It’s finally Bandcamp Friday again, which means I can purchase and listen to everything that’s been piling up in my shopping cart all summer. (If you’re wondering: Bad Moves, Imperial Teen, Quivers, and Verboten.) But first there’s a whole week’s worth of news to get to, so let’s get to it:
- Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker says keeping the 76ers in her city is “a priority,” but as far as a new arena goes, “we have a process here in the city of Philadelphia that we are following, and we will allow it to play itself out.” Philadelphians, meanwhile, told pollsters commissioned by the Save Chinatown Coalition that they overwhelmingly oppose the Sixers’ arena plans, by a 56-18% margin. The actual question was “Generally speaking, would you support or oppose a proposal to build a new 76ers arena in Center City, near Chinatown, or are you neutral about it?” which is a pretty neutrally worded question; after being read arguments in favor of and opposing the arena, opposition rose to a 69-15% margin, with increased traffic and congestion and fears it would hurt the neighboring Chinatown as the two main reasons. Also, only 12% said a new Sixers arena should be a priority, as opposed to more than three-quarters who listed addressing the opioid crisis, improving schools, building affordable housing, and getting homeless people off the streets as important — no one’s asked Mayor Parker yet to rank her top priorities, but maybe it’s about time someone does?
- The owners of the Philadelphia Flyers, meanwhile, Comcast Spectacor, who are also the Sixers’ current landlords, continue to make not having a new arena built be a priority, as you would expect. Their latest gambit is to present a competing developer who they say would build a biomedical “innovation hub” on the proposed arena site; the proposal included at least one rendering, but it didn’t feature any fireworks or lens flare, how’s that supposed to compete with an arena in politicians’ eyes?
- Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren, who just re-upped his team’s contract with stadium lobbyists for another $120,000 a year, says he would prefer to get a new stadium within Chicago city limits, and anyway Chicago needs one, because “we’re missing out on concerts, multiple megaevents, including Super Bowls, Final Fours” and “if we don’t wrap our arms around some of these construction projects, we’re going to fall behind as a city.” It will be left as an exercise for readers to calculate how many Super Bowls Chicago would have to host to earn back the $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion in tax money Warren is asking for, but suffice to say that it would be at least several per year.
- Elected officials in Indianapolis are debating whether paying for a retractable roof for the Colts stadium was a good idea, something complicated by the fact that nobody seems to know how much the retractable roof cost. (“A minimum, a minimum, at least $100 million,” says former Hamilton County council member Rick McKinney, but there was no actual line item for it in the $720 million stadium budget.) The best part of the Indianapolis Star article on this is that the “was too!” position is staked out by Steve Campbell, who when the stadium was approved in 2004 was an official in City Hall and who is now the Colts’ vice president of communications and external affairs, funny how that works out. Campbell says that city officials then wanted to make sure the stadium had every possible doodad because “we knew that the next stadium that came out would have something that we didn’t have”; presumably the only reason they didn’t add in holographic replay systems is that they didn’t know where to buy one.
- NFL owners are so rich that they’re having a hard time not paying taxes on all their wealth when they die. That’s it, that’s the whole story, Lucky Ducky wins again!
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