agreeing to a $4.65 billion purchase price. And now all anybody wants to know, it seems, is when are they gonna demand a new stadium already to replace the one that’s almost 21 years old?

  • Mile High Sports, which appears to be both a radio station and a print magazine and maybe a sports betting portal, calls late former owner Pat Bowlen “the greatest owner in the history of Denver sports” and says getting the current stadium built in 2001 was part of his “legacy,” then immediately speculates that the Walton clan will want a new $2 billion stadium with a retractable roof, or “that’s the rumor, anyway.” (Journalism!) Then it notes that there was a fire at the current stadium this winter; acknowledges that this is no reason in itself to build a new stadium; wonders where a new stadium would go if it can’t be built in the parking lot like the current stadium was; and declares that fans are “excited for the possibility of a new stadium,” apparently without asking any actual fans.
  • Out There Colorado, which mostly seems to cover hiking, speculates that a new stadium could be built near the airport or in Commerce City, cites two fans on Twitter saying that they hope not because those sites would be a long drive, then asserts that “being able to bring a Super Bowl to Denver could bring huge economic benefits with it,” apparently without asking any actual economists.
  • The Denver Channel, which is definitely a TV station and also a website, asks a bunch of fans, one sports radio host, a marketing professor, a city planning professor, and the manager of a taco restaurant about the idea of a new stadium, and gets back a lot of the old place isn’t that old, but sure maybe? “You would think there’s no way the team could ever leave Denver, and while I agree that is highly, highly unlikely, to think that it is impossible is probably a little bit naïve because there have been other markets who thought, ‘There’s no way the league would ever let this happen,’ and then it happens,” says the sports radio host. “And then you’re without a team.”
  • Paul Klee, a sports columnist for the Gazette, which is Colorado Springs’ newspaper, says that Walton will want out of downtown Denver because crime is up and Klee’s family closed its cellphone store at a downtown mall.

None of this, mind you, is coming from Walton, who hasn’t said a word about wanting a new stadium; all of the articles cite current team president Joe Ellis’ month-old statement that a new building is “the No. 1 decision the new owner will have to make.” (After deciding whether to keep on Joe Ellis, presumably.) And nobody seems to be wondering whether Walton would want to plunk down $2 billion for a stadium on top of spending $4.65 billion on the team, or whether he would demand that Denver kick in towards the cost, or why taxpayers would want to do that — aside from the lure of a Super Bowl or the fear of the team leaving. Walton inherits the Broncos’ lease that runs through 2030, but that’s apparently not worth mentioning either, not when there are restaurant managers to interview.

In short: New rich guy buys team from estate of old rich guy, everyone wonders when he will demand money to build new stadium to replace the one that isn’t yet old enough to drink. We saw all this already a month ago when Walton was first identified as one of the frontrunners, but apparently it’s just going to continue regardless of anything Walton does or doesn’t say. Hey, it worked with the Buffalo Bills owners, maybe it’ll work in Denver!

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Possible new Broncos owner may want possible new Broncos stadium to replace 21-year-old one

access_time personNeil deMause

The Denver Broncos are up for sale because their old owner died in 2019 and his family doesn’t want to keep running the team, and throughout the process there’s been a steady drumbeat of articles wondering if a new owner will want a new stadium, seeing as the old one is 21 years old and lacks that new-car smell that is half the fun of dropping billions of dollars on a pro sports franchise. And now that a pair of frontrunners have been identified — Walmart heir Rob Walton and New Jersey Devils/Philadelphia Sixers owner and private equity goon Josh Harris — at last, their wishes can be divined, or at least speculated upon:

Sources said that Walton is the favorite because (A) he can outbid Harris and associates (B) he has such a close connection to Kroenke, (C) he owns a home in Aspen (in addition to his three-home compound in Scottsdale, Ariz., (D) he has a son and family in Boulder (E) and he likely would build a new stadium in Denver to rival Kroenke’s in Los Angeles.

Those are presumably in descending order of importance, as the Bowlen family is far more likely to care about who’ll offer the most money than whether the new guy wants to build a new stadium or not. Also, that’s pretty weak sourcing on the claim that Walton would replace the Broncos’ current home: Unnamed “sources,” which could be just Walton’s people trying to hype their boss’s purchase bid for all we know, say that he will “likely” build a new stadium, with some money from somewhere.

As we saw with the infamous Bills-are-moving-to-Austin tweet, though, it doesn’t take much more than that to get the sports news echo chamber excited about omigod it’s new stadium time! Here, for example, is some Sports Illustrated-owned sports betting site absolutely raving about the possibilities:

Perhaps what will make even the most apathetic Broncos fans sit up and take notice is the fact that sources have suddenly revealed that a new stadium could well be in the pipeline. Dangling such a juicy carrot could instantly prove to be a pivotal bargaining chip with which to capture the hearts and minds of Broncos Country and also serve to smooth the sale process moving forward.

I’ve read that three times and still can’t make head or tail of what it means: A new Broncos stadium will be a “carrot” for fans and a “bargaining chip” for Walton to negotiate his purchase with … fans? The fans aren’t selling the team. Does FanNation think Broncos fans get to vote on who buys the team? Do Broncos fans get to vote on who buys the team? Has Colorado suddenly been taken over by radical libertarian Marxists? I really need to get out more…

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Friday roundup: Titans get their $500m in state money after all, who’s next? (Answer: everybody, probably)

access_time personNeil deMause

Normally here I would say something about a long week finally coming to an end, but now that I know that time doesn’t exist (much like Wyoming, and birds), that just seems silly. So happy eternal present, and let’s get to the news from what we might once have called “the recent past,” if “once” had any meaning to begin with:

  • Well, that was fast: One day after the Tennessee state senate stripped a provision from the state budget bill to spend $500 million in state money on a new Titans stadium, the combined legislature put the money right back in, approving it 71-19 in the house and 18-13 in the senate. Arguments for the subsidy: “When you decide to do a dome type of facility, all of a sudden we go from a football dominated venue to an entertainment dominated venue”; “You cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good”; “If you’re not going to give half a billion dollars to the local NFL billionaire, who will you give it to?” (Ed. Note: One of these quotes is not real.)
  • The Denver Channel asked Broncos president Joe Ellis if a new owner will likely want to build a new stadium once the team is sold, and Ellis said, “It’ll be the No. 1 decision the new owner will have to make,” and then they went and asked a bunch of other people if that was a good idea, and then that became an article somehow headlined “Will they build it? Broncos president floats idea of new stadium with new ownership.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Denver Post ran pretty much the same article two months ago. The Broncos’ stadium is all of 21 years old, so it’s not clear if the Denver sports press is just bored, or somebody in the Broncos front office or the Denver business community is feeding them these storylines, or things have just gotten to the point where everyone assumes a 21-year-old stadium is of course obsolete by now, but here we are.
  • The Santa Cruz Warriors G League basketball team might leave town without a new stadium, because the old one is 10 years old and has “long-outlived its tenure and usefulness for the team,” writes Lookout Santa Cruz. (To be fair, the old arena only cost $3.5 million and was meant to be fairly no-frills; also to be fair, it’s only 10 years old.) “If it becomes evident that there is no viable solution aside from the current arena, we don’t really have much of a choice but to not play in Santa Cruz,” said team president Chris Murphy; the article doesn’t say if he stared meaningfully at listeners’ wallets as he said “viable solution,” but we can read between the lines.
  • The Carolina Panthers owners officially bailed on their plan for a new practice facility and surrounding development now that cost overruns have raised the price tag, despite $225 million in public funding that would have come with the $800 million project. “We are prepared to sit down with the City and other interested parties to discuss the significant challenges ahead,” said a statement from team owner David Tepper’s GT Real Estate Holdings, which … actually, that sounds less like abandoning the plan than saying he wants a new plan, only one with less of his money, doesn’t it? Old stadium deals never really die, they just re-emerge with more zeroes at the end.
  • Your friend and mine Victor Matheson had a fun op-ed this week about how the $1 billion Buffalo Bills stadium subsidy is “one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory,” which really anybody could tell from that $1 billion figure, but it’s nice to have a professional economist confirm it. A sample: “The Bills have earned over $300 million in operating income since the Pegulas purchased the team for $1.4 billion just seven years ago. And since then, the value of the Bills has risen by another $900 million. The Pegulas have earned enough on their investment in just seven years to pay for the entirety of a new stadium on their own.” But of course, if you spend your own money, then you don’t have it anymore.
  • This article would have been 1000% better if the headline writers had dropped the word “Arizona.”
  • “Roger Goodell gets booed at NFL draft party in Downtown Detroit, then projects $200 million windfall for city,” on the other hand, is an awesome headline, made only the more awesome by the fact that most of the article is behind a paywall, leaving me to assume that Goodell actually produced a study showing the tremendous economic activity generated by booing him, Roger Goodell, which seems totally in character.
  • Elsewhere in headlines, the Voice of OC asks: “Should OC Taxpayers Be Paying the LA Angels $6 Million for Suicide Prevention Ads?” No? I’m going with “no.”
  • The Columbus Blue Jackets just got $13 million public money for, I dunno, stuff, because reasons, does it even matter anymore? The world is just an endless flow of money from working people to people too rich to work, who, vampire-like, live only by sucking living labour, and live the more, the more labour they suck. It’s a little late to be getting all upset by every instance of this — sure it’s fun for a while, but eventually either you have to accept it as the natural, if horrible, state of things, or rise up and seize control of the means of production, don’t you think? Just a thought, anyway; have a good weekend, if weekends exist, which scientists say they don’t!
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Chiefs threaten to move across state line to Kansas, we are officially entering a new golden age of NFL stadium giveaway demands

access_time personNeil deMause

So that’s five straight posts about the Buffalo Bills owners’ plans to get around a billion dollars in public subsidies for a new stadium; what else is going on in the sports world, you may ask? Why, here’s a little news item in Sports Business Journal talking to Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan, wonder what he has to say:

Chiefs President Mark Donovan said the team is evaluating pitches from developers to build a new stadium in Kansas, across the state line from its historic Missouri home of Arrowhead Stadium. “Pretty consistently, we get inquiries from the state of Kansas, [that] if you’re going to make a change, what if you brought the stadium here?” Donovan said at the NFL annual meeting. “So we’re looking at that as well.”

Well, then! Donovan didn’t mention anything about public funding, but then, he didn’t have to: Talking about moving the Chiefs from Missouri to Kansas, even if it’s only a matter of a few miles, can’t be anything but the prelude to an attempt to prompt a bidding war between the two states for the team’s presence. That’s working pretty well for Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder, so why not?

The idea that the Chiefs owners might demand stadium money is nothing new: It was already reported last year that the NFL team might piggyback on the Royals‘ owners’ own request for a new stadium with a “hey, us too!” plan. But after a couple of high-profile football stadium projects that were mostly paid for by the teams themselves — the New York Jets and Giants‘ new stadium, and the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers‘ new stadium — it looks like NFL owners are determined to get back to business as usual, which means a whole lot of taxpayer cash and a little something thrown in by the billionaires who would actually benefit from the project. In addition to the Bills and the Chiefs and the Commanders, we have the Tennessee Titans owners’ call for at least $300 million in public money for stadium renovations and possibly more if they instead choose to go with a whole new building, plus a plan for $600 million in taxpayer funding for improvements to the Baltimore Ravens‘ stadium. And hey, the Denver Broncos‘ 21-year-old stadium just caught fire, causing damage to part of the steel superstructure — wouldn’t it be simpler to just tear it down and build a new one?

The sad fact of the matter, as I told a series of TV reporters Zooming me from their cars yesterday, is that sports team owners are not going to stop demanding public money to underwrite their private profits until they start getting “no” for an answer. So every billion-dollar Bills subsidy that sails through will only increase the desire of their fellow billionaires to get a cut of that boodle — understandably so, as the best way to turn a big fortune into an even bigger fortune is to get somebody else to pay for your business expenses. I feel like a broken record on this sometimes — it’s literally the subtitle of our book, after all — but if sports owners are going to keep on working the same grift, I guess it’s my fate to keep pointing it out, in hopes that either someone in a position of power will take notice or somebody will get out the torches and pitchforks.

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Friday roundup: Possible VA locations for $3B Commanders project revealed, Tulsa mulls USL stadium on race massacre site, and more!

access_time personNeil deMause

Too much news to recap this week to have time writing an amusing intro, sorry!

  • WUSA-TV “went in search of tax plans for the new [Washington Commanders] football stadium. What we found was so much more.” Actually, they didn’t find anything about the tax plans, but they did find an internal document from December, provided by “a source close to the Washington Commanders stadium project,” showing which three sites in Virginia team owner Dan Snyder is looking at for a stadium: the Loudoun Quarries in Sterling, across the highway from Dulles Airport; a plot of undeveloped land between Summit School Road and Telegraph Road in Woodbridge, off I-95 about 25 miles south of D.C.; and Potomac Shores in Dumfries, a new development even farther south along the west bank of the Potomac River. Each site would be developed with not just an NFL stadium and training facilities but “a 14,000-seat amphitheater, hotels and a conference center, residential buildings and mixed-used retail including nightlife.” No price tags were included ($3 billion has been the going figure), nor plans for who would pay for acquiring the land, whether it would be on the public rolls and thus skip out on paying property taxes, or anything like that, but if anyone wants to start debating the vital question of how long it would take to drive to Commanders games — up to 90 minutes during a Thursday night rush hour, according to WUSA — have at it.
  • One Orchard Park councilmember wants the Buffalo Bills owners to pay for extra police on game days if they get a new stadium, and one New York state assemblymember wants the Bills owners to lower food and drink prices if they get stadium subsidies. Both of which are reasonable asks — if you’re going to hand over close to a billion dollars in tax money for a stadium, you may as well get something in return — but both are also likely to amount to a rounding error compared to the state’s price tag for a stadium, so neither would be so much a win as a consolation prize.
  • Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell says there’s talk underway of building a new stadium for the F.C. Tulsa USL team on the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and surprisingly this isn’t going over real well, not just because the city already built a Tulsa Drillers minor-league baseball stadium on a possible burial site for victims of the massacre, but because the surviving descendants of the city’s Black community still live there, and a soccer stadium isn’t especially at the top of their development list.
  • Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee reports on the roots of the Milwaukee Brewers owners’ demands for upwards of $70 million in stadium upgrades under their state-of-the-art lease clause, and notes a list of things the money would go for, including replacing the air conditioning, replacing parts of the retractable roof, replacing all the seats, replacing all the lights, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards again 10-15 years later, and upgrading the sound system to a “multi-zone system.” A Brewers exec said this list wasn’t “comprehensive,” so put on your owner goggles and imagine your own wish list as well!
  • “Will a new Denver Broncos owner mean a push for a new stadium, too?” The Denver Post actually has no idea, but the Broncos‘ current stadium is a whole 21 years old already, you can’t expect these things to just last forever before tearing them down and building a new one, and another new one, and another…
  • John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, an FoS reader and maker of excellent stickers, published an essay at Baseball Prospectus asserting that the baseball lockout makes stadium subsidies even worse, since now stadiums aren’t even providing the meager tax revenues that they usually do when baseball games are being played. This prompted an email discussion between myself and John about whether the substitution effect means that when stadiums are shuttered people will just spend money elsewhere in the area so it’s really a wash; and then more emails between myself and an economist about what the data shows about whether, say, a stadium in a city can at least be a net plus by siphoning off spending from the suburbs. No conclusive evidence yet, will report more later if and when I find out if we have yet another reason to hate Rob Manfred.
  • Chris Fedor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer tweets: “NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said they are estimating a roughly $100 million economic impact for the city of Cleveland as a result of All-Star Weekend.” Asked and answered!
  • Neither the Boston Red Sox nor the Chicago Cubs are planning to move out of their popular, historic ballparks, and yup, that qualifies as a reason to write a whole Athletic article these days.
  • And here’s a whole article about the housing group that pointed out that the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium land purchase likely violated the state Surplus Land Act, I guess there’s just a lot of sports-page space to fill what with spring training getting wiped out by the lockout. Not that I’m complaining, they’re interesting enough overview articles, but it would be nice if publications were investigating things we didn’t know instead of rehashing what we already do, that’s all.
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