It’s been another nutty week in stadiumland, but let’s give thanks for the small things — in this case, for the WP Dark Mode plugin, which has been updated so that it again gives FoS readers the option to avoid eyestrain while still navigating the site as you’re meant to. If you haven’t clicked the little crescent moon in the corner of the screen, give it a try, it’s fun!
Or you can read about the news of the week, which is less guaranteed to be fun, but is still … interesting? Informative? One of those:
- Fox 13 in Salt Lake City claims that both the proposed MLB stadium and NHL arena would create entertainment districts where sales taxes would be kicked back to pay for the projects. We knew this for the baseball stadium, but for the arena the legislation says “authorizes a qualifying local government to levy a sales and use tax within the local government’s boundaries and for use within the project area” and caps the amount at 0.5%, so it looks like this would actually be a citywide sales tax hike? Either way, it’s a lot of money, and still more money would be required to pay the full $1.4 billion combined cost — including, notes University of Colorado economist Geoffrey Propheter, $1 million a year in kicked-back “possessory interest taxes,” more than half of which would come out of school budgets — but it sure would be nice to see some clarity on this before the legislature wraps up its session … wait, today? Well, that’s suboptimal.
- NBC Chicago obtained emails showing that Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf had their comms departments work together to concoct a press statement about the team’s stadium plans in January, and while it’s sort of understandable given that it was about a meeting between the two, it’s also maybe not the best sign of a mayor being interested in driving a hard bargain for his constituents that when the White Sox asked the mayor’s office to vet their press release, the response was “Could we do a joint statement?” Especially when the resulting statement referred to a meeting “to discuss the historic partnership between the team and Chicago and the team’s ideas for remaining competitive in Chicago in perpetuity” and didn’t mention anything about the $2 billion public price tag.
- Chicago political consultant David Axelrod tweeted that the White Sox stadium plan would be “a game-changer for the city” and immediately got piled on for “peddling disinformation” (The Athletic’s Keith Law), told “You’re not an economist, so how about trust the economists who are” (economist J.C. Bradbury) and “Claiming stadiums catalyze economic development is like arguing vaccines cause autism” (Bradbury again), among many, many others.
- Comcast Spectacor, the owners of the Philadelphia Flyers, are talking about doing a $2.5 billion redevelopment of the parking lots around their arena, to include “hotels, residences, restaurants, shops and a 5,500-seat performance stage.” Funding for the first phase would come from Comcast and its development partners, while the second phase would be paid for by “yet to be determined,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which isn’t a red flag at all.
- The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill handing over the RFK Stadium site to Washington, D.C. for redevelopment which will likely mean a proposal to build a new Commanders stadium there. Every representative from Maryland but one voted against it, as did four of 11 members from Virginia; “It’s most certainly not a level playing field when one interested jurisdiction receives a free transfer of federal government subsidized land,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland. We’re still a long way from actual stadium plans or price tags, and the D.C. council may yet vote to use the site for something other than a stadium, but it definitely adds one more potential competitor to what’s been a mostly quiet of late three-way bidding war.
- MLB commissioner Rob Manfred called the Oakland A’s Las Vegas relocation plans “solid” and immediately got piled on for damning it with faint praise. Manfred also acknowledged that “to most effectively build the [2025] schedule, we need to know at some point in the spring exactly where they’re going to be,” which isn’t exactly giving A’s owner John Fisher a deadline, the commissioner knows who signs his checks. Fisher is apparently hoping that if he agrees to sell his share of the Oakland Coliseum site to the local group that wants to develop it, the city of Oakland will grant him a lease extension to play there through 2027, which isn’t the deal the Oakland mayor’s office has been talking about at all, so we’ll see what the reaction there is.
- Tennessee’s tourism department has asked the state legislature for the right to deny public access to public records about how much it offers the NFL for the right to host the Super Bowl at the new Titans stadium under construction. “The Super Bowl deal is often embarrassing for the NFL because of the demands they make and for the politicians that agree to give the league things like free high-end hotel rooms and police escorts,” notes College of Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson.
- Toronto is now expecting to spend $380 million on hosting six 2026 World Cup matches, which is, let’s see, $63 million per match. It says it expects an economic boost of $392 million in GDP and tax revenues of $119 million, which seem both optimistic and mismatched unless Toronto has a 30% sales tax rate, but since World Cup impact numbers are generally garbage anyway — Matheson once called them “so outlandish as to defy common sense” — we can safely ignore them entirely.
