Category: Las Vegas Raiders

Who won the Super Bowl subsidy game?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Super Bowl is over (presumably, I didn’t watch), and there is a winner and a loser! Or multiple winners and losers? Only one winner, multiple losers? Methinks we need a list:

For those who need a refresher: Actual after-the-fact studies have shown that the benefit of hosting a Super Bowl is at most a few million dollars, which is less than most cities spend on advertising the game, let alone increased police presence. Winners: NFL owners who keep getting large chunks of their stadium costs paid for by taxpayers, plus Nevada police who get overtime pay, I guess?

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Friday roundup: A modest economic impact reporting proposal, plus two, three, many vaporstadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

I was out sick yesterday, but fortunately nothing incredibly stupid happened with the $1.5 billion Virginia arena subsidy plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards for the first time all week, so my services weren’t needed. (Other than the whole thing remaining incredibly stupid, but that’ll still be true today, and next week, and next month, and…)

Other things, though, kept happening, and my Decemberween gift to you is to present them all, neatly wrapped and suitable for pointing and laughing:

  • Veteran sports business reporter Alan Snel’s LVSportsBiz.com has announced a new policy of not reporting economic impact claims without also including how the numbers were calculated, and while that may sound like a simple matter of reporting out all the details, it becomes much funnier when you realize that this means Snel just isn’t going to report any numbers that don’t show their math. On a Las Vegas Raiders announcement of the economic impact of their team, Snel reported that he’s waiting on Raiders officials to grant “an interview about how the economic impact number was determined before we publish that number”; about a similar UFC impact report, he wrote that “LVSportsBiz.com will publish these numbers when UFC and Applied Analysis explain how they determined these economic figures.” I truly hope this will lead to stories like “A’s Claim New Stadium Will Create Some Damn Number of Jobs, So Far As We Know They Pulled It Out of Their Ass,” which honestly would be some of the most accurate reporting out there.
  • And speaking of goofy economic impact numbers: A new roof for Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which already cost $1 billion in 1976 loonies, may or may not cost $750 million, but if it does it’s okay, says Quebec Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx, because then Taylor Swift might say “Joli toit!” and play five nights there and bring $350 million in spending that totally would be from out-of-towners who would all fly to Montreal because Taylor Swift never plays near them. [citation needed]
  • Not saying that a stadium district project called “Project Smoke” sounds like a grift, but when the guy presenting it is a Nashville pediatrician who pled guilty to billing fraud and people at the meeting were reportedly saying, “Have you Googled this guy? Can you believe this?”, it’s definitely not a good thing. Though it could make a good Avengers 5 plot to replace the one about Kang now that Jonathan Majors has been fired.
  • “Baltimore is not on the verge of landing a pro outdoor soccer team,” begins a Baltimore Sun article about the Maryland Stadium Authority commissioning a site study for a stadium for this team that, it bears repeating, does not exist and likely will not exist soon. The study cost $50,000, which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but is maybe around $50,000 more than needs to be spent identifying places to build a stadium that likely won’t ever be built.
  • The Jackson County legislature on Monday put off a decision on whether to put a sales-tax increase for Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects on the April 2024 ballot, then the measure’s sponsor, county chair DaRon McGee, introduced a “corrected measure” that would specify that the sales tax wouldn’t take effect until the teams negotiated 40-year leases, agreed to community benefits agreements, and chose an acceptable site. We’ll see if that makes county executive Frank White hate it any less, but it is at least better than voting to collect a giant pile of money for the local sports teams and then negotiate the details later, we’ve seen how that works out.
  • Philadelphia’s law department has now denied more than 100 public records requests for information about the proposed 76ers arena, which is a lot! Activist and journalist Faye Anderson said one of her few requests was approved shows that city officials and other involved parties have been meeting weekly for more than a year on the project, but she can’t get any information about what they’ve been talking about. “What were they saying behind closed doors?” she asked. “What were they saying when they thought those conversations, those records, would never see the light of day?” An appeal has been filed with the state Office of Open Records, so we may find out next month, or later, or never.
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Friday roundup: Philly paper mysteriously pulls article about 76ers arena being called human-rights violation

access_time personNeil deMause

So this was originally going to be a minor bullet point in the Friday roundup: An international human rights organization called The Shift had declared the Philadelphia 76ers‘ arena plans to be “inconsistent with international human rights law” and called on team owner Josh Harris to work with Chinatown residents to “help realize, rather than interfere with, that community’s human rights.” Okay, sure, international human rights law is a bit of an odd legal footing to appeal to, but if anybody’s authorized to do so it’s an international human rights organization, so that’s worth a small note.

Until this happened:

That’s right: Click on the original link on the Inquirer site and it 404s, though the article still shows up in the Inquirer’s own search results. (I had previously saved the article to Instapaper, and you can find a PDF of that here.) Debbie Wei of Asian Americans United, one of the Philadelphia groups strongly opposed to the arena, says she believes the article was taken down at the request of “the billionaires,” but I haven’t been able to get any more details yet from her.

It’s extraordinarily unusual for a news outlet to outright pull a story without even an editorial note stating why it was removed. It actually goes against most journalism ethics policies, which is that stories should be corrected, but not outright deleted. (The Inquirer does have a committee to de-index older stories that may be unintentionally harmful, but even then the stories remain searchable on the Inquirer site, just not on search engines like Google.)

The whole thing is, frankly, bizarre, doubly so since the original article was fairly tame, with the statements from The Shift countered by statements from team spokesperson Nicole Gainor that The Shift’s letter “isn’t based on a clear understanding of how we are thoughtfully approaching this project.” I’ve reached out to the Inquirer for comment, but haven’t heard back yet; if I get any more information today, I’ll post an update here.

UPDATE: Just got this emailed statement from Gabriel Escobar, Inquirer editor and senior vice president: “The article that briefly appeared Thursday on Inquirer.com, in hindsight, required more context and more reporting. For those reasons, we decided to take it down while continuing to pursue the story.”

Meanwhile, on with the rest of the news:

  • The new Forbes NFL team value estimates came out this week, and there have been lots of headlines about how the Tennessee Titans‘ value jumped 26% after getting their new $1.2 billion stadium subsidy. Which, yes, it’s an indication of how stadiums let the rich get richer on the public dime, but some grains of salt do apply: The Forbes team value estimates are very handwavy and much less reliable than their team revenue estimates (which generally check out), and the average NFL team rose an estimated 14% in value next year, so it’s tough to say exactly how much more the Titans are worth now. If anything, it’s notable that even according to Forbes, the Titans only appreciated in value by $420 million more than they would have without the $1.2 billion handout, which implies that Nashville and team owner Amy Adams Strunk both would have been better off if the city had, say, written a half-billion-dollar check to Strunk and let them keep playing in their old stadium.
  • Add the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality to the list of Bronx groups who really hate Mayor Eric Adams’ idea to build a temporary cricket stadium atop public cricket fields in a public park to host the T20 Cricket World Cup: In a Bronx Times op-ed, the BCEQ wrote that it could take two years for the parkland to be fully restored, and “You can add the NYC/ICC proposal to the growing number of ‘mega-events’ that, according to sports economists, drive wedges between localities and global brand-building strategies and fail to deliver promised economic benefits.” At press time, the Bronx Times had not pulled the op-ed.
  • Just when you thought illegal helicopter registration was going to be the weirdest thing about the now-defunct Los Angeles Angels stadium land sale fiasco, now comes the news that the city of Anaheim can’t find the email where an Angels consultant laid out how Mayor Harry Sidhu and city council members were expected to rubber-stamp the deal, even though the FBI already has a copy. Please consider kicking the nonprofit Voice of OC some cash for keeping on top of these things, if only for the LOLAngels value.
  • The insane Jackie Robinson (not that one) Las Vegas arena for no tenant at all is maybe finally dead, after it blew past a county deadline on Wednesday. That only took, let’s see, ten years? Andy Warhol said you get 15 minutes, man, and you already played seven years in the NBA, quit hogging all the attention already.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders stadium has a leak in its roof, time to build a new one.
  • I forgot to link to the KSHB-TV story last week that interviewed me about the Kansas City Royals stadium situation (sample sound bite: “For this to create the kind of new spending that the Royals are claiming, it would be the first time in sports history that occurred”), but you can still check it out here, along with my living room wall art. (Diego Rivera and Jon Langford, if anyone’s curious.)
  • Finally, thanks to everyone who signed up as a Field of Schemes subscriber to get the brand new set of 25th anniversary fridge magnets! (Or, you know, to support the work this site has been doing for 25 damn years now. But I know it’s mostly the magnets.) If you want to get in on the swag, or just encourage me to spend more time on this apparently never-ending mission, sign up now!
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Friday roundup: Anaheim ex-mayor faces prison over Angels land deal, Sixers owner calls public arena input “harassment”

access_time personNeil deMause

Ah, the dog days of summer, when news slows to a trickle and [opens up Instapaper and is hit by a firehose of saved items] BLEEAARGH!

Twenty-five years, people. I’ve been writing this stupid blog for 25 years, and the only thing that’s changed is now there are fewer decent outlets providing actual news, and the number of zeroes on the subsidy price tags keep going up. I hope you’re enjoying continuing to read this stuff, because it seems like we’re going to have to keep on rehashing the same tired absurdities even longer than The Simpsons, and nobody’s ever going to learn not to build the monorail.

Anyway, it’s Friday, let’s do what we do:

  • Former Anaheim mayor Harry Sidhu has agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges and will face up to 40 years in federal prison following an FBI investigation for soliciting bribes around a new Los Angeles Angels stadium land deal as well as something about illegal helicopter registration. (In classic getting-Al-Capone-for-tax-evasion fashion, the guilty plea is for the coverup, not for the initial alleged crimes.) That land deal is now dead, along with Sidhu’s political career; it’s possible that the Anaheim city council could even void the Angels’ sweetheart stadium lease extension on the grounds that Sidhu negotiated it, though given that no current council members would comment on the possibility when asked by the Voice of OC, probably best not to hold your breath there.
  • The Philadelphia 76ers held the first of five online forums about their new arena plans this week, one that some people criticized for only showing team executives on camera while not allowing the public to speak live. Sixers co-owner and lead developer David Adelman replied during the event, “Some people are disappointed that they can’t harass us on Zoom,” and the team subsequently rebranded the forums from “community meetings” to “community info sessions,” all of which went over about as well as you’d expect.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, in trying to argue why the Kansas City Royals need a new stadium either in downtown K.C. or North Kansas City, declared that it would be “a tremendous opportunity for this community — forget the Royals,” and then in the next breath said that “new facilities provide a ballclub with an opportunity for revenue generation that simply doesn’t exist in older footprints.” All evidence continues to be that Manfred is very bad at this, but also that he doesn’t have to be very good at it to be successful.
  • The Clark County Commission has voted to spend $440,000 in pandemic recovery money on bringing corporate CEOs to the Super Bowl in hopes that they’ll move their businesses to Nevada. Apparently neither spending $750 million on an NFL stadium for the Raiders nor being Las Vegas was enough to put the city on the corporate relocation map, but once the billionaires have been wined and dined at a Super Bowl, that’ll surely do the trick.
  • Longtime Cleveland city official Ken Silliman has a new book out about the city’s sports deals, and Signal Cleveland’s review includes some enticing snippets, including that Silliman shielded details of Guardians subsidy talks from public records requests by briefing public employees verbally but not in writing, and that he thinks Congress should “resurrect 1998 legislation written to curtail what’s known as ‘franchise free agency,'” which maybe means Rep. David Minge’s Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act that would have made sports subsidies subject to a federal excise tax, though that was actually 1999. [UPDATE: Silliman writes to say it’s actually this bill, which would have exempted sports team relocations from antitrust law.] Clearly I’m going to have to read the book before reporting fully on it, this journalism thing is a lot of work!
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Friday roundup: Guardians issue screwy new seating plans, NYCFC tax breaks hit $516m, Illinois blocks some Bears subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news for you this week! If you don’t like any of this news, you just don’t like any news at all!

  • Cleveland Guardians management has released some details of how they plan to spend their new $435 million renovation fund ($285 million of it from city, county, and state taxpayers), and the answer is: on $202.5 million of renovations now, then bank the rest for future maintenance and upgrades. Progressive Field Reimagined is focused on creating new “social spaces,” which from the looks of things include some kind of seating terrace where fans will sit on sofas, some of them facing away from the game, plus, if you look real fast at WKYC’s video, turning much of the outfield upper deck into a giant sun-shaded outdoor concessions plaza that you can’t actually see the game from. (Right now much of that area is currently taken up by giant shipping containers that serve as ad boards because nobody wants to sit there, so maybe this isn’t too much of a loss.) It’s also amusing to see that some of the “Terrace Hub” weird-facing sofas will be behind, yes, pillars, that favorite bugaboo of stadium designers that many a team owner has declared to be the reason they need to replace existing stadiums, but apparently set to make a comeback now that a team owner realizes they need them to hold the upper deck up, physics FTW!
  • Turns out when sports economist Geoffrey Propheter estimated that NYC F.C.‘s full property tax break on its new stadium would cost taxpayers between $132.5 million and $197 million, he was lowballing a bit; his former colleagues at the New York City Independent Budget Office have now crunched the numbers and come up with a total tax-break cost of $516 million in present value. Add in city infrastructure costs that will likely top $100 million and whatever the benefits are of getting the use of city land for 49 years for just $30 million in rent, and we’re looking at well over $600 million in subsidies for a stadium that Mayor Eric Adams touted as “100% privately financed.” But then, that’s kind of a tradition in New York.
  • An Illinois state bill to create a $400 million “large business attraction fund” has had an amendment added to bar any of the money from going to “a professional sports organization that moves its operations from one location in the state to another location in the state,” which it doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to see means the Chicago Bears. A Bears stadium in Arlington Heights could still receive other state subsidies, as well as local subsidies like the property-tax kickbacks they’re reportedly considering, but at least it’s an indication that Illinois state legislators aren’t quite so dumb that they think paying a sports team to relocate from one part of the state to another is good policy. (Them thinking that paying other businesses $400 million to relocate to Illinois is anything other than wasted money is another story, but one baby step at a time.)
  • What should Miami Heat fans call their arena now that their crypto naming-rights partner is going out of business and its founder is in jail? The Arena, says a spokesperson for Miami Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, “with a capital A.” No, I don’t know how one pronounces a capital A differently either, but I guess this counts as Branding™, whereas just letting people call it “the arena” would be a failure of leadership or something.
  • What do you do when a local sports team owner, in this case the Detroit Red Wings‘ Ilitch family, gets $400 million in public money to build a new neighborhood and then just doesn’t? Why, give them another $797 million to not build more development, of course! Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan must figure he doesn’t have much choice, given that the rest of his city is just a blank gray void.
  • Opposition continues to build to the Philadelphia 76ers owners building a new arena right next to the city’s Chinatown, with 87 of around 100 local business owners signing a petition opposing the plan, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund looking into legal action. “This is something that will destroy Chinatown,” said Steven Zhu, head of the Philadelphia Chinese Restaurant Association, and given what happened with Washington, D.C.’s arena, he may have a point.
  • Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin says he’s ready to talk about building the Washington Commanders a new stadium in Virginia as soon as Daniel Snyder sells the team, because doing so while Snyder still owned the team turned out to be a non-starter.
  • Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is reportedly “embarrassed” that so many visiting-team fans are flying in to Vegas to watch Raiders games, which, has he forgotten that the whole pitch for Nevada building him a stadium was so that it would bring more tourists to town? Or, now that Davis has his $750 million in state cash in hand, he just doesn’t care about economics and only wants to see more fans rooting for his team? Almost certainly one of those.

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks, so if posts here are a little irregular or appear at weird hours of the day, don’t worry yourself over it. Have a good long (if you’re in the U.S.) weekend, and see you back here on Tuesday or thereabouts!

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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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Friday roundup: Rays focused on Tampa Bay (for now), Anaheim officials say Angels stadium sale got illegal secret approval

access_time personNeil deMause

Lots of news this week, starting with the continuing reaction to yesterday’s tragic death of the Tampontreal Ex-Rays:

  • While the rejection of his split-city plan by his fellow MLB owners would seem to leave Rays owner Stuart Sternberg in a position to play Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Montreal — and maybe other cities as well like Nashville or Portland — off against each other in a bidding war, he says he intends to focus on Tampa and St. Pete, at least for now, saying during yesterday’s bonkers Zoom press conference, “I’ve never threatened to move the team out of the region. That seems to be 101 in the playbook of getting stadiums and arenas built. It just hasn’t been my way to this point. And people have advised me to do that.” (Yahoo Sports’ Hannah Keyser astutely observes that “telling someone you haven’t threatened them yet — and, indeed, have magnanimously resisted the obvious and apparently advisable temptation to do so — can read a little like a threat.”) Meanwhile, would-be Montreal investor Stephen Bronfman responded like Montreal is out of the running, saying during his own Zoom call, “It’s like a bloody eulogy. I’m just tired. I’m a little upset. We had something so good. We would have proved [to] everyone, we would have made a mark. I think a lot of people in sport would have been listening to us.” Prediction: Sternberg works on getting whatever bidding war going that he can between the two sides of Tampa Bay, since that seems to be what MLB prefers, and if that falters then he can decide which city to start ostentatiously attending hockey games in.
  • Speaking of the Oakland A’s, their Howard Terminal stadium environmental impact statement passed a planning commission vote this week, which means the environmental signoff could be headed for a final council vote in February. Of course, there’s still a potential half-billion-dollar budget gap even after the Oakland council gave preliminary approval to $495 million in tax kickbacks, all of which would need to be resolved before a final council vote later this year. Meanwhile, a new poll shows that Oakland residents oppose spending public money on an A’s stadium by 46-37% margin, though given that the maybe-billion-dollars in proposed public money is all for “infrastructure” and not the stadium per se, stadium advocates are claiming that the plan meets this provision anyway. The A’s seem to have backed away from threats to trade all their good young players this winter, which is probably a good idea as it’s tough to build support for public funding for a terrible team, but we could well see this whole threatdown reemerge after the 2022 season, if there is one.
  • That lawsuit announced back in March 2020 against the city of Anaheim for selling its stadium land to the Los Angeles Angels without sufficient public meetings is finally underway, with former city manager Chris Zapata and councilmember Jose Moreno filing testimony that the council secretly made the sale decision before holding any public hearings at all. The trial is set to begin on February 14, and man do I hope it will be televised.
  • The Buffalo Bills are currently getting about $13 million a year in state money to fund stadium operations under their current lease, while paying only $900,000 a year in rent, according to an Investigative Post report. The Bills lease, which was signed in 1998, is “not much worse than a lot of the other leases out there, but given that the average lease is pretty bad, that’s not really a compliment,” says one stadium blogger whose name you can probably guess even without clicking through to the article.
  • The new head of Charlotte’s economic development committee, councilmember Malcolm Graham, said that “Public-private partnership is one that’s obviously going to get a lot of attention over the next 18 to 24 months in terms of some of the things we are working on with some of our local partners,” and indicated that taxpayer money for the Panthers and Hornets could be two of those things. The latest ask from Panthers owner David Tepper was for around $500 million, while Hornets owner Michael Jordan hasn’t put a dollar figure on his request so far that I can tell.
  • Las Vegas’ top tourism marketer says that more than half of all Vegas visitors will add an extra visit or stay longer thanks to the presence of the Raiders and Golden Knights, citing … no actual data at all that I can tell? It’s going to be tough in any case to determine economic impact of the new teams given that the pandemic has turned both sports spending and travel spending upside down, but I hope that once we can manage a relatively normal year, the usual economist suspects will do some studies to see if the substitution effect holds for Vegas the same as everywhere else.
  • The Single-A Hillsboro Hops want a $60-100 million stadium upgrade, because all the minor-league baseball kids are doing it. No word yet on who would pay for what, but the city of Hillsboro issued an RFP for design and construction work.
  • This week’s non-sports-stadium subsidy report: West Virginia is giving $1.7 billion to a steel company for a new plant that will largely employ residents of neighboring Ohio and Kentucky, read all about it.
  • A sewage pipe burst at the Los Angeles Rams‘ stadium, time to build a new one!
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Friday roundup: Bills threaten to evict selves in 2023, plus hurricane porn!

access_time personNeil deMause

Why yes, thank you, I was fine in the flooding: Our terrace was briefly a small lake, but it didn’t breach the door to our apartment. Still, I will be demanding a new state-of-the-art retractable-roofed terrace from the governor as soon as my lease expires.

And speaking of demanding things from the governor once your lease expires, the Buffalo Bills, amirite?

  • Pegula Sports and Entertainment senior vice president Ron Raccuia said that the Bills won’t renew their lease in Buffalo in 2023 unless a deal for a new stadium in in place by then. Asked what the team would do if there is no deal by then, Raccuia replied, “We’re not even focused on that, yet,” which will be familiar to parents as the “Don’t make me come in there” move: Threaten first, figure out what to do if your kid calls your bluff later. He also asserted that the current stadium’s upper deck “will fail” in about five years but that it definitely won’t fail before then, which is an oddly specific way for metal to age, confirmed that the planned new stadium would have a $1.4 billion price tag, and said the team owners have “never discussed” moving the team and “our sole focus is to get a deal done here,” which is slightly odd for an interview where you just threatened to leave if you don’t get a deal done. Raccuia did not say how much public money the team would be demanding, but did call a new stadium “the single-largest construction project in Western New York history,” and who can put a value on that? (Aside from economists, but they don’t understand the value of a team to a city’s “psyche and core,” now do they? That’s about enough out of you and your “measuring the value of a team to a city’s psyche with actual math,” Bruce Johnson!)
  • Speaking of evictions, Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo has officially submitted a bid for land in Tempe for a new arena now that they’re getting kicked out of Glendale. This is only the first step in a possible arena process — later steps will include such niceties as “who’s going to pay to build this thing exactly?” — but first Meruelo has to actually get dibs on the land, so watch this one closely.
  • And speaking of the Coyotes, here’s a nice article in Venues Now about the economic impact study that made Glendale city officials feel okay about evicting them — tl;dr version: hockey fans just buy a hot dog and go home, Elton John fans travel further and make a day of it. This seems slightly dubious to extrapolate to all concerts, but as Venues Now doesn’t actually link to the study, we’ll have to take their word for it for now.
  • Hagerstown, Maryland is getting a new Atlantic League team to replace the Hagerstown Suns, which were disappeared during the Great Minor League Purge of 2019. The cost: Only $59.5 million to build a new stadium, which is surely an excellent investment and won’t result in a deteriorating empty stadium with graffiti on the luxury box furniture once the team folds, you must be thinking of some other league, surely.
  • Alameda County’s sale of its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to A’s owner John Fisher may violate the state Surplus Land Act, because of course it may, all the kids are violating that law!
  • Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is building a $14 million mansion designed to look like his team’s new taxpayer-funded stadium, as one does.
  • The New York Yankees clearly need a retractable roof, too. (In the headline I teased this as “hurricane porn,” but truly that term should be reserved for whatever the hell this is.)
  • Nice stickers!

 

 

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Friday roundup: Bears owner bids to buy Arlington Park, plus do you really need anything else?

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everyone! Unless you’re in the American West and currently melting from the heat, in which case, umm, try to stay indoors and hydrated, and don’t think about how in coming years it’s only likely to get worse. (This is maybe another reason why the Oakland A’s aren’t likely to move to Las Vegas, though building a new stadium right on San Francisco Bay is an equally bad idea in climate-proofing terms.)

Lots of news this week, so let’s get down to business:

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Friday roundup: County to use federal stimulus money for minor-league ballpark, plus way too much excitement over tax bookkeeping and Elon Musk

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s going to be tough for anything to top a sports team owner claiming he needs a new stadium because his 25-year-old one is literally going to “fall down,” but the rest of this week’s news was no slouch, either:

  • The county legislature in Dutchess County, New York, will vote Monday on a 25-year lease extension for the Hudson Valley Renegades that would use $12.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan money to renovate the team’s 27-year-old stadium and buy the land under it from the Beacon City School District. The ARP, better known as the Biden stimulus bill, included not just extended unemployment benefits and new stimulus checks for Americans, but also $350 billion to state and local governments to help bridge pandemic-related budget shortfalls; renovating a minor-league baseball stadium does not appear to be one of the permitted uses of this ARP funding, though Dutchess County legislators will presumably claim it’s helping an “impacted industry” recover from Covid losses or some such thing.
  • Cobb County, Georgia, may get to stop using general fund money to pay off its Atlanta Braves stadium debt as soon as 2024, according to Braves exec Mike Plant, thanks to the county getting more hotel/motel tax revenue that it’s spending instead. That’s good news in that county revenue is up; whether it’s good news that the county is spending money out of one pot of revenue instead of another will likely depend on whether or not your name is Mike Plant.
  • In related but opposite news, Clark County, Nevada, is having to dip into a reserve fund for $11.7 million in Las Vegas Raiders stadium payments after hotel tax revenues fell short thanks to the pandemic, just six months after pulling another $11.6 million from the reserve fund for the same reason. Again, this is bad in that the county has less money on hand to spend, but it doesn’t make the stadium a better or worse expense, any more than buying NFTs would be a less stupid idea if you just got an unexpected cash windfall.
  • And speaking of stupid ideas, Raiders president Marc Badain says he’d welcome a Vegas Loop station near his team’s stadium, which makes this a good time to remind him and everyone reading this that the Vegas Loop is just a one-lane tunnel for self-driving Teslas and so doesn’t really have “stations” per se, though it does have whatever the hell this is.
  • The Daily Herald, which covers the Chicago suburbs, asks whether the Chicago White Sox could move to the Arlington Park racetrack site in suburban Arlington Heights, immediately answers its own question by noting that “no one actively is suggesting” such a move, then goes on for 34 more paragraphs of speculation about what such a move would look like. Journalism!
  • Field of Schemes gets a nice shoutout from Jadrian Wooten’s Monday Morning Economist newsletter this week in his look at some favorite baseball stadiums, which also includes a lovely photo of the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium, which is one of my favorites as well. See, I can say nice things about a stadium without mentioning its $218 million in state and city subsidies about which one Pennsylvania legislator said, “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan” … oh, whoops, guess I can’t.
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