Category: Minnesota Vikings

Stadiums and arenas are set to collect $18B in property tax breaks over their lifetimes

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a year since I excitedly got my copy of Geoffrey Propheter’s book Major League Sports and the Property Tax, so I figure it’s maybe time that I actually review it. (What can I say, a lot of shit happened last year.) Propheter is one of the most active researchers and commenters on sports venue deals, and was a property tax analyst for the New York City Independent Budget Office for three years, so he’s the perfect person to investigate the knotty question of how much exactly local governments are subsidizing sports team owners via property tax breaks.

As Propheter says at the outset, “property tax exemptions are government spending by another name”: There’s no functional difference between a government cutting a sports team owner a $100 million check and one granting them $100 million in tax breaks. (Propheter notes one economist’s quip that you could easily eliminate the entire defense budget by replacing it with a “Weapons Supply Tax Credit.”) But where it’s easy to calculate cash allocations, it’s a lot more contentious to establish how much taxpayers are giving up in tax money they would have gotten, if a stadium or arena had been subject to normal tax rates.

Previous attempts at coming up with property tax subsidy numbers — most notably by Rod Fort and Roger Noll and by Judith Grant Long — were general estimates without delving into the nuances of tax assessment. Assessments are more art than science at the best of times, as they require figuring out how much a building is worth to its owner; for sports venues, it’s doubly problematic given the problem of finding other examples to use for comparison, thanks to each city only having a handful of stadiums and arenas, and most of those being tax-exempt.

As of 2022, 79% of the 126 stadiums and arenas for the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MLS were fully exempt from real property taxes, according to Propheter, the same as in 2000 and up only slightly from 1970. After running through a whole lot of math, he concludes that the 105 current stadiums and arenas receiving tax breaks would have owed an additional $654.3 million in property taxes in 2022 if they’d paid like normal property owners. Topping the list by far: the Minnesota Vikings‘ stadium ($25.1 million in property tax breaks in 2021) and the New York Yankees‘ stadium ($24.2 million) — the latter of which double-dipped on its tax savings by then calling the team’s own bond payments “payments in lieu of taxes” in order to get access to cheap loans.

When Propheter extends those exemptions over the life of the buildings’ current leases, he comes up with a total public cost of about $18 billion (using a 3% discount rate for future value; it’s a bit less if you bump that up a couple points) that governments are handing over to sports team owners by letting them off the hook for full property tax payments on their current stadiums and arenas. The average sports venue that gets property tax breaks, then, gets about $171 million in public money from that source alone, on top of any actual budgeted cash, diverted tax revenues, free land, operating subsidies, or development rights that a team owner is likely to rake in.

So, what’s that to you, if you’re not a team owner or a city budget analyst? As Propheter explains, “Like all spending decisions, allocating $1 to good X means not allocating that dollar to good Y.” In this case, the opportunity cost of giving up that tax money is far from theoretical: Of that $18 billion in tax breaks, he calculates that $7.5 billion comes straight out of money for K-12 education, the most common use for property tax revenues.

There’s lots more in the book to sink your teeth into, especially if you love lots of charts and tables laying out the tax status of each stadium and arena. (You know I do.) It is admittedly priced for the academic market, so if you just want some distilled wisdom from Propheter, follow him on Twitter, where just in the last week he’s written a thread of top research insights on tax increment financing and reported that Virginia’s “72% privately financed” Washington Capitals and Wizards arena actually comes in at 63% public, for a final taxpayer bill of $1.64 billion. Did he include a spreadsheet? Of course he did.

 

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Minnesota pays off Vikings stadium early, total taxpayer tab could still be $1.4B

access_time personNeil deMause

The state of Minnesota has paid off its debt on the Vikings stadium 20 years early, thanks to money from electronic gambling coming in faster than expected:

With the support of Gov. Tim Walz, the Legislature agreed this year to pay off the debt early, mostly by using the cash accrued in the stadium reserve account. That fund developed a surplus when tax collections from pulltabs surged in recent years.

This sounds great on the surface, especially if you only read as far as headlines like “U.S. Bank Stadium paid off as of Monday.” Being in debt is bad, according to the prevailing wisdom, and if the tax revenue being used to pay off the stadium has come in more quickly than expected, then the stadium has worked out better than expected, right?

Let’s try looking at the story a slightly different way, and see how it pencils out:

  • After devoting $348 million toward the Vikings’ stadium in 2012, the state still owed $378 million thanks to the reverse magic of interest front-loaded amortization. It is now paying that off with a combination of $366 million from a stadium reserve fund, plus $12 million from the general fund.
  • That stadium reserve fund is flush because electronic pulltab gambling — basically gambling on iPads — has finally taken off after a slow start. The start was so slow, in fact, that the state had to approve using cigarette tax money and corporate tax money to fill in the gap in the early years, until pulltab revenues started coming in.
  • Spending $378 million now will save the state $226 million in future interest payments, which is good! But it also means it won’t have that $378 million to do something else with now, and those interest payments would have been spread out over the next 20 years, so it’s entirely possible that the state will end up worse off, or at least just breaking even, in present value terms.

What’s happened here, then, has nothing to do with the stadium, and everything to do with bookkeeping: Minnesota is taking advantage of a big budget surplus year to pay down some debts early, using tax money now to save tax money in the future. But it’s still all tax money: If the state had approved e-pulltabs and not a stadium, it could instead be using that $366 million reserve fund for something else. That the reserve fund is flush is a sign that e-pulltabs worked well — if you don’t account for the social costs of promoting more gambling, anyway — but says nothing about whether the stadium was a worthwhile expense.

But still, it’s worth at least one small cheer that Minnesota can stop budgeting money annually toward paying for the Vikings’ football stadium—

A report commissioned by the stadium’s oversight board, the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA), the building will need $280 million in maintenance and upgrades in the coming decade.

Welp. Assuming the MSFA ends up paying for the maintenance and upgrade costs, this will take the total public cost to around $1.4 billion. “At least Minnesotans are gambling enough that we can keep pouring tax money into the place” may be better than the alternative, but not by all that much.

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Vikings’ 7-year-old stadium needs $279m in repairs, says company that could be hired to do the work

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s become common in recent years for team owners and stadium district bureaucrats to start demanding upgrades to sports facilities earlier and earlier, sometimes when the buildings in question are 20 years old or less. But, you may be thinking, would anyone have the chutzpah to ask for major upgrades to a stadium that hasn’t even reached its 10th birthday? The answer is yes, and the stadium is the Minnesota Vikings‘:

U.S. Bank Stadium is well-maintained and wearing well for its age, but to keep it that way for another decade, it’ll cost roughly a quarter of a billion dollars, according to a report from architecture firm Populous.

The Kansas City, Missouri-based company presented a cost estimate of $230,990,503 for stadium maintenance and an additional $47,812,500 estimate  (over 10 years) to build the second phase of the venue’s secured perimeter to the Minnesota Sports Facilities Board Friday morning.

That comes to $279 million, which is a sizable chunk of change, even for a stadium that cost taxpayers $1.1 billion to build in the first place. What on earth would cost so much?

The first cost can be broken down as follows:

• $80,574,375 for architecture and interiors

• $55,401,857 for A/V systems

• $27,325,272 for electrical and lighting systems

• $25,137,887 for technology systems

• $21,390,351 for structural systems

• $9,606,478 for the landscape and hardscape of the site

• $6,459,307 for mechanical, plumbing and fire protections

• $5,094,976 for graphics and wayfinding (building signage and site signage)

That is an awfully mixed bag of stuff, even within some of those categories: “architecture and interiors” could include anything from structural work to furniture, and “A/V systems” specifically includes things like the TV screens at concession stands, which one wouldn’t think would normally be the responsibility of the landlord. (The Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority is a state body that owns the Vikings’ stadium, though the team owners get the revenue from NFL games there.) And, of course, there’s the fact that the laundry list was compiled for the authority by Populous, who as one of the most prominent stadium design firms both should have a firm grip on the cost of upgrades and also has a huge conflict of interest as a firm that will very likely be bidding to do the upgrades.

But, no worries, the original stadium deal set aside a reserve fund for such future expenses, right?

“Is there sufficient money to cover these? The answer to that is no,” said Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) Chair Michael Vekich. “That is the work that we have to do collectively with [stadium operator] ASM, the Minnesota Vikings and … the governor and the Legislature.”

The Vikings and the public make annual contributions to the stadium capital improvement fund, which sits at just over $16 million. The audio-visual room — one of the areas that will need work soon — is alone expected to cost $14 million, the report said.

There is a separate “stadium reserve fund” that has $368 million in it — resulting from better-than-expected proceeds from the tablet-gambling revenues that were initially supposed to pay for the whole stadium, but ended up having to be supplemented with other state money when they started off slow — but the state is thinking of using that to pay off some of its stadium construction debt early. So it sounds like the sports authority is looking to get even more money authorized for additional repairs and upgrades, unless by “work with the governor and the Legislature” Vekich means something other than asking for public cash.

(There’s been no public statement thus far on the renovation proposal from Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, but it’s hard to imagine the authority would have floated this without at least running it by him.)

Anyway, this $279 million in new expense would be worth it, according to Populous architect Brady Spencer, because it would be “protecting your investment in the stadium.” Exactly what kind of protection Spencer was talking about wasn’t clear — Minnesotans wouldn’t get any additional tax or rent money from the Vikings in exchange, or any commitment by the team to extend their lease, or really anything at all — but as all grifters know, the best way to separate a fool from their money is by calling it an investment.

 

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Friday roundup: Bears buy stadium land but won’t promise to build stadium on it, and other confusing news of the week

access_time personNeil deMause

We have made it to the end of another week, or will soon, anyway. Why not celebrate with a round of bullet points about ways in which pro sports team owners are seeking to extract money from the public purse to use to pad their own profits? No, no, that was a rhetorical question, I’m sure you have many good reasons why not, but you’re here now and it’s too late to go back. so:

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Minneapolis seeks state bailout on Vikings stadium debt so it can pay convention center debt instead

access_time personNeil deMause

Let’s start with the simple part of this story:

Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis, said he will seek relief from the city’s first scheduled debt payment of $17 million [on U.S. Bank Stadium] — and then push for a longer-term discussion about restructuring the stadium’s debt to give relief to Minneapolis.

The city of Minneapolis owes $150 million toward construction costs on the Minnesota Vikings‘ stadium, with the state covering another $348 million and team owner Zygi Wilf another $600 million. (Though when you add in the team’s property-tax break and city money being spent on stadium operations, Wilf’s tab is really closer to $0.) The pandemic has trashed the city’s budget, especially the sales taxes it had set aside for stadium debt payments, so Noor is looking to the state to bail it out.

The reason why the city is looking for state help — other than that cities will always do that when they can — has to do with the insanely convoluted financing structure the two levels of government set up during the rush to approve funding for the Vikings’ stadium. The city put off paying down any stadium debt until 2021, because it was busy paying off debt on its convention center until then. The state, meanwhile, decided to fun its share with pulltab gambling revenues — which turned out initially to bring in no money at all instead of the $62.5 million that had been projected, forcing the state to raid its cigarette tax fund instead to pay down stadium debt. Then Minnesotans finally started getting hep to the pulltab gambling thing and money started flowing from that, which led to a small but growing surplus in the pulltab fund, which led Minneapolis officials to start salivating over how nice that money would look plugging their budget hole.

So far this is all just city and state governments bickering over who’ll cover how much of $1-billion-plus stadium tab now that money is tight. But then we get to the debt on Minneapolis’s convention center, which is another drag on the city’s budget:

Earlier this fall, Minneapolis City Hall decided to refinance the remaining $26 million convention center debt for up to five years…

City Coordinator Mark Ruff declined multiple interview requests but provided a written statement saying the city had seen an “unprecedented decrease” in sales tax revenues from the pandemic. City staff recommended delaying the convention center debt for greater “flexibility,” he said.

But Ruff warned that if sales tax revenues do not recover quickly, “revenues will need to be diverted from future capital improvements at the Convention Center to debt payments.”

Put it all together, and we have: If Minnesota doesn’t share some of its surplus money it ended up with after dumping more cash into the stadium project, then Minneapolis won’t be able to spend more money to upgrade its convention center. A convention center that nobody wants to go to during Covid, and probably no one will want to go to even after Covid because convention spending is in a long-term decline. This is maybe not the argument that I would want to go to the state capital with, but all’s fair in love and bailouts.

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Friday roundup: Throwing good money after bad edition

access_time personNeil deMause

This will be remembered as the week that all 30 MLB teams played at once, after the Cincinnati Reds returned from being sidelined by a positive Covid test … for one whole day, until the New York Mets were sidelined by two positive Covid tests. Is this a sign that having 900 players plus coaches plus other staff flying around a country with some of the highest Covid rates in the world is likely to keep resulting in occasional infections? Probably! Is it a sign that the MLB season is doomed to fail? Probably not, given that the season is almost halfway over already, though it’s going to get interesting once the “Everybody Plays!” postseason kicks off and a positive test result means delaying the entire schedule, and/or maybe playing entire playoff series as seven-inning doubleheaders. There’s increasing talk of playing everything after the first round in a bubble in, uh, Texas and Southern California, which sounds like a terrible idea but the NBA has managed to keep its players uninfected in the eye of the Covid hurricane in Florida, so who knows, really. Maybe there are no good ideas right now, only more and less terrible ones.

Anyway, enough about the goofy baseball season that could end up with a sub-.500 team winning the World Series, let’s talk about what you’re really here for:

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Friday roundup: Dolphins owner seeks Formula One tax break, Tacoma okays soccer subsidies, plus vaportecture from around the globe!

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy coronavirus panic week! What with stadiums in Europe being closed to fans and stadium workers in the U.S. testing positive for the virus, it’s tough to think of much right now other than what song to wash your hands to for 20 seconds (this is my personal preference). But long after we’re done with our self-quarantines, the consequences of sports venue spending will live on, so to the week’s news we go:

  • Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross is seeking a sales-tax exemption for tickets to Formula One racing events at his stadium, saying that without it, Miami might not get a Grand Prix. The tax break is expected to cost the state between $1.5 million and $2 million per event, but Formula One officials say each race would generate an economic impact of more than $400 million, and what possible reason would they have to lie about a thing like that?
  • The Tacoma city council voted 8-1 on Monday to approve spending on a $60 million, 5,000-seat stadium for the Reign F.C. women’s pro soccer team. According to a letter of intent approved by the council, the city will provide $15 million, while the city parks agency will provide $7.5 million more, with perhaps another $20 million to come from federal tax credits for investing in low-income communities. The parks body still has to vote on the plan on Monday as well; given that Metro Parks commissioner Aaron Pointer — who is also a former Houston Astro and a brother of the Pointer Sisters — said he doesn’t see “really any benefits at all” for the city or its parks, it’s fair to say that the vote there will be more contentious than the one in the city council.
  • Brett Johnson, the developer behind a proposed $400 million development in Pawtucket centered around a pro soccer stadium, says he has lots of investors eager to parks their capital gains in his project tax-free under the Trump administration’s Opportunity Zone program, but it might take a while to work out all the details because reasons. But, he added, “My confidence is very high,” and confidence is what it’s all about, right?
  • Nashville’s Save Our Fairgrounds has filed for a court injunction to stop work on a new Nashville S.C. stadium, on the grounds that no redevelopment of the state fairgrounds can take place without a public voter referendum. This brings the total number of lawsuits against the project to … umpteen? I’m gonna go with umpteen.
  • There’s now an official lawsuit against the Anaheim city council for voting on a Los Angeles Angels stadium land sale without sufficient public meetings. The People’s Homeless Task Force is charging that holding most of the sale talks in private violated the state’s Brown Act on transparency; the city’s lawyers responded that “there could be a myriad of reasons” why the council was able to vote on the sale at a single meeting in December despite never discussing it in public before that, though they didn’t suggest any specific reasons.
  • Wondering what vaportecture looks like outside of North America? Here’s an article on Watford F.C.‘s proposed new stadium, though if you aren’t an Athletic subscriber you’ll be stuck with just the one image, though given that it’s an image of Watford fans stumbling zombie-like into the stadium out of what appears to be an open field, really what more do you need?
  • There are some new renderings of the St. Louis MLS team‘s proposed stadium, and once again they mostly feature people crossing the street, not anything having to do with watching soccer. Are the clip art images of people throwing their hands in the air for no reason temporarily out of stock or something?
  • Here are photos of a 31-year-old arena being demolished, because America.
  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ four-year-old stadium needs $21 million in new paneling on its exterior, because the old paneling was leaking. At least the stadium’s construction contractors will be footing the bill, but it’s still an important reminder that “state of the art” isn’t necessarily better than “outmoded,” especially when it comes to new and unproven designs.
  • And speaking of COVID-19, here’s an article on how travel restrictions thanks to the new coronavirus will cost the European tourism industry more than $1 billion per month, without wondering what else Europeans (and erstwhile travelers to Europe from other continents) will do with the money they’re saving on plane tickets and hotel rooms. Where’s my article on how pandemics are a boost to the hand sanitizer and canned soup industries?
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Friday roundup: Developers pay locals $25 each to hold pro-arena signs, a smoking and farting winged horse team logo, and do you even need a third thing after those two?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another week of pretty bad news, topped off by a private equity firm somehow buying the entirety of .org domains, meaning every nonprofit website will now have to be licensed from an entity whose sole mission is to squeeze as much money from them as possible. The stadium and arena news, by contrast, isn’t all terrible, so maybe it qualifies as cheery? You be the judge:

  • The Richmond city council voted Tuesday to put off a decision on a $1.5 billion downtown development that would include a new arena (public cost: $350 million), after a contentious hearing where both supporters and opponents held signs espousing their opinions. Or espousing somebody’s opinions, anyway: Some locals holding “yes” signs later reported that the project’s developers paid them $25 a pop to do so. City council president Michelle Mosby replied that if anything people were just reimbursed gas money, which 1) only makes sense if everyone there drove their own car and had to travel like 250 miles round trip to get to the hearing and 2) isn’t really any less corrosive of democracy anyway.
  • If you’ve been wondering how Inter Miami plans to build a temporary 18,000-seat stadium in Fort Lauderdale (later to be turned into a practice field) between now and March and figured it would have to involve throwing up a bunch of cheap metal bleachers, now there’s video of construction workers doing exactly that. Also laying down the sod for the field, which I thought usually takes place after the stadium is more or less built, but I guess if they can build the stadium without treading on the field, no harm in doing so now. This all raises questions of whether the stadium will feel excessively crappy, and if not why more soccer teams can’t just build cheap quickie stadiums like this without the need for public money; I guess we’ll know the answer by springtime one way or another.
  • When the state of Minnesota agreed to pay for the Vikings‘ new stadium with cigarette revenue after electronic pulltab gambling money didn’t come in as expected, it still kept collecting the gambling cash; and now that e-pulltabs (which are just lottery tickets, only on a tablet) have taken off, there’s debate over what to do with the cash that the state is collecting, about $5 million this year but projected to rise to $51 million by 2023. The Vikings owners want the money used to pay off their stadium debt early, while some lawmakers would like to use the revenue to fund other projects or reduce taxes on charitable gambling institutions now that it’s no longer needed — all are valid options, but it’s important to remember that the state already paid for most of the stadium, this is just arguing over what to do with the zombie tax that was left over after the financing plan was changed. (It would also be nice to know if e-pulltab gambling has cannibalized revenues from other gambling options, thus making this less of a windfall, but modern journalists have no time for such trivialities.)
  • The city of Wichita is spending $77 million (plus free land) on a Triple-A baseball stadium to steal the Baby Cakes from New Orleans, and have been rewarded with the Wichita Wind Surge, a name that’s supposed to reference the city’s aviation history or something but actually means “storm surge,” which isn’t a thing that they have in landlocked Kansas? It also features a logo that looks like a horse and a fly got caught in a transporter accident, which the team’s designer explained with “The nice thing about Pegasus, however, to me, was the fact that it’s got a horse in there.” A local designer responded with a sketch of a winged horse smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and farting, which by all accounts is much more popular with Wichitans. (The sketch is, I mean, though I’d love to see a poll asking Wichitans, “Which do you prefer, the name Wichita Wind Surge or farting?”)
  • San Diego State University’s plan to buy the city’s old football stadium and its surrounding land for $87.7 million has hit some “speed bumps,” namely that city economists have determined that the price could be below the land’s market value and $10 million of the sale price would have to be set aside for infrastructure improvements for the university’s development. “There’s also the matter of the $1-per-month lease that, as proposed, may not adequately protect the city from expenses or legal risk,” notes the San Diego Union-Tribune. Given all these uncertainties, the city’s independent budget analyst called SDSU’s proposed March 27 deadline “very challenging,” not that that’s stopped city councils before.
  • Saskatoon has enough room under its debt limit to finance either a new central library or a new sports arena, and regardless of what you think of how badly Saskatooners need a new library, it’s still a pretty strong example of how opportunity costs work.
  • The Phoenix Suns‘ new practice facility being built with the help of public money will include a golf simulator for players, because of course it will.
  • Speaking of Phoenix, the Arizona Republic has revealed what the Diamondbacks owners want in a new stadium; the original article is paywalled, but for once Ballpark Digest‘s propensity for just straight-up paraphrasing other sites’ reporting comes in handy, revealing that team owners want a 36,000-  to 42,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof and surrounded by a 45- to 70-acre mixed-use development and a 5,000-seat concert venue and good public transit and full control of naming-rights revenue and public cost-sharing on ballpark repairs. And a pony.
  • “Will Raiders football hike your home value?” asks the Nevada Current, apparently because “Is the moon made of green cheese?” had already been taken.
  • And last but certainly not least, your weekly vaportecture roundup: The New Orleans Saints‘ $450 million renovation of the Superdome (two-thirds paid for by taxpayers) will include field-level open-air end zone spaces where fans have ample room enjoy rendered people’s propensity for flinging their arms in the air! The new Halifax Schooners stadium designs lack the woman hailing a cab and players playing two different sports at once from previous renderings, but do seem to still allow fans to just wander onto the field if they want! It should come as no surprise to anyone that even Chuck D can do a better job of drawing than this.
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Friday roundup: Oakland opens A’s land sale talks, Clippers arena down to two lawsuits, plus video vaportecture!

access_time personNeil deMause

I know it’s not Deadspin — nothing is, or ever will be again, though we can dream — or even sports, but I have an article up at City Limits this week about another big-money public construction project that seems to be proceeding despite no one quite knowing how it will work or how it will be paid for. It’s probably only a matter of time before sports team owners figure out a way to do promote new stadiums as worthy of climate resilience funding, especially since local governments are already showing themselves willing to spend climate money poorly to benefit rich people.

Anyway, oodles of bonus news this week, plus more vaportecture, so let’s get to it:

  • The city of Oakland is starting talks with the A’s owners about selling the city’s half of the Oakland Coliseum property to the team for development — with the proceeds to be used to build a new stadium on the Oakland waterfront — but still hasn’t dropped its lawsuit against Alameda County for agreeing to sell its share to the A’s without consulting the city. Meanwhile, here’s an article by the mayor of Oakland about how baseball and port operations are both good things, let’s find a way to make them both work together!
  • The Federal Aviation Administration has ruled that the proposed Los Angeles Clippers arena in Inglewood poses no danger to aviation at nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and a judge has dismissed claims that the city was required to seek affordable housing uses for the site first. But the project still faces two more lawsuits over how Clippers owner Steve Ballmer was granted the land and whether the city illegally evaded open-meetings laws, so we could yet be here a while.
  • Paterson, New Jersey is asking the state Economic Development Authority for $50 million in tax credits to use on a $76 million project redevelopment of Hinchliffe Stadium, a crumbling (this term is way overused, but it’s actually crumbling) former Negro League stadium, into “a 7,800-seat athletic facility, with a 314-space parking garage, restaurant with museum exhibits dedicated to Negro League baseball, 75-unit apartment building for senior citizens and a 5,800-square-foot childcare facility.” The rest of the article doesn’t explain much about what the renovation will look like or how the money will be spent or who will collect revenues from the new facility or anything, but it does include Mayor André Sayegh opining that you could “have a big concert there. Boxing. Wrestling. It could all happen there,” and Councilmember Michael Jackson countering that “to spend money on this project is senseless” since it will only create maybe 50 jobs. Feel free to take sides!
  • The Arena Football League has suspended operations — again — after getting sued for nonpayment by its former insurance company, but “may become a traveling league, similar to the Premier Lacrosse League, whereby all players practice in a centralized location and fly to a different city each weekend to play games.”
  • Nashville S.C.‘s MLS stadium is now on hold, with Mayor John Cooper suspending demolition to clear the site, amid a lawsuit charging that the project and its $75 million in public cash were approved improperly and will interfere with the annual Tennessee state fair. The Tennessee Tribune writes that “it’s only a matter of time before the MLS soccer stadium contracts will be voided and put out to bid again”; I am not a lawyer, but then, neither are the Tribune’s journalists, so we’ll see.
  • If you want to rent office space in the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium for some reason, you now can! Just realize that it won’t be air-conditioned when you go outside.
  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ stadium is killing more than a hundred birds a year, but other buildings kill even more birds, which means the Vikings clearly need a more state-of-the-art bird-killing building, that’s how this works, right?
  • Here’s a photo of how the new Los Angeles Rams (and Chargers) stadium looks in its current state of construction, and if you think that the “vertical design” will make it feel “intimate.” then you agree with one Rams fan! Another fan, who was sitting in the fourth row of seats behind the end zone, remarked, “I kind of expected the field (area) to be much larger, to take you away from the experience. But you’re going to be right in the game.” Two takeaways: There are reasons why teams never invite fans to sit in the cheap seats to see what the view will be like from there, and American sports fans really aren’t great with geometry.
  • Calgary is looking at cutting wages for city employees to balance its budget, and one local economist thinks maybe not building the Flames a new arena would be a better idea.
  • The five-county sales tax surcharge that paid for the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Miller Park is finally set to phase out in January, after 23 years and $577 million. This is not so good news if you’re upset about Wisconsin taxpayers spending $577 million to pay for a private sports owner’s baseball stadium, but good news if you were worried that the Brewers or some other sports team might see the sales tax money sitting around and want to propose a new project to spend it on, which is always a worry.
  • The Montreal Canadiens have gotten a reduction in their property tax bill for the fourth time since 2013, even while property valuations elsewhere in the city are soaring. No reason was given, but “they’re major players in the local business community and whined about it a lot” seems like a reasonable theory.
  • Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist John Steigerwald asks about public funding for the Pirates‘ now 18-year-old stadium, “If the Pirates were faced with paying for their ballpark, do you think they might have had more incentive to insist on real revenue sharing and a salary cap before they built it?” Answer: No, rich people have incentive to demand money everywhere they can find it, regardless if they already have money, which Pirates owner Bob Nutting totally does. Next question!
  • I promised you vaportecture, so here’s some vaportecture: a ten-second video of the entryway to the Phoenix Suns arena morphing into a somewhat snazzier entryway now that the city of Phoenix agreed to spend $168 million in renovations in exchange for a few tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. (Actual quid pro quo not included, but you can picture it easily enough.) Yes, it’s mostly just a bunch of new video boards and some new escalators being enjoyed by a handful of beefy white people, but isn’t that what pro basketball is all about?
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Friday roundup: Vikings get $6m in upgrades for two-year-old stadium, Sacramento finds rich guy to give soccer money to, CSL screws up yet another stadium study

access_time personNeil deMause

No time to dawdle today, I got magnets to mail, so let’s get right down to it:

  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ two-years-and-change-old stadium is getting $6 million in renovations, including new turf, and taxpayers will foot half the bill, because of course they will.
  • Billionaire Ron Burkle is becoming the majority owner of the USL Sacramento Republic, so now Mayor Darrell Steinberg wants to give the team “tens of millions of dollars” in infrastructure and development rights and free ad signage so that he can build an MLS stadium. “The richer you are, the more money we give you” is the strangest sort of socialism, but here we are, apparently.
  • Concord, an East Bay suburb until now best known as “where the BART yellow line terminated until they extended it,” is considering building an 18,000-seat USL stadium. No word yet on how much it’ll cost or how much the city will chip in, but they probably first need to wait to see how rich the team’s owner is.
  • Not everyone in Allen, Texas wants to live across the street from a cricket stadium, go figure.
  • Everybody’s favorite dysfunctional economic consultants Convention, Sports & Leisure have done it again, determining that Montreal would be a mid-level MLB market without bothering to take into account the difference between Canadian and American dollars. (Once the exchange rate is factored in, Montreal’s median income falls to second-worst in MLB, ahead of only Cleveland.) CSL explained in a statement to La Presse that it wanted to show “the relative purchasing power” of Montrealers, and anyway they explained it in a footnote, so quit your yapping.
  • The Milwaukee Brewers are going to change the name of their stadium from one corporate sponsor to another, and boy, are fans mad. Guys, you know you are free to call it whatever you want, right? Even something that isn’t named for a corporation that paid money for the privilege!
  • Local officials in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. are still working on an interstate compact to agree not to spend public money on a stadium for Dan Snyder’s Washington NFL team, though passage still seems unlikely at best, and the history of these things working out effectively isn’t great. Maybe it’ll get a boost now that team execs have revealed that the stadium design won’t include a surfboard moat after all. Nobody respects the vaportecture anymore.
  • The libertarian Goldwater Institute is suing to force the release of a secret Phoenix Suns arena study paid for by the team and conducted by sports architects HOK, but currently kept under lock and key by the city. (Literally: The study reportedly is kept in locked offices and is only allowed to be accessed by a “very limited number” of people. Also, a citizen group is trying to force a public referendum on the recently approved Suns arena subsidy, though courts have generally not been too keen on allowing those to apply retroactively to deals that already went through. And also also, one of the two councilmembers who voted against the Suns subsidy thinks the city could have cut a better deal. Odds on any of this hindsight amounting to anything: really slim, but maybe it can help inform the next city to face one of these renovation shakedowns, if anyone on other city councils reading out-of-town news or this site and ultimately cares, which, yeah.
  • Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke signed agreements to cover the NFL’s legal costs in any lawsuit over those teams’ relocations, and they’re both being sued now (by Oakland and St. Louis respectively), and NFL lawyers are really pricey. Kroenke is reportedly considering suing the league over this, which I am all for as the most chaotically entertaining option here.
  • Wilmington, Delaware is being revitalized by the arrival of a new minor-league basketball team, so make your vacation plans now! Come for the basketball, stay for the trees and old cars! Synergy!
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