Category: Pittsburgh Steelers

Friday roundup: KC approves $1B+ in Royals stadium subsidies over calls for public vote, independent analysis

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Kansas City council voted on a proposed city funding package for a new Royals stadium yesterday, and as expected, it sailed through, with councilmembers voting 11-2 to approve a series of agreements promising $600 million in cash plus at least $500 million in tax breaks toward a new $1.9 billion stadium at Crown Center.

The council vote came amid more protests from members of the labor group Missouri Workers Power, who vowed to move ahead with plans for November ballot measure on the plan, which if it goes against the council’s verdict will likely spark a legal battle over which vote takes precedence. Councilmember Johnathan Duncan, one of the two no votes yesterday, said the council shouldn’t have voted without waiting for independent economic analyses of the plan; Mayor Quinton Lucas retorted that there will soon be a TIF district analysis made available along with other studies, and “if for some reason the third party financial review says, ‘this doesn’t work,’ then these things don’t go forward,” though it’s not clear what council action would be necessary to undo yesterday’s decision.

Kansas City Star columnist David Hudnall summed up the situation before the council vote: “Huge financial questions remain unanswered. Some pages in the agreements are literally blank. … They don’t want us to vote on this stadium, and pushing it through like this is their best chance of making sure the public doesn’t have a say.”

Fran Marion, a fast food worker and Missouri Workers Power leader, said in addition to the proposed ballot measure, “we see how our mayor and council members voted, and we know elections are coming up in April and June, and we will remember what they did today.” That’s absolutely been known to happen, though it’d be cold comfort for Kansas Citians to get revenge on local councilmembers (Lucas is term-limited out in 2027) while still being stuck with a huge public tab, just as it was for residents of Wisconsin and Cobb County and Miami before them.

And in other news of the week:

  • Tampa Mayor Jane Castor now says that a revised Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan could see the city of Tampa fronting $80 million while the Rays ownership would take out a $100 million loan, all of which would be repaid out of future property tax receipts. That would still 100% be replacing city tax money with city tax money, with the Tampa Bay Business Journal acknowledging that there’s “not much” difference between a Community Redevelopment Area district (the old plan) and a Tax Increment Financing district (the new one). Castor promised, “We’re not going to rush into an agreement just for the sake of time,” while also saying that a council vote could come as early as next week despite no one knowing yet exactly how the financing would work.
  • The Federal Railroad Administration has approved two grants totaling $659 million for relocating an Amtrak facility in Chicago, which could clear the way for the 14th Street rail yard to be used by incoming Chicago White Sox owner Justin Ishbia to build a new stadium there. Who would fund that project still remains very much an unknown, but it seems like we’re headed toward finding out.
  • After receiving $750 million in state money for his Las Vegas stadium, Raiders owner Mark Davis is now asking for another $75 million to fund a new entry plaza in advance of hosting the 2029 Super Bowl. The money would come out of a “waterfall” fund set aside for Raiders stadium upgrades from the same hotel tax money that paid for the first $750 million — but that’s still not without its costs in terms of draining funds you might need later for other repair needs, as Cleveland could tell you.
  • “I don’t think the Steelers have any plans of leaving” their 25-year-old stadium, said Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor this week, but “the reality is both stadiums need upgrades” and “I think to compete, we’re gonna have to have those conversations long term with the Steelers and the Pirates.” Left unspecified: What kind of upgrades the stadiums need, who would pay for them, and who O’Connor thinks he’d be “competing” with exactly.
  • Speaking of needs and wants and competition, Boston Celtics owner Bill Chisholm said this week that he doesn’t need a new arena to compete with other teams financially, but “I do think we need to have an arena that is consistent with the quality and the excellence of the Celtics.” Chisholm added, “if we can make it work, we’d love to stay where we are,” all of which sounds very much like gamesmanship with his current landlords, Delaware North, whose owner also owns the Bruins.
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Friday roundup: NC may earmark $700m for stadium for imaginary MLB team, Steelers could seek upgrade on “expiring” 25-year-old home

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to this week’s news roundup, some old business from last week: I shamefully forgot to give a shoutout to John Mozena for his outstanding liveblog of the stadium-related papers at University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s annual sports economics conference after I was unable to attend. Please check out John’s work at the Center for Economic Accountability and throw some coin his way if you like, or at the very least get some of his free “Pay For Your Own Damn Stadium” stickers.

Back in the present, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with this week’s avalanche of news items:

  • The North Carolina legislature is debating whether to set aside unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in its final budget for a stadium for a potential future MLB expansion team “in or near Wake County,” which would mean the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Triangle” area, as distinct from the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point “Triad” area that voted down paying for a stadium to lure the Minnesota Twins back in 1998. The state has a $700 million Economic Development Project Reserve that it can designate for “high-yield” development projects, and while sports stadiums are nobody’s idea of high-yield in terms of actual measurable impact, there’s got to be somebody somewhere willing to write a consulting report claiming otherwise.
  • Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch says team ownership is ready to get back on line for a new or renovated stadium now that their current home is 25 whole years old: “Thirty years is the expiration date. Guess what Acrisure Stadium is? Twenty-five years. So I promise you, conversations are happening behind the scenes to figure out kind of what the next move is as the Rooneys are looking for an upgrade in their stadium.” The next move, apparently, is to send your former-players-turned-YouTube-creators out to talk up how stadiums just straight-up become obsolete after 30 years and somebody has to build you a new one and see if that flies.
  • Illinois’ efforts to retain the Chicago Bears in the wake of team execs’ announcement that they’re absolutely, definitely (maybe) moving to Indiana remain very much undead, with Gov. JB Pritzker saying his state is ready to act but first needs “the Bears to focus on what they want,” adding, “they have not been clear about what is the bill that they need, and how do they need to look, and then, can they get the votes necessary to get it done in the House and the Senate.” State house stadium bill sponsor Kam Buckner noted that both that body and the state senate have passed competing bills — there’s also now a third one, filed by State Rep. Martin McLaughlin despite the legislature not even being in session, that would raise the size thresholds on a “megaprojects” bill to where it would only apply to an Arlington Heights stadium — and “the Bears have to decide what makes most sense for them, which one of those bills is the bill they can get behind and wrap their arms around that can help them remain here in the state of Illinois,” adding, “We cannot have a special session until we have a deal. You don’t call a special session to draw up a flight plan. You call a special session to land the plane.” The hope here seems to be that if Bears officials pick a favorite tax break bill and declare that it’ll be enough to get them to stay in Illinois, that’ll get legislators in both houses to vote for it, which is absolutely the kind of bootstrapping your own momentum thing that you try to do when you’re pushing legislation that just got nowhere.
  • Building a stadium district in Denver’s Burnham Yard railyards may be easier said than done for Broncos ownership, given little details like the land is mostly zoned only for industrial use. This is Broncos owner Greg Penner’s problem, of course, except that, as the lengthy Denver Post article on this only reveals down in its 28th paragraph, Penner could end up asking for TIF property tax breaks to pay for his larger development. “The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” noted University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, “is shaky. And that’s being super generous.” (Credit where credit is due to the Post: “The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries” is an excellent teaser lede, though still not quite up there with “The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming.”)
  • Athletics owner John Fisher now says his mistake in announcing a stadium plan in Las Vegas was not talking to the media himself enough about it: “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?” He then went on to tell The Athletic absolutely nothing about how he plans to make a $2 billion stadium (with $600 million in public subsidies) in what would be MLB’s smallest market work out, especially when his development partner Bally’s may bail on its part and leave Fisher to fund such additional amenities as a $100 million parking structure. Hearing from John Fisher, it turns out, also leads to frustration, who’da thunk it?
  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones would like Spurs minority owner Michael Dell (net worth: $246 billion) to pay for some or all of her city’s $489 million share of a downtown arena. Dell hasn’t responded to her request, and Stanford University Roger Noll says that’s likely because the multibillionaire knows spending your own money on new sports venues is a dumb idea — “the incremental benefits of having a new arena are not as big as the cost” — which is why it’s only worth it if you can stick taxpayers with the bill.
  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ 10-year-old stadium needs a new roof because it got damaged by hail three years ago, but insurance should cover it, or at least the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority does not believe “substantial use of public funds” will be required, which is slightly less reassuring than “insurance should cover it.” Anyway, it’ll probably never hail this bad in Minneapolis again, right?
  • The first of the Buffalo Bills‘ family of stainless steel buffalo statues has arrived, and fans are excitedly pointing out that bisons don’t really look like that! They’re not even usually made of steel!
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PA gov is “worried” about spending state money on Steelers, Eagles stadiums but will “dialog” with them

access_time personNeil deMause

Two headlines from today:

Pennsylvania governor to work with Eagles, Steelers on stadium needs

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro says there will be no state money for sports venues

Yeah, that’s not confusing at all. What did Shapiro actually say?

“I’m very worried about the overall budget,” Shapiro said Sunday ahead of the scheduled NASCAR Cup Series race at the track. “I’m very worried about the overall economic situation given the federal cuts. You want to balance investing in tourism, investing in sports, investing in great arenas and facilities, with making sure that you’re also investing those dollars in things that Pennsylvanians need most.

“I will tell you that we want to make sure the Steelers, we want to make sure the Eagles, and all of our pro teams have outstanding places to play. That are welcoming for fans. That generate revenue. We’re going to continue to dialog with them about what they need and what’s possible.”

That’s noncommittal in the extreme, and exactly the kind of middle-groundism that is de rigueur for elected officials when asked about their stadium subsidy plans: Of course we want to keep the team owners happy, but not if it means spending unnecessary taxpayer dollars. There’s still plenty of wiggle room there to endorse necessary taxpayer dollars, or tax breaks or whatever that can be waved off as not really public money — don’t forget that Pennsylvania was one of the first states to use tax-increment financing to fund stadiums (for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s NFL and MLB teams), leading to the memorable quote, “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”

The news coverage leaves unclear why Shapiro was even talking about the Eagles and Steelers — as noted, he was at a NASCAR event at Pocono Raceway, and was mostly talking about how to potentially bring NASCAR to Philadelphia without undermining the state’s existing NASCAR track before veering into NFL stadium talk. Regardless, he seems to have left at least some of the assembled reporters convinced that he is ruling out state money for football stadiums even while not actually committing to ruling it out, which is some boss level governoring right there.

UPDATE 4:38 pm ET: NBC Sports’ Mike Florio, who ran the article under the second headline above after reading the AP story under the first headline, has gone back and actually watched the video of Shapiro’s interview and realized that he got it completely wrong, though he’s blaming AP for the screwup. In any case, Florio has clarified that Shapiro was asked by a reporter about state money for the Steagles, and ducked the question. Further updates never, hopefully. 

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Pittsburgh set for epic throwdown over how to spend hotel-tax money: stadiums or tourism ads, what else is there?

access_time personNeil deMause

There are two pieces to any public spending proposal: Where will the money come from? and Where will the money go? While they often get lumped together, especially by proponents hoping to argue that tax money isn’t really tax money — I recall, for example, supporters of Washington, D.C.’s gifting of public cash to a Nationals stadium insisting that as it would mostly come from a tax on city businesses, nobody else should complain — they can almost always be separated in subsidy discussions, and should be — there was nothing stopping D.C. from raising business taxes and spending them on something else, except now it can’t because it’s already used that to fund a private baseball stadium.

With that in mind, let’s visit Pittsburgh, which is embarking on a knock-down drag-out fight over hotel taxes, whether to raise them, and how to spend them:

  • VisitPittsburgh, which is a tourism promotion nonprofit run by local Pittsburgh businesses, is proposing a 2% surcharge on hotel stays anywhere in Allegheny County, with the proceeds put in a pool for “promoting tourism.” The tax would be estimated to provide $6.5 million a year.
  • The Pennsylvania state senate is proposing a “tourism improvement district” in Allegheny County that would be allowed to impose a hotel-tax surcharge, with the actual amount determined by a board of hotel operators, because that’s how taxation works, like how sales-tax hikes are determined by a board of consumers. (Ed. Note: This may not actually be how taxation works.)
  • State Sen. Wayne Fontana, the board chair of the city-county Sports and Exhibition Authority, says he won’t approve the tax surcharge unless VisitPittsburgh agrees to give up a cut of the hotel-tax money it already receives for tourism promotion, and instead give it to the sports authority, which runs Pittsburgh’s money-losing convention center (this is a tautology, as pretty much all convention centers lose money) and pays for maintenance on the Pirates and Steelers stadiums and Penguins arena, currently out of ticket taxes.
  • In fact, Fontana would like to see all the hotel tax money dispersed by the sports authority, which he’s portraying as bringing all tourism-and-sports-related spending under one roof, and never mind that it would just happen to be his roof.
  • VisitPittsburgh President and CEO Jerad Bachar says if the sports authority gets control of the money, he’s worried that not enough of it will go to tourism promotion, so the proper solution, clearly, is to let him have the money and decide how it’s spent, since he’s an upstanding individual and not susceptible to “politics” like the authority board chair.

In a sensible world, questions would now be asked, in the halls of power and newspaper pages alike, about several things: Will spending more on hiring people to promote tourism (40% of VisitPittsburgh’s expenses are for salaries) really benefit hotels and other businesses dependent on tourism enough to be worth a 2% hotel-tax hike? Do Pittsburgh’s three sports stadiums and its convention center really need more money for maintenance and operations, and what would happen if they didn’t get it? Could a hotel tax surcharge be used for other things that might do even more to help Pittsburgh businesses and residents? This is not that sensible world. Instead, we have the public official who controls the city and county’s stadium/convention slush fund and the nonprofit CEO who controls the tourism spending slush fund fighting over who gets to direct the slush, because surely allocating it as part of the normal government spending process that is (in theory) open to public debate would be entirely crazy.

There’s almost certainly a longer article that could be written about how it came to be that fighting other cities for tourist visits became seen as one of the roles of local government — I may see if Heywood Sanders has anything to say about that, in fact. But for now, appreciate that there’s a fight going on over giving money to Pittsburgh sports venues, and it would very clearly be money that could be spent on a very specific other thing if not used for sports, and that other thing may be as big a waste of money too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that spending it on sports is a good idea, either. Sorry if that doesn’t provide you with an easy white hat to root for, but moral ambiguity is all the rage these days, embrace it!

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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

access_time personNeil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

  • A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
  • Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
  • Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
  • The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
  • Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
  • While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
  • Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
  • Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
  • Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
  • Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
  • Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
  • If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.
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Friday roundup: NFL teams debate which fans will be the first to enjoy socially distanced peeing

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time today, so while I’d love to comment on everything in the world that happened this crazy week, I’m just going to give you a link to my article on news coverage of the California fires and the state’s reliance on incarcerated people to fight them, then get straight to a quickie news recap:

  • The Cleveland Browns will reportedly “consider personal seat licenses” in determining who gets to attend reduced-capacity games this season, which isn’t very specific: Would season ticket holders with PSLs (which is almost all of them) get priority? Would those who spent more get let in first? One can only imagine the Browns front office debating which is the fairest solution, and/or which would help maximize team revenues, because you know that the latter is never very far from sports owners’ conception of the former.
  • If you’ve been jonesing for a picture of what socially distanced urinals will look like, Sports Illustrated has you covered.
  • Pittsburgh’s Sports & Exhibition Authority is, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “requesting $7.4 million to COVID-19-proof Heinz Field, PNC Park, PPG Paints Arena and the David L. Lawrence Convention Center,” whatever “COVID-19-proof” means. (Lots of urinal covers?)
  • There are new reports estimating the costs to the local economy of spring training in Arizona ending early and the Oklahoma City Thunder season ending early and do you think either of them looked at what, say, sales-tax receipts actually did starting in March, or did they just project out how much money is normally spent at these events and assume that it all vanished into thin air once they were canceled? (If you guessed door #2, congratulations, you can skip journalism school and go directly to a newspaper job, if newspapers or jobs still existed.)
  • No huge new revelations in this week’s Epoch Times report on the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal, but it’s a decent roundup and there sure is a ton of me in it, so check it out if you like. (EDIT: Or actually maybe don’t, if you don’t want to support QAnon and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. If you want to know what I said, I’ll post it in comments.)
  • This German study of how people’s breath spreads at an indoor concert is kind of genius, and everyone should be watching to see the results if we ever want to be able to attend indoor events again, whether masked or distanced or ventilated with HEPA filters or what. Results are due in four to six weeks, so stay tuned in early October for further updates.
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Pittsburgh and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sports team impact study

access_time personNeil deMause

Check it out, the owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Steelers, and Pirates, seeking $800,000 a year in county money for a slush fund for improvements to their venues, have teamed up to pay for a study showing how much the teams contribute to the city’s economy, and their hired hands have determined: a hell of a lot! $6 billion over five years’ worth of a lot! Do we dare try to analyze their methodology without actually seeing the report itself, because the teams haven’t released that? I’m game if you are! Let’s begin with this from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article on the report:

They commissioned accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to produce an economic impact study that measures their value on several fronts, including direct and indirect spending, tax revenue and jobs.

That’s not a good sign: PwC is an accounting firm, not an economic analysis firm, so it’s unlikely they tried to account for the substitution effect whereby if Pittsburgh residents didn’t have pro sports to spend their money on, they wouldn’t just stuff it under their mattresses instead. A serious economic impact study would look at, say, spending during years when there’s a labor stoppage vs. spending during years when all the teams are playing, but we can probably safely assume that didn’t happen here.

[Penguins CEO David] Morehouse said the teams brought nearly 4 million people, counting concerts, to the city in 2017 to eat at restaurants, to stay at hotels, and to partake in other activities.

“Counting concerts”? How are the teams credited with people in Pittsburgh going to concerts? (People even go to concerts in cities with no major-league sports teams! It’s a true fact!) And the total attendance of the three teams in 2017 was only about 3.2 million, so clearly a lot of these people “brought to the city” were already in the city, which makes bringing them there not such an impressive accomplishment.

“You can’t just talk about Pittsburgh’s revitalization and then say these greedy sports bastards over here. I mean, if you’re going to tell the positive story about what’s happening in Pittsburgh, we’re part of it and we shouldn’t be the ones having to say it,” [Morehouse] said.

“But if we’re going to have to say it, we’re going to say it with the largest numbers we can possibly justify! Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”

Frank Coonelly, the Pirates president, doubts Pittsburgh would be one of 20 finalists for Amazon’s second headquarters if it did not have pro sports teams. Only one finalist for the online retailer’s new location — Austin — is without at least one pro sports team in its region.

This is not actually true: Montgomery County, Maryland, isn’t home to any pro sports teams either, nor is northern Virginia, though I suppose one could squint and give them credit for the teams nearby in D.C. But mostly, this is selection bias: Amazon is looking for a major urban area to put its new headquarters in, and there simply aren’t that many major urban areas without major sports teams: There’s Greenville and Grand Rapids, I suppose, but somehow I don’t think they would have made the cut even if they had acquired teams. (Oklahoma City and Buffalo, which are similar sized, didn’t.)

The GumGum analysis found the three teams generate 513.3 million in “combined impressions” a year, whether through TV broadcasts, social media, or print publications.

To get that kind of “postcard” exposure — whether it’s shots of the city skyline, the bridges, or other local landmarks — through paid advertising would cost nearly $41.5 million.

So basically the teams want to be credited for every time they got the name “Pittsburgh” mentioned in the national media, regardless of whether it was in a positive or negative light. I could note that there are other things that got Pittsburgh mentioned nationally lately that you really don’t want to start crediting for ad impressions, but I probably shouldn’t go there.

When the Penguins were fighting for a new arena a dozen years ago, a move to Kansas City made more sense — the deal was better and the city had a larger population, Mr. Morehouse said.

But, but, your own owner said it was a bluff! Get on the same page here, guys!

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Friday roundup: Leaky fountains, cheap stadium beer, and the magic of computers

access_time personNeil deMause

The world may be on vacation this week, but the stadium news decidedly is not:

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Steelers owner: If you won’t pay for my Wi-Fi, maybe I won’t host the Super Bowl, nyah

access_time personNeil deMause

Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II has announced that he’s suspended efforts to get awarded the 2023 Super Bowl, and is blaming it on the Pittsburgh-Allegheny County Sports & Exhibition Authority not giving him enough money for stadium upgrades:

“I don’t know that there’s a real commitment here from our landlord to do what’s necessary and work with us in a way that’s cooperative,” Mr. Rooney told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “It’s hard for me to explain what the reason is. It’s been something that’s becoming more difficult as the years have gone on in our lease.”

Rooney’s gripe is that he wants to expand capacity by another 2,000 seats (after already adding 3,000 in an expansion set to be completed this year), build a new scoreboard and expanded museum and concessions space, and pay for new sound and Wi-Fi systems that have already been installed, all using money from a capital reserve fund being paid into by ticket surcharges. The sports authority is pushing back on that, and Mayor Bill Peduto was even more vocal on the subject yesterday:

“What they’re asking for is tens of millions of dollars in public money, out of a fund that doesn’t have nearly enough,” Peduto said. “They want to have a state-of-the-art wifi system for eight games a year. I want a state-of-the-art wifi in every one of my schools for 180 days a year. I want to have the ability to reinvest in neighborhoods, not just reinvest in a Jumbotron.”

That’s a little unfair, as the capital reserve fund won’t be available to pay for schools funding if it’s not used on stadium upgrades. If the capital reserve fund runs dry, though, and the city ends up having to pay for other maintenance costs out of its own pocket because it used all the money on a new Steelers scoreboard, Peduto has a bit of a point. (It would take a deep dive into the Steelers’ lease to determine how exactly the capital reserve fund can and can’t be used, and all I can find at the moment is this summary, which doesn’t go into that level of detail.)

Peduto has played hardball with sports team demands before — he was elected in 2013 after campaigning against public funding being used for the last round of Steelers upgrades, and managed to successfully get the team owners to pay for them with increased rent payments. And the Pirates owners have threatened to sue the stadium authority over a similar issue about tapping a capital reserve fund for improvements to their stadium.

Ultimately, this is a minor squabble that mostly points up the importance of having good lawyers write up your leases so everyone doesn’t end up in court a few years later to determine what the heck they mean. Peduto and the stadium authority, though, are doing their job, which is to protect money controlled by the public from being used on anything that it doesn’t have to be. It seems a little harsh to report on that with headlines about “The dream of holding a Super Bowl at Heinz Field has come to a halt,” but I suppose it could be worse.

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St. Pete mayor ousted, Astrodome rehab defeated, and other stadium-related election returns

access_time personNeil deMause

Travis Waldron of ThinkProgress thoughtfully ran down five elections yesterday with stadium implications, from a vote on rehabbing the Astrodome to decisions on new mayors for cities facing sports venue battles. And the results are:

The big one to watch immediately is clearly the St. Pete mayoral situation, given that Sternberg is undoubtedly going to be one of the first to call on Kriseman wishing to start those promised “conversations.” There are still a heck of a lot of obstacles to the Rays getting a new building — how on earth to pay for it, mostly — but Foster, at least, is no longer one of them.

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