San Francisco 49ers – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Throw another $75m on the Rays subsidy fire, Phoenix mayor opposes neo-Coyotes arena tax

May 24, 2024 Neil deMause

It’s Friday again! I tried asking Google AI some stadium questions to see if it would return entertainingly daft answers, but I didn’t get much, so just eat your rocks and let’s get on with the week’s news remainders:

If an estimated $1.5 billion in cash, tax kickbacks, and land breaks for the Tampa Bay Rays didn’t sound like a lot already, turns out the $155 million that Rays owner Stu Sternberg wants to pay for 65 acres of land isn’t really $155 million, because he’d be making the payments in installments over 30 years. (St. Pete Assistant City Administrator Tom Greene estimates that this would knock about one-third off the value of the payments, making them worth $103 million; I get more like $80 million, but it depends on the exact payment schedule.) “I think that if you are not accounting for inflation in the agreement, we’re not getting the value that it says there,” said city councilmember Lisset Hanewicz, and, nope, inflation is not quite the same as devaluation for present value, but good enough for government work.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego says she “does not support using taxpayer funds, including property tax abatement, for sports arenas,” which is a blow to once-and-wannabe-future Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo’s plan to build a new arena in Phoenix using a “theme park” sales tax surcharge. “Tax abatement is essentially what establishing a theme park district does — so per the statement, she is opposed,” a Gallego spokesperson clarified — I’m still not 100% convinced that’s what it does, but either way, it’s going to make it tough for Meruelo to pursue his arena plans, at least unless the state legislature passes its bill to block city officials from having any say in such matters.
The city of Santa Clara and the San Francisco 49ers owners have resolved their lease dispute after, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, “the five-member City Council majority, which was elected with the help of millions in campaign contributions from 49ers CEO Jed York, approved the deal 5-2 in a closed session Monday night.” The details are too detailed to figure out exactly who came out how far ahead in the agreement, but given the above you can probably make an educated guess.
Voters in Eugene, Oregon have overwhelmingly rejected spending $15 million toward a new stadium for the minor-league baseball Emeralds, who have to move from their current stadium, which is only 14 years old, because MLB is making them as part of its “force all minor-league cities to build new stadiums” plan. Team officials had previously said they would move the team if the stadium measure didn’t pass; General Manager Allan Benavides said following the vote results that he didn’t know what the team owners’ next steps would be: “We’ll have to get really creative if we want to stay here, or find a new home.” Or maybe MLB could give them a waiver to keep playing in their current stadium, though that would only help the Emeralds and their fans, not MLB, so don’t hold your breath there.
John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability (the makers of these stickers) wrote an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times yesterday on why stadium subsidies in St. Petersburg or anywhere are a bad idea, which provides a good overview of the economic arguments and more than a few bon mots — I’m partial to “stadiums don’t create more economic activity in a city any more than cutting a pizza into more slices creates more dinner for everyone,” but feel free to choose your own favorite.
The St. Louis Cardinals suck, which means it’s time for a news report about how hot dog trucks outside the stadium aren’t seeing as much business. Are hot dog trucks on the other side of town doing better business as a result? That’s too hard to report, you’ll have to do your own research, apparently.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: More shouting about Virginia arena traffic, plus rumors of A’s (temporary) death and Coyotes-to-Utah

February 2, 2024 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! (Happiness provided separately.) While I have you here, is it a good time to remind you that Field of Schemes is on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Post, and whatever Elon Musk is calling his thing these days? And that by following FoS in any or all of those places, you can get notifications of new posts as soon as they happen — and not only that, by reacting to posts on those sites, you can help get more attention for Field of Schemes, because that’s how social media likes work, it’s a popularity contest where your votes make the things you like more popular? No, that isn’t what you want to hear right now, you just to read the weekly news recap? Okay, ignore all that for now, you can always come back to it later.

Alexandria held a public meeting last night on traffic and transit plans for its proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, and people came with all sorts of questions about the traffic and transit plans, who’da thunk it? The teams’ owner and the Virginia Department of Transportation issued a new “concept plan” for traffic and transit that mostly seems to be about how arenas generate traffic mostly at peak times (duh) and the state would be spending $200 million to mitigate this through various stuff (okay) — though honestly it’s hard to get much out of the plan beyond its dedication to all-caps type, seriously don’t do that unless you want to make it harder for readers to comprehend what you’re saying … oh.
Former D.C. councilmember Jack Evans wrote a whole op-ed for the Washington Business Journal saying that the Alexandria arena deal would be a terrible one because it involves “extremely risky” TIFs, which isn’t necessarily wrong but is hilarious if you remember who Jack Evans is and why he’s now a former councilmember. (If you don’t remember Evans, just luxuriate in the part where he cites the more than 20 TIF deals he consummated while on the council as evidence that he knows how awful they can be.)
Slate’s David Faris, meanwhile, thinks D.C. should let the Wizards and Capitals leave and let Virginia stick itself with the arena costs, because the teams and their limited economic impact aren’t worth it. Mostly I want to call attention to Faris’s suggestion that stadium and arena deals are subject to “a sports version of Fenno’s paradox — the political science finding that people generally like their own representative while disapproving of the job Congress is doing” — which I’m not sure is actually the case, since in my experience people tend to get the maddest about their own cities’ sports subsidies, but it’s an interesting concept.
Could the Oakland A’s disband for three seasons, leaving MLB with only 29 teams, then emerge fully formed in Las Vegas as a beautiful expansion butterfly? You could take my word for it (hahaha no), or you could read Awful Announcing’s lengthier consideration of the possibility (the players’ union would have to sign off on losing 40 major-league jobs for three years, fewer teams would mean fewer games and would affect TV contracts, hahaha no).
The actual likeliest locations of the A’s until their Vegas stadium is ready (if their Vegas stadium is ever ready, add Ken Rosenthal to the list of doubters) is thought to be either Salt Lake City or Sacramento, but either would require temporarily rejiggering the A’s TV rights situation, which “is gumming up a resolution,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan. I know A’s owner John Fisher claims he fell in love with Las Vegas and really wants to move there, but it does seem more and more like he stumbled into committing to a move through his stadium czar Dave Kaval’s loose lips and is only now trying to figure out how it will actually work.
Could the Arizona Coyotes move to Salt Lake City as soon as “immediately”? Rumors say so, and just because the same rumors said so last summer and nothing happened then doesn’t mean they couldn’t be right now, right?
“Levi’s to pay 49ers, Santa Clara $170M to make stadium signs slightly bigger” is a funny headline, but it’s not actually true, since Levi’s will be paying the San Francisco 49ers and Santa Clara $170 million for a ten-year extension of their naming rights deal, which is only partly motivated by wanting to make their stadium signs bigger before the 2026 Super Bowl and World Cup. Good on the city for getting at least a share of the naming rights money when many cities don’t, that’ll help make up for the money they’re losing from the team owners winning their case that they only have to pay half of the property taxes on the stadium.
State Treasurer Dereck Davis said, “I feel lied to,” after learning that Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos had agreed to sell his team just weeks after promising he wasn’t going to sell his team in order to get a new sweetheart lease deal from the state, that seems a very valid feeling to have. Maybe the state should have put a poison pill clause in the lease making it null and void if Angelos went back on his word? Oh well, too late now, maybe next time.
The people who want to bring an MLB expansion team to Portland, Oregon might buy a golf course to use for a stadium that would be paid for somehow for a team that only exists in their dreams. At least they’ll always have their outfield tram renderings.
A bill to lure the Chicago Bears across state lines to Indiana now has two sponsors in the state house instead of one. Further updates as events warrant.

Share this post:

Study “proving” 49ers stadium is a huge win for the public says nothing of the sort

October 4, 2023 Neil deMause

The sports business site Front Office Sports — originally founded by a sports management student with no journalism experience as a way to interview sports execs in hopes of landing a job with them — has a well-deserved reputation for having its head so far up the butts of team owners that it can see what they had for lunch, so I tend not to link to too many of its “articles.” But it’s hard not to take notice of one with the headline “49ers Proving Not All Criticism of Public-Funded Stadiums Is Warranted.” Oh, does it now, Front Office Sports, do tell?

Sitting in his sunlit office, Al Guido, President of the San Francisco 49ers, felt vindicated.

“We’ve proven our business case here,” Guido told Front Office Sports. “From a mathematical perspective, I don’t think you can look at this stadium as it relates to the 49ers or the city or, frankly, the larger region and say that this wasn’t a tremendous success in the first 10 years.”

This data was detailed in a study released on Monday, demonstrating that Levi’s Stadium has not only generated more than $2 billion for the local economy but has also contributed nearly $469 million in tax revenue since its opening in 2014.

So we’ve already taken a step back from the claims of the headline, where instead of the 49ers‘ stadium proving that public stadium subsidies aren’t as bad as they’re cracked up to be, we have a 49ers exec asserting that it proves it. From a mathematical perspective even! And with eye-popping numbers of $2 billion in economic impact and $469 million in new taxes over nine years, according to a study that … where does that link lead, anyway?

Head over to sportseconomics.com and we learn that “SportsEconomics is a full-service marketing research and economic consulting firm. Industry-leading Economist oversees all analysis.” Said economist is Daniel Rascher, who unlike in the case of some economic impact study consultants actually has a PhD in economics; SportsEconomics appears to be the shingle he’s been operating his consultancy under since way back in 1998, which explains how he was able to land the domain name.

As for those glowing impact findings, let’s dig into them some more:

“Projected” direct spending is an interesting term to use for the year 2022 in a report prepared in 2023. Where did that $251 million figure for projected non-stadium economic impact — in other words, spending in Santa Clara outside the stadium that can be credited to the stadium — come from?

This Report utilizes primary research (surveys and direct data gathering during the events) to estimate spending, as well as secondary research (the assimilation of data/information that already existed and was created for purposes other than this report) for non-survey based spending categories.

That’s a whole lot of passive voice there: Who’s gathering data from whom exactly, and how? It looks like somebody, probably the 49ers themselves, just asked fans to estimate how much they were spending during their visits to the stadium and then wishcasted that into solid economic projections, which — oh, look, while I was on a plane, J.C. Bradbury already made this point for me:

I thumbed through this last night. This is not how economists measure economic impacts. Basically, it uses attendee surveys (notoriously unreliable/biased) and then run through an input-output multiplier. It's not credible and no one should take it seriously. https://t.co/30SkYjRgjb

— J.C. Bradbury (@jc_bradbury) October 3, 2023

Stanford University sports economist Roger Noll was almost as harsh when asked about the report by the San Jose Mercury News, saying that while it’s “more carefully done than a typical impact study” it still “does not measure the net benefits to Santa Clara, city or county, from having the stadium.”

There’s also a weird disclaimer stuck in toward the end of Rascher’s report:

So the estimates of how much of the spending is incremental — i.e., how much is genuinely new, not just people who would have been in the area spending money anyway — is or isn’t included in the impact projections? It’s hard to tell whether Rascher here means “I acknowledge that some of this money isn’t really new, but I don’t know how much” or “This is just the new spending, there’s also non-new spending but I don’t know how much.” And if the latter, it’s hard to say how he knew, if his only data source is 49ers fans filling out surveys sent to them by the team.

Finally, Rascher also claims that the stadium created “approximately 11,840 [full-time equivalent] jobs,” which would be remarkable for a stadium that’s only in use a couple of dozen days a year; unfortunately no source at all is cited for the jobs number, so we have no clue at all what if anything that means.

I’ve reached out to Rascher to see if he can clarify some of the numbers he’s presented and where he got them, and will update this post if I hear back. In the meantime, any last words, J.C.?

This is about identifying truth. Sometimes we get things wrong, and good faith mistakes are a part of the process. Self-publishing motivated findings outside normal channels for a fee is not. You want to consult? Fine. But you have to conform to conventional research standards.

— J.C. Bradbury (@jc_bradbury) October 3, 2023

#micdrop

Share this post:

49ers and Santa Clara declare end to lease fight after team-sponsored councilmember flips bird, mayor calls cops

September 1, 2022 Neil deMause

Let’s see, what else happened this week? Oh, looks like the city of Santa Clara and the San Francisco 49ers owners finally settled their long-running squabble over the team’s management of the city-owned and -financed but team-funded (sorta, more or less, mostly) stadium. That can probably wait for the Friday roundup, let’s see if there any especially interesting details—

That’s when Becker yelled “F— you!” at Watanabe and made an obscene gesture, according to both Gillmor and Watanabe. Gillmor remained in the room after Watanabe left.

Um.

“I called the police because it was obvious he was having huge anger issues. I’m always very careful if it appears anyone is getting out of control. But he was so emotional and I wanted to protect myself.”

Um.

Okay, some background: Gillmor is Lisa Gillmor, Santa Clara’s mayor, who has been fighting with the 49ers owners over the stadium lease terms for years. Becker is Anthony Becker, who was elected in 2020 along with two other councilmembers with the financial backing of 49ers owner Jed York and who is running for mayor this fall against Gillmor. Watanabe is Kathy Watanabe, who along with Gillmor tried to get the settlement discussed in open session, only to see that vote fail, leading to a closed session — which is where the cursing, flipping the bird, and police-calling all happened.

The settlement offer is worth $13 million, according to team execs, but that includes only $1.35 million in actual cash, according to a previous Chronicle report, with the rest including theoretical benefits, including some funds the city already controls, including $1.3 million shifted from the stadium authority’s discretionary funds to general and operating funds, and the 49ers waiving accrued interest they were demanding, leading Thomas Shanks, former executive director of Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, to call it “funny money.”

Topping it all off, it’s not clear whether the council actually approved the settlement, with interim city attorney Steven Ngo first saying nothing had been agreed on, then later saying an agreement had been reached. The Chronicle, however, notes that if a vote was taken, it must have been in closed session while Gillmor and Watanabe were both out of the room, and councilmember Raj Chahal also absent, leaving only four of seven councilmembers there.

Gillmor already wants to reconsider the deal, or at least have it explained in open session so everyone can see what happened while she was out of the room calling the police on one of her fellow lawmakers:

“If this settlement is indeed final, I want the staff to put it on the agenda for next City Council meeting, so we can let the public know exactly what this council accepted and bring some transparency. … I’m very concerned they didn’t report the action out of closed session. There’s been no explanation, and it lends to a lot more suspicions of a back-room deal.”

Gillmor is also considering filing a police report on Becker, and definitely plans to file a complaint with the city’s human resources department. This fall’s Santa Clara mayoral debates are going to be really interesting, let’s just leave it at that.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: More Jaguars move threats, more bad convention center spending, time is an endless loop of human folly

December 4, 2020 Neil deMause

It’s Friday again! And December, how did that happen? “Passage of time,” what manner of witchcraft are you speaking of? Time is an eternal, unchanging present of toil and suffering under the grip of unending plagues! Thus has it ever been!

This notwithstanding, there was some news this week, though in keeping with the theme, it looks an awful lot like the news every week:

The Jacksonville city council ignored Mayor Lenny Curry’s pleas to stop thinking about Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s multi-hundred-million-dollar subsidy demand and just vote on it, and instead held another hearing last night on the team’s request for $200 million in public cash toward building a development in one of the stadium parking lots. Jaguars president Mark Lamping picked up the baton, though, and issued an impressive string of non-threat threats that the team would leave town without approval of the subsidy, saying, “We’re doing what we believe is necessary to ensure NFL football is here in Northeast Florida for decades to come,” that the Lot J development and renovations to the team’s stadium are needed to “ensure we stay in Jacksonville,” and “We are doing everything to stay here.” Council president Tommy Hazouri would like to wait to vote on the Lot J subsidy until January, but Jaguars lobbyist Paul Harden warned of “deal fatigue” and called for a vote on Tuesday, and apparently Florida law gives lobbyists equal power to council presidents — who knew? — so that might actually happen. At which point Khan can come back in a couple more years to demand additional stadium renovation money in exchange for a lease extension. It’s good to be king.
Good article in the New York Times this week about how multiple cities (Indianapolis, Savannah, Cleveland, Terre Haute) are pouring money into convention center expansions even as convention centers remain closed and in any case have been facing years of declining attendance nationwide. In fact, convention center operators say this is even more of a reason to throw good money after bad, because with fewer conventions, they have no choice but to spend more to compete for the few that are available, right? “This is a perverse world, where market realities do not affect city decision-making,” University of Texas at San Antonio economist and FoS convention center correspondent Heywood Sanders tells the Times.
When Hamilton County, Ohio passed a 0.5% sales tax hike in 1996 to fund new stadiums for the Cincinnati Bengals and Reds, lawmakers promised county residents that if there was any money left over after paying off the stadiums, it would go to lower their property taxes. That’s only happened in the amount promised back then twice in the last decade, and it’s not going to happen this year either, with the pandemic taking a bite out of sales tax revenues that will leave only enough surplus for 21% of what homeowners were expecting. This has squat-all to do with the stadium deal — it’s more about the county overpromising by making rose-colored projections of how much money the tax hike would bring in — but as I noted when this same thing happened two years ago, at least this time the county didn’t have to sell any hospitals.
The Anaheim Ducks, Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, and Pittsburgh Penguins are all reportedly considering playing their NHL seasons outdoors in order to be allowed to sell tickets, which is a great plan except that California is about to be under new stay-at-home restrictions that almost certainly won’t allow outdoor sports attendance either, and in Boston and Pittsburgh it snows a lot in the winter. Add in the costs of building and operating a temporary hockey rink at, say, Fenway Park, and this doesn’t seem all that likely to happen, but it’s certainly a better idea than hoping to allow attendance at indoor arenas before enough people are vaccinated, which isn’t likely to happen until the 2021-22 season.
Santa Clara’s stadium authority met this week to discuss an audit report of the San Francisco 49ers‘ stadium, and the 49ers responded by telling Santa Clara to fire its auditor. Then the audit showed a couple of million dollars of “discrepancies” in the 49ers’ books, at which point 49ers officials said they wouldn’t cooperate with audits anymore. Is this how rich people behave with the IRS, too? Yeah, pretty much.
I went on Orlando’s Beat of Sports radio show this week to discuss MLB’s self-declared mission to reorganize much of the minors into intern leagues so it can stop paying players while also leveraging cities for more stadium money, and you can listen to it here.
There are new renderings of the under-construction St. Louis S.C. stadium, and frankly they’re kind of boring, though they do have a Ferris wheel in them. They also supposedly show how fans will have a “perfect view” of the Gateway Arch, which I can’t actually spot in any of the images, but then I’m not sure why anyone would buy tickets to a soccer match to see a structure that they can see every day for free.
The Pawtucket Red Sox are no more, and if you want to remember the team’s history by buying some Keith Foulke bobbleheads, knock yourself out.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: San Diego okays $1B arena complex, Manfred floats neutral-site World Series, and that time the Twins ran stadium ads featuring a kid who’d died from cancer

November 6, 2020 Neil deMause

I am way too tired this morning from waiting for tranches of vote counts to drop to write an amusing intro, so let’s get straight to the news:

San Diego voters have approved Measure E, which removes a 30-foot height limit on buildings in the Midway District, which will allow the construction of a $1 billion-or-so new arena complex, which it’s still not entirely clear how it would be paid for, plus there’s still a lawsuit against it, so tune back in later.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has told Sports Business Daily that holding the World Series at a neutral site every year is not “completely off the table” because “you can plan, you can take out travel, you can pick sites that eliminate weather problems.” Marc Normandin notes that this is probably just a trial balloon — “Manfred says a lot of things to gauge the reaction of them, and then attempts to move forward with the things he thinks he can get away with or that are worth MLB’s time regardless of fan reaction” — but also points out that MLB could require cities to bid for the World Series like they do the Olympics, or at least use hosting rights as a carrot for cities to build new stadiums (like they already do with the All-Star Game), which is likely a way bigger factor than how early John Smoltz gets to book his plane tickets.
The MLS expansion team Charlotte F.C. is no longer looking to build a new headquarters at the former Eastland Mall, apparently as a Covid-sparked cost-saving measure. As a result, the city of Charlotte is cutting its subsidies to the team (at least for now) from $110 million to $39 million. There needs to be a new agreement worked out between the team and the city, but also the city council is voting on it on Monday, so maybe it’s already worked out?
The Toronto Raptors could play the 2020-21 season in Newark to get around U.S.-Canada travel restrictions, because at least Newark is in the East. The safety of playing basketball indoors without a bubble remains unclear, but that big German indoor concert study shows that maybe it’s actually safe so long as there’s good ventilation and everyone wears masks and distances, which basketball players aren’t going to do, so never mind.
D.C. United fired its security company to save money and then asked team staffers to take unpaid shifts sitting in the arena watching security cameras, which is very much not a good look. Adding “Volunteering to assist with security will certainly be looked favorably upon (and vice versa)” really didn’t help.
Hotels in Tampa Bay are excited about the upcoming Super Bowl, even if it’s at reduced capacity, because absolutely nobody is staying at hotels in Tampa Bay right now.
Portland’s sports-owner-friendly mayor Ted Wheeler was re-elected, and this guy is really happy because yeah sports!!!
As if the San Francisco 49ers battle with the city of Santa Clara over their stadium operations isn’t weird enough, now the team has signed a parking agreement with the city and then asked the city to tear it up, which is both weird and probably illegal.
SB Nation’s Minnesota Twins blog looks back at that time team execs ran an ad warning that if they didn’t get a new stadium and the team left town, outfielder Marty Cordova could no longer visit eight-year-old cancer patients. Also the kid in the ad had already died by the time it ran. That did not work out well, but the Twins still got their publicly funded stadium a decade later by doing an end run around the city and getting the county to pay for it, so all’s well that ends well or something.

Share this post:

49ers owner spends $3m to unseat Santa Clara politicians who crossed him, says he’s promoting “diversity”

October 26, 2020 Neil deMause

San Francisco 49ers owners the York family successfully won approval in 2012 to build a $1.2 billion stadium in Santa Clara with the city taking on much of the risk, but ever since then has butted heads continually with local government, clashing over insufficient team financial reports and how much taxes the team would pay and whether the Rolling Stones could set off fireworks and who gets to manage the stadium and whether the team could withhold rent when two exhibition games were canceled thanks to Covid. What’s a poor sports billionaire family to do? Buy a new local government, of course!

[Jed] York has contributed $3 million to Citizens for Efficient Government and Full Voting Rights, a PAC whose stated mission is to bring diversity to the city council…

”It would be unusual for a sports franchise owner or let’s just say any corporation or business to spend this kind of money even in a mayor’s race,” John Pelissero, the senior scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said Thursday. “Instead this has all the appearance of attempting to buy four city council seats just to improve the private interests of the 49ers.”

While the PAC is organized to promote diversity, the candidates it’s supporting this year go extremely white guy, Indian-American guy, Indian-American woman, Korean-American guy; they’re looking to unseat a white woman and a woman so white she has a Celtic knot in her campaign page banner design, plus capture two open seats. So that’s either a plus or a minus depending on whether you’re looking at racial or gender diversity, and of course assuming by “diversity” you mean “access to just enough power for non-white-guys to not make white guys uncomfortable,” but that’s a battle that was lost decades ago.

Anyway, the issue here is less whether York is backing diverse (or good) candidates than whether he’s trying to unseat elected officials who are a pain in his butt by throwing money around. Three million dollars may not be a lot to an NFL owner, but it’s a fortune in small-city political circles: SFist notes that one of the incumbents (it links to a dead campaign finance page, so we can’t tell which one) has only raised a total of $6,234 this year. And whether or not York is successful — and whether or not the challengers he’s supporting would necessarily be beholden to his interests — he’s certainly making a public statement that anyone who clashes with him will be firmly in the crosshairs of his wealth come election time. If that’s enough to get current or future local pols antsy enough to get them looking to cut deals with him rather than taking a hard line, that should prove money well spent.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: World still on fire, let’s remember 1989 when the greatest sports horror imaginable was Alan Thicke in a tuxedo

October 23, 2020October 23, 2020 Neil deMause

Very busy week here at FoS HQ, so let’s dispense with any introductory chitchat and get right to the news we didn’t already get to this week:

California is set to allow fans back into outdoor sporting venues in counties with low coronavirus infection rates, but no county in Southern California qualifies and Santa Clara County has ruled that it won’t allow fans at San Francisco 49ers games yet, and the baseball season is almost over, so this will only apply to a few high-school and college teams, maybe? Meanwhile, Louisiana is allowing attendance at high school football games at 50% capacity for parishes where virus positivity rates are below 5%, because those are nice round numbers, I guess? I sure hope the virus counts in base 10.
The sales-tax increase that delivered $309.5 million in tax money to the Green Bay Packers over 15 years worked out great, says the CEO of the Packers. In related news, Jesse James says the light security on America’s trains has provided a terrific economic boon to society.
The head of the Saskatchewan Party, which is the ruling party of the province of (wait for it) Saskatchewan, says he’d consider kicking in some provincial money toward a new sports arena in Saskatoon. Saskatoon, you will recall, has no major sports teams but needs a new arena because of some kind of extended used-car metaphor, so it’s nice to see the province stepping up to meet urgent community needs.
Here’s an entire article about how sad it is to see the Superdome empty when you’ve had so much fun going to games there, which is maybe just slightly tone-deaf, The Atlantic, in a week when the New Orleans Saints have been revealed to be lobbying hard to allow fans into the dome, indoor virus precautions be damned.
Let’s talk to the architect of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium about how great it is to play the World Series in, even though he didn’t get allowed in to see the games in person either!
This isn’t new, but it’s new to me: The 1989 opening ceremonies for SkyDome were completely amazing, and if you think I mean that in a good way, you have never watched Alan Thicke doing a musical dance number with Andrea Martin about retractable roofs.

That’s all for now, see you all Monday!

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Drumming clowns, vaporgondolas, and the XFL rises shambling from its dusty grave

September 18, 2020 Neil deMause

The magnets have shipped! Repeat: The magnets have shipped! If you want to get in on this, act now, or you might have to wait until I make my second trip to the post office.

This was an extra-busy news week, which felt like a bit of a return to normalcy after several months of sports team owners mostly focusing more on getting back on the field than on getting money to pay for new fields. But life can’t be put on hold forever, and by “life” I mean “grubbing for someone else’s cash,” because what is life if not that? (Answers may differ if you are not a sports team owner.)

Here’s a bunch more stuff that happened than what already made FoS this week:

That protest to call for the New York Yankees to pay their fair share of taxes or maybe just bail out local struggling businesses only drew about 10-15 people, according to NJ.com, but also “clowns playing a drum on stilts.” The site’s accompanying video features less than two seconds of drum-playing stilt clowns, and a whole lot of 161st Street BID director Cary Goodman talking about the plight of local businesses, and while I know Cary and he apparently paid for the clowns, I still say that this is a dereliction of journalistic duty.
Along those same lines, the gondola company owned by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has reportedly released new renderings of its proposed gondola to Dodger Stadium, but does NBC Los Angeles show us any of them? No, it does not. (I so yearn to see Cab-Hailing Purse Woman cast off her foam finger and hail a gondola.) We do learn that “the gondola system could move up to 5,500 people per hour in each direction, meaning more than 10,000 fans could be transported to Dodger Stadium in the two hours before the start of a game or event,” which seems to misunderstand how people arrive at baseball games, which at Dodger Stadium is mostly all at once in the third inning, and even more misunderstand how people leave baseball games, which is all at once when they’re over, at which point there would suddenly be a two-hour-long line for the gondola. McCourt’s L.A. Aerial Rapid Transit company says it will pay the project’s $125 million cost, but even if true — and you know I’m always skeptical when people ask for public-private partnerships but promise there will be no public money — that doesn’t make this much less of a crazy idea.
The XFL’s Los Angeles Wildcats might have to share their stadium this spring with a college football team, and, wait, didn’t the XFL fold? I swear the XFL folded. Oh, I see now that The Rock bought it, so: In the unlikely event that the XFL gets going again, its L.A. team will have to share digs with a college football team playing in the spring. Honestly having to use a football stadium more than 10 days a year just seems like efficient use of space to me, but sports leagues do get gripey about scheduling, even sports leagues that barely exist.
That Palm Springs arena being built by AEG now won’t be built in Palm Springs after all, but rather nearby Palm Desert, because the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose land was going to be used for the project, decided after Covid hit to “reevaluate what was going on just like most other businesses because they had so many other projects,” whatever that means. Given that the Palm Springs police and fire departments said they’d need tens of millions of dollars to provide services for the new arena, I think it’s safe to say that Palm Springs just dodged a bullet here.
The San Francisco 49ers are finally paying rent again to the city of Santa Clara, after initially trying to get out of it because their two exhibition games at home were canceled.
This Athletic article about the attempts in the 1980s and ’90s to save Tiger Stadium is paywalled and is not nearly as comprehensive as the entire chapter about the same subject in Field of Schemes, but it does have some nice quotes from Tiger Stadium Fan Club organizers Frank Rashid and Judy Davids (the latter of whom worked on a renovation plan for the stadium that would have cost a fraction of a new one, a scale model for which I once slept in the same room with when she and her husband/co-designer John put me up at their house during a FoS book tour), so by all means give it a read if you can.
If you’re wondering how $5.6 billion in subsidies for a new high-end residential/office/mall development in Manhattan is working out now that Covid has both residents and offices moving out of Manhattan, I reported on it for Gothamist and discovered the unsurprising answer: really not well at all.
The KFC Yum! Center in Louisville’s naming rights are about to expire, but KFC is talking about signing an extension, so with any luck we have many more years ahead of us to make fun of the name “KFC Yum! Center.”
That’s not how you spell “ESPN,” Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: 49ers stadium squabble, Richmond nixes arena plan (for now), Mets’ $55m taxpayer-funded sofas off-limits to mere minor-leaguers because “status”

February 14, 2020 Neil deMause

A glacier in Antarctica just lost a chunk of ice bigger than Seattle twice the size of Washington, D.C. nearly the size of Atlanta almost as big as Las Vegas a third the size of Dublin, maybe it’s time to quit driving an SUV? Or maybe it’s just time to focus on some more human-scale disasters that involve small groups of people enriching themselves to the detriment of humanity:

The Santa Clara city council voted unanimously to remove the San Francisco 49ers as managers of their stadium for both NFL and non-NFL events, on the grounds that the team owners were siphoning off lease payments that could have gone to the city. The vote is “just symbolic,” however, as the fate of the stadium’s management is already tied up in litigation ever since the council voted to remove the 49ers owners as managers for non-NFL events last year, so we’re not going to see the team forced to negotiate a lease to play home games just yet.
The Richmond city council has killed the city’s $1.5 billion arena district plan dead, only maybe not completely dead given that everyone is just going back to the drawing board to concoct a new deal. The old plan to sink $300 million in tax money into an arena appears dead, though, so that’s something.
The New York Mets have completed $57 million in upgrades to their Florida facility, almost all of it public money, with one of the highlights being a lavish clubhouse that only big-leaguers will be allowed to use during spring training, not minor-leaguers during the regular season, “to give minor leaguers a reminder of the status they’re working to earn.” As Marc Normandin notes in his subscription-only newsletter, “Apparently, the horrific wages, forcing players to pay for their own equipment, not paying them during spring training at all, and having five roommates who all sleep on air mattresses in a small apartment wasn’t enough motivation to be treated more like a person.” Plus the sandwiches and not even being allowed to bring your own lunch! The major-league Mets, though, they get comfy sofas at taxpayer expense, because that’s how American capitalism is meant to be.
Washington NFL owner and full-time supervillain Dan Snyder is apparently using the promise of a new stadium in either Maryland or Virginia to press those states to legalize sports gambling, which sounds reasonable until you remember that whichever state wins the stadium likely “wins” a huge public subsidy tab as well. Maybe Snyder should threaten that he won’t go away unless the state legalizes sports gambling?
Louisville is considering a 10% ticket tax on events at the KFC Yum Center plus a 0.25% restaurant tax surcharge in the entire city, all to pay off the arena’s massive debt load now that the plan to pay for it with a tax increment financing district was such a complete disaster. Friends don’t let friends pay for things with TIFs!
Next Tuesday’s planned groundbreaking for a planned Palm Springs arena — set to be the home of a new minor-league hockey team — was unexpectedly postponed this week, with no explanation. Nobody from either the the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose land the arena will be built on, or Oak View Group, which is building it, is commenting at all, so feel free to read the tea leaves however you want.
The Vegas Golden Knights‘ new minor-league affiliate that the team moved from San Antonio will play in the 17-year-old Orleans Arena until a new arena can be built, because who plays willingly in a 17-year-old arena, my god, what will the neighbors think?
Six months to go before the Tokyo Olympics, time for the ceremonial sweeping of the homeless out of sight of cameras!
If that news item about the state of New Jersey paying $20 million a year to NBC to shoot a TV show in the vacant Meadowlands Arena got you wondering how much you the taxpayers spent to subsidize this year’s Oscar-nominated movies, Kasia Tarczynska of Good Jobs First has you covered. If I and my fellow New Yorkers helped pay $9.9 million toward The Joker, shouldn’t we at least get, I dunno, free Netflix?

Share this post: