Category: New Orleans Saints

Thanks to everyone who’s expressed concern about my health in comments — I’ve been testing negative for COVID since Wednesday and am slowly regaining my stamina, so looks like I’m in the clear until the next time I get this virus or whatever comes next.

While we’re all still waiting to be struck down by whatever diseases we’re bringing upon ourselves, we still have lots of other crises to keep an eye on — like, for example, the question of how much public money the state of Louisiana will have to deliver to New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson this time to get her to extend her Superdome lease. New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Jeff Duncan says a blank check is fine with him so long as it keeps the team in town:

The New Orleans Saints and state officials are close to an agreement on a long-term deal that will keep the team in Louisiana for the foreseeable future.

The agreement would extend the team’s lease at the Caesars Superdome through 2035 and include multiple five-year options that could bind the team to Louisiana for two decades beyond that…

Unlike our peers in Jacksonville and Kansas City, we allow our appointed elected officials to handle these high-stakes lease negotiations in private. … Above all, keeping the Saints in New Orleans has to be the top priority. The team is too valuable to the city and state to leave any wiggle room.

Duncan goes on to write that “it’s incumbent for state officials to strike a deal that maintains the best interests of state taxpayers” and then in the next sentence that “recent stadium deals in Buffalo, Jacksonville and Tennessee provide a useful blueprint,” which is slightly contradictory in that the Bills, Jaguars, and Titans deals are all sterling examples of deals that were not in the best interests of state taxpayers. But they did include non-relocation clauses in exchange for the billions of dollars of public spending they included, so if that’s all Duncan cares about, then I guess he could do worse for models.

If it feels like we just went through this with the Saints, we pretty much did: The state just approved $300 million in public spending on the Superdome in 2019, in exchange for what turned out to be only a five-year lease extension until 2030. Then earlier this year Benson balked at spending the $200 million she had agreed to as part of the deal, something that Duncan reports team and state officials have “made significant progress” on, though apparently he means that as part of getting Benson to pay what she already owes, she’ll get gifted more public money for her next lease extension.

How much this next round will amount to is unknown, thanks to Louisiana’s patented ability to conduct these negotiations in private and its sports columnists’ disinterest in doing any investigative work to find out what’s being discussed. The Superdome already cost $163 million in state money to build in the 1970s and has received more renovation subsidies than I can count, including that time Louisiana was paying the Saints to play in the dome and then replaced that with a deal where it was guaranteeing the team’s profits. I know that I previously singled out Indianapolis as the poster child for sports grifts that keep on giving, but you gotta give New Orleans its props as a serial subsidizer, too.

It seems like the New Orleans Superdome gets a major renovation every five years or so, with the latest one, a $500 million upgrade (originally $450 million, but I guess that was before fees), underway since 2020. The state of Louisiana is putting up $300 million of the cost, which leaves Saints owner Gayle Benson to pay the other $200 million, something it turns out she hasn’t been doing:

Members of the commission, formally known as the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District, or LSED, were informed at a board meeting Wednesday that the Saints haven’t paid their share of the massive renovation project since December, and currently owe $11.5 million to the commission, which has been covering the bills to date.

The holdup, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, apparently has to do with the Saints’ lease, which was only extended five years until 2030 as part of the renovation deal, making it the second-priciest per-year lease extension subsidy ever. The Saints front office is still haggling with the state over terms of a longer lease extension, and the T-P reports that unnamed sources say “the payment dispute is directly tied to those talks,” though it’s unclear why Benson thinks it’s okay to renege on payments agreed to in your last lease extension as part of talks for a new lease extension. (In a statement, the Saints ownership said it was withholding payments while waiting on “certain documentation.”)

All this is of some urgency because next year’s Super Bowl is scheduled to be played at the Superdome, and work remains to be done on widening concourses, extending suites, and adding a new club and new bars. If the brinksmanship continues, would Louisiana taxpayers be on the hook for fronting the money for those upgrades? Would the NFL consider switching hosts for next year’s Super Bowl if the upgrades aren’t complete? Is $11.5 million a piddly amount of money to worry that much about, in comparison to the $300 million in public subsidies already approved and whatever taxpayers are likely to be on the hook for with the next lease extension? Possibly, who knows, and probably, but it’s a good reminder that the answer to the question of how much a particular stadium will end up costing the public is usually “more than you think.”

Sometimes when I write a post here assuming the worst intentions of sports team owners, I feel slightly bad. Sure, sports barons may have a long history of using everything possible in the pursuit of personal profit, but does that mean it’s always the case? Maybe when the New Orleans Saints owners say they’re thinking of temporarily relocating to Baton Rouge so they can have fans in the seats, they’re genuinely trying to make the best of a bad situation and not just trying to pressure the city of New Orleans into opening up the Superdome to paid attendance?

Turns out: Naaaaaaaaah.

In August, before the season began, the Saints made a pitch to Gov. John Bel Edwards for a bolder idea: 35% capacity — a plan that would put almost 24,000 fans in the stadium for games…

The plan featured a detailed “seating manifest methodology” that showed how patrons would be spaced from several angles. In all, 23,875 people would have been allowed in the stadium under the proposal, to which Edwards did not agree.

That “seating manifest technology,” NOLA.com goes on to report, was mostly based on advanced fudging the numbers, as fans would have been seated less than six feet apart, the minimum distance recommended by the CDC, even though it’s also noted that the virus can spread across greater distances “under special circumstances.” Whether those special circumstances may include football fans taking off masks to eat and cheer in an indoor stadium is not specifically mentioned in any CDC reports, but it’s certainly a concern.

Also, luxury suites would have been filled to 100% capacity, because everyone in a luxury suite can clearly be trusted to stay six feet apart and masked within their extremely indoor space, which is then only a problem if you spend several hours together there uh-oh. (An official from Louisiana’s Ochsner hospital, who argued on behalf of the Saints’ plan, said that suite denizens would be assumed to be “cohorted group,” which given that Superdome suites hold up to 24 people would require some pretty huge households.)

The 35% plan was rejected by Gov. Edwards, who later approved attendance of up to 25% at Louisiana sporting events. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell later rejected any in-person attendance, though, saying her approval would depend on whether she got more state money to help deal with the pandemic, which doesn’t actually seem like great epidemiology either. And the Saints are keeping up the lobbying just in case:

The Saints met with Cantrell, medical professionals at Ochsner and Cantrell’s medical advisors on Monday about potentially phasing in fans for this weekend’s game and beyond, [Saints spokesperson Greg] Bensel said Monday evening.

“The city continues to see COVID positivity rates remain stable,” Bensel said in a statement. “The city currently has one of the lowest rates in the nation. We all agree that the priority is to make sure our city’s residents and our fans are safe and not to regress from the progress that has been made. We look forward to providing our fans more information shortly.”

Cantrell’s office declined to comment on the matter Monday.

Keeping people safe: When has the NFL ever made anything else its priority?

The battle over letting fans back into sports stadiums has so far been a matter for state politicians and team officials, who have tried to strike a balance between concern for public health and desire for private profit. But no team has succeeded in pitting two different government against each other, in a “savvy negotiator creates leverage” way, to compete for a team’s presence — until now:

Fed up with COVID restrictions that have silenced the Mercedes Benz Superdome, the New Orleans Saints say they’re considering another venue that could bring back a little noise.

LSU and Baton Rouge say they are happy to lend out Tiger Stadium…

Officials with Visit Baton Rouge say even a few extra Saints fans could bring in big business for the city…

“Obviously it would be the biggest single event that would occur, or episode to occur in Baton Rouge during this pandemic,” said Paul Arrigo, President & CEO of Visit Baton Rouge.

Some background: New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell has issued much tougher measures on public events, mask-wearing, and other Covid prevention methods than the rest of the state, creating what one disease expert called an unintentional controlled experiment in the efficacy of anti-pandemic rules. (So far Orleans Parish is doing significantly better than the rest of the state, both in terms of total cases and recent cases.) And the Saints, of course, play in the Superdome, which is of course indoors, which is of course where the virus goes to spread. So Cantrell has steadfastly refused to open the dome to fans:

“While the Saints’ request for a special exception to the city’s COVID-19 guidelines remains under consideration, allowing 20K people in an indoor space presents significant public health concerns,” Cantrell said in a statement.

“At present, no NFL stadium in the country with a fixed-roof facility is allowing such an exception,” her statement read. “We will continue to monitor the public health data, but cannot set an artificial timeline for how and when conditions may allow for the kind of special exemption being requested.”

Playing outdoors at LSU’s Tiger Stadium actually seems like a good solution here, at least if masked (when not eating or drinking) and distanced fans attending games outdoors turns out to be safe, which we still don’t know for sure. But Saints execs seem to be using the option less as a stop-gap measure than as a saber to rattle, issuing a statement saying that their “overwhelming preference is to play our games in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome with partial fan attendance” even while they’re exploring the option of playing in Baton Rouge.

And why should New Orleans care if the Saints play in Baton Rouge temporarily? All together now: ECONOMIC ACTIVITY!!!1!

“Baton Rouge is going to get all of that money. They’re going to get all the restaurant money, all the hotel money,” said [New Orleans native and Saints fan Andruski] Austin. “They’re going to get all of that.”

Okay, so maybe asking a random Saints fan for an economic impact statement wasn’t the most expert source you could use, WWL-TV. The Saints have five home games left this season, so you’re talking maybe 100,000 fans total going to games in Baton Rouge; most of them are either going to be local or make the hour-plus drive from New Orleans, so there’s probably not a ton of hotel money at stake. Maybe you’ll get some more restaurant visits, but at most you’re talking about a couple million dollars in spending — Baton Rouge has a 5.5% local sales tax, so maybe could see $100,000 or something in new taxes as a result, which probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for extra hospital services if even a small outbreak resulted from Saints fans piling into Fat Boy’s Pizza for a postgame meal.

It’s entirely possible that none of this will sway Mayor Cantrell, and also possible that the Saints will play games temporarily at LSU and everything will be fine. But this is another worrisome data point in the trend of sports teams seeing taking on increased Covid risks as a competitive advantage — and cities now being encouraged (by the local news media and random football fans, anyway) to do the same. Letting fans back into sporting events as soon as it’s safe is a great idea; letting them back in as soon as someone is worried that they’ll be leaving money on the table if they don’t is extremely not.

When I wrote on Monday that Indianapolis giving Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon $600 million worth of renovation payments and operating subsidies to extend his lease for 25 years was setting a new standard in making sports leases the grift that keeps on giving, I figured that record would last, oh, I dunno, more that a couple of days. And yet:

State and New Orleans Saints officials are working toward an agreement that will keep the team in Louisiana through 2035 and include a transformative $450 million renovation of the Superdome, officials said this week.

The deal would extend the Saints’ current lease agreement with the state another 10 years and feature the most elaborate and expensive overhaul of the iconic stadium in its 44-year history.

It’s not quite as bad as that lede makes it sound: The Saints owners will be chipping in $150 million of the renovation cost. But still, that leaves $300 million to be paid for by the state, which for a ten-year lease extension means Louisiana taxpayers will be shelling out $30 million a year for the Saints to play in New Orleans — blowing away the Pacers’ just-established $24 million a year record.

This new agreement — which the New Orleans Times-Picayune calls “the lynchpin to a long-term agreement between the state and the team,” which is not at all how you should be spelling “linchpin” — would be, like the Pacers’ deal, just the latest in a long series of subsidies the Saints owners would be collecting from the state of Louisiana: Late Saints owner Tom Benson, in fact, pioneered the pay-to-play concept when he engineered a lease in 2001 where the state would pay him $18.6 million a year to play in the Superdome for another ten years. Then he got another $392 million in 2013, and now is set to receive another $300 million just six years later — adding in all the earlier money Louisiana spent on building and renovating the dome, the Saints’ five-decade total will come to $1.442 billion (non-inflation-adjusted dollars), which is even more than the Pacers’ $1.161 billion, though the Pacers got all their cash in the span of just 20 years, so they still take the subsidy-rate crown.

The latest Saints plan still needs to be approved by state officials — certainly the state bond commission, maybe the state legislature as well, though the Times-Picayune didn’t do any better a job reporting this than they did on their spellchecking. Gov. John Bel Edwards reportedly already “gave his blessing: to the plan, though, and given past history in Louisiana, it has to be considered likely to be approved. Some days, I feel like we’re making some headway in getting elected officials to at least check the literature on economic benefits or the lack thereof before lavishing tax dollars on the local sports team owner; other days, not so much.