Category: Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Bucs, Cowboys go back to public trough for upgrade money for taxpayer-built stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the standards of the sports subsidy playbook has been the grift that keeps on giving: Once a team owner gets a new stadium or arena at public expense, their next step is to go back and ask for more money to renovate it once the new car smell is gone. And one big decision is how long is the right amount of time to wait before going back to the taxpayer trough?

One option is to wait until your lease is about to expire, and demand upgrades in order to stick around longer. (The unstated threat is that the team would leave if the subsidies aren’t approved, but it’s far more common that team owners just sign short-term extensions while continuing to negotiate for stadium cash, especially since for many of them the only other option would be to go play in the street.) That’s the approach taken by Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, who opened Raymond James Stadium 28 years ago at public expense, and now are seeking unspecified city and county money in exchange for extending their lease another five years:

“I can confirm that we met recently with the Tampa Sports Authority, Hillsborough County, and the City of Tampa to discuss developing a long-term plan that supports the stadium’s ability to continue hosting major events which contribute to the success of our region,” Bucs chief operating officer Brian Ford said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times. “As Raymond James Stadium enters its 29th year, our goal is to ensure it remains a competitive premier sports and entertainment venue for the Tampa Bay community well into the future.”

Ford didn’t say what the Bucs stadium needs to be “competitive” with, though it’s possible that a new Rays stadium in Tampa could compete for hosting concerts, maybe. (The football stadium currently has 11 concerts scheduled for the rest of 2026, including three by BTS and two by Bruno Mars.) Spending tax money to upgrade Tampa’s football stadium so it can compete with a new Tampa baseball stadium built with tax money may seem like an odd way to run a railroad, but this is where we are.

Or maybe you’re Jerry Jones, who opened the publicly funded AT&T Stadium just 17 years ago, and you don’t want to wait a whole 30 years until your lease is expiring. Well, good news, everyone, there’s no rule against just asking for renovation money now:

Arlington’s city council could soon be asking its residents to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade AT&T Stadium for the Dallas Cowboys.

The agenda for next week’s city council meeting includes a proposal to contribute what will be $273 million in upgrades to the stadium.

The Cowboys’ portion will be $750 million.

A $1.023 billion renovation would be more than half again as much as the $650 million it cost to build the stadium in the first place, half of which was approved as public money by Arlington voters. The city’s next $273 million would come from the same taxes as last time, but no public vote would be required, as the last vote allowed city officials to extend the tax surcharges established then into perpetuity and keep on giving the proceeds to Jones. (No explanation has been provided how this will work when the Cowboys’ car rental tax surcharge is already being used to pay off Arlington’s new Texas Rangers stadium.)

One way to evaluate taxpayer-funded stadium renovations is by how many years of lease extension the city would get in exchange — the record for least bang for your buck there is the $43.3 million per year of new lease that the Carolina Panthers got in 2024. The Cowboys would be extending their lease from 2039 to 2055, so a $273 million expense would come to only $17 million per year of lease extension; for a five-year Bucs lease extension, as noted here in February, it would only take about $220 million in Tampa spending to break the record. Does that make Arlington’s plan to upgrade a stadium that was considered so state-of-the-art just 17 years ago that it set off a wave of other NFL teams demanding new or upgraded stadiums less bad by comparison? Discuss.

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Buccaneers owners say if Rays are set to get public stadium money, it’s time they should too

access_time personNeil deMause

The Hillsborough County Commission voted yesterday to ask the county attorney whether paying almost half a billion dollars toward a Tampa Bay Rays stadium with a county sales tax that voters were promised wouldn’t be used for stadiums would be legal, and an answer is expected back by the commission’s next meeting on April 15. The commission also rejected a motion by Commissioner Joshua Wostal to release all internal documents on the proposed Rays project, instead voting to hold a public “workshop” once the details of a deal are finalized.

Meanwhile, though, Tampa area officials have another potential billion-dollar-plus fish to fry, as Buccaneers owners the Glazer family have decided this is a perfect time to remind the city and county that they would like a freshened-up stadium too, and would like public dollars to make it so:

[Tampa] Sports Authority CEO Eric Hart said at a board meeting Tuesday that the Bucs requested a meeting to get started.

Board member Tony Muniz asked if Hart had a ballpark estimate of how much public funding the Bucs may be seeking, though he guessed it would be in the hundreds of millions.

“It’s a significant number on these stadiums,” Hart said. “What that number looks like, I don’t know.”

Hart then pointed to other teams like the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills whose owners have gotten public money in excess of $1 billion for new stadiums, as well as the Jacksonville Jaguars, where owner Shad Khan is getting $775 million in taxpayer money toward $1.4 billion in renovations, as examples. “Look around the country and you can see what’s happening around in these arenas and the kind of money it’s taken to keep them state-of-the-art,” Hart said. “They’re significant, but they’re also big economic engines.” (Citation needed.)

There’s a deadline coming up of sorts for the Bucs, who must decide by the end of January 2027 whether to extend their lease for five more years beyond its current termination date of the end of the 2027 season. That’s really more pressure on the Glazers than on Tampa, since if they don’t extend their lease they’ll have nowhere to play in 2028 — it’s not like they’d be able to get a state-of-the-art stadium built elsewhere in a year and a half — but feel free to start the betting pool now for the date of the first article describing this as a looming deadline for Tampa area officials to “resolve the Bucs’ stadium issues.”

Tampa City Council chair and Sports Authority board member Alan Clendenin, at least, seemed to take the news of fresh Bucs stadium demands in stride:

“We’re talking about a baseball stadium and substantially more activation and enormous footprint of other economic development opportunities that didn’t exist,” Clendenin said. “And we actually have a team established in the Tampa Bay area, not one that’s threatening to leave.”

Clendenin said the sports authority sits in the “captain’s seat” and should maintain RayJay to keep it competitive. But he said the agency is not in the same position it was when it was first negotiating with the Glazers and the Bucs.

“You also don’t have to bend over and take it like the first deal,” he said to laughs Tuesday.

That’s promising in terms of at least one local elected seeming to have determined that the city has some leverage here, at least as much as any statement saying maybe this stadium deal will be better than a rape can be considered promising.

Anyway, this should all be a lesson that if you give public money to one local sports billionaire, the others will be quick to … I was going to say “me too,” but maybe in light of Clendenin’s metaphor that’s not the best.

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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends read stadium news coverage, Bears’ list of places not to move to keeps growing

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the things you learn if you read enough articles with the word “stadium” in them, as I am condemned by an ancient mummy’s curse to do, is how very many news reports are just about nothing. For every article that tells us some actual information, there are easily five to 10 that are just meant to fill pixels with something easily reportable, regardless of whether it qualifies as “news,” let alone “reporting.”

Just this week, we’ve had: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is in favor of the Tampa stadium plan that his co-bosses the Rays owner wants and he’s “optimistic” about getting it done; a Baltimore soccer stadium is “gaining momentum,” according to a headline describing a press conference by Baltimore’s mayor, who didn’t actually even say that; Denver Broncos president says team leaders are “laser-focused” on building the tax-subsidy-funded stadium in a rail yard they already said they want; the Broncos president says actually the rail yard is only the “preferred” site and team execs are still considering other options; Minnesota Timberwolves co-owner A-Rod says a new arena is a “necessity” for the 6th-in-the-Western-Conference, $3.6-billion-valued franchise “to compete”; Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says he’s determined to build a new Royals stadium that will create “economic development” in a way that’s “fair and transparent for our taxpayers,” no details provided.

That’s a whole lot of Important People giving press conferences in order to get their message out in the news media, which the news media is happy to oblige for them. For normal people, meanwhile, the only option is to try to get space on an op-ed page, if you can convince the op-ed editors that you should be allowed to have an opinion that diverges from that of Important People. It’s also an awful lot of reporters’ time spent on this when they could be trying to investigate all the open questions about what these stadium deals would actually entail for taxpayers and why elected officials are pushing them — but asking questions takes up valuable time that could be spent transcribing press statements. As the old journalism adage goes, “if your grandmother says she loves you, take her at her word and put it on the front page, so long as she owns a local sports team.”

Enough whining about the news media, time to attempt to do some actual reporting by, uh, seeing what’s in the news media:

  • The Chicago Bears have almost as many places now in neighboring states wanting to be their new home (without offering any money toward it) as they do in the Illinois suburbs: In addition to Gary, Indiana, there’s now Portage, Indiana, plus the entire state of Iowa. While the Bears moving to Iowa sounds like a joke and probably is, at least there’s a bill there to provide actual state tax credits toward a stadium; in Indiana, meanwhile, even the bill to create a stadium authority with no funding attached now isn’t going to move forward, Indiana legislators say, until the Bears owners first commit to moving there if it does. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders might want to just bide their time and see if all the new Bears move threats evaporate just like the last round did, though it sure sounds like they’re more interested in throwing state money at the problem while the move-threat iron is hot.
  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer still wants the major stadium renovation he asked for last April before he’ll sign a five-year lease extension, and Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan has assured Glazer that the county’s plan to divert more than a billion dollars in tax money to a Rays stadium won’t get in the way of diverting money for the Bucs. In exchange for only a five-year extension, by the way, it would only take about $220 million in subsidies to break the record for priciest per-year lease extension in U.S. sports history, you can pretty much take it to the bank that that’ll be the plan.
  • On the subject of that Baltimore soccer stadium, D.C. United owners said on Thursday that they’re planning to build a 12,000-seat venue on the site of Carroll Park Golf Course, to host a minor-league MLS Next Pro franchise and a pro women’s team owned by former NBA star Carmelo Anthony. And by “planning to build” I of course mean “hoping to receive $216 million in state money to build.” One of the state lawmakers sponsoring bills to provide the cash says “the stars have aligned” now that Carmelo Anthony is on board, maybe somebody should call a local economist to see if studies have found that involving Carmelo Anthony increases economic impact? If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what they’d say if they could ever stop laughing.
  • Foxborough, Massachusetts officials say they may not issue a permit for men’s World Cup games to be played at the New England Patriots stadium in June unless someone helps cover $8 million in security costs that the town is currently faced with paying, Asked why Patriots owner Robert Kraft, whose team is worth an estimated $9 billion, couldn’t just cut a check, FIFA World Cup Boston 26 organizers said the Krafts are offering up the use of their football stadium for two months in “peak period” of the NFL offseason, what do you want from them, blood?
  • The Center Square is a libertarian-leaning news site that has generally been pretty skeptical of stadium subsidies, so for it to run the headline “Seahawks’ Super Bowl win temporarily jolts local Seattle economy” is pretty notable — or would be if the gist of the actual article weren’t “U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims Seattle will benefit from the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, economist Victor Matheson says one study found a short-term bump in per-capita income from Super Bowl-winning cities but it may have just been a spurious finding because ‘when you test 100 different things, even if all those things are random, one of them is going to end up being the best.'” At least the Center Square called an actual economist, unlike those corporate stooges at Al Jazeera in their article on how the Super Bowl will be a windfall for the San Francisco Bay Area despite the 49ers not being in the game and also economists consistently saying no it won’t be.
  • If Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam can’t get money to build roads and pedestrian bridges around his new Brook Park stadium from the state of Ohio, he’ll ask for $25 million from the federal government instead, there’s got to be someone to stick with the bill that isn’t named Jimmy.
  • Also in K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas news, marginally more newsworthy edition: The mayor wants to cut spending on everything except a Royals stadium and more cops.
  • Plans for an Indianapolis MLS stadium have gone from on hold to pretty much dead, according to Indiana legislative leaders, though in stadium deals just like in comic books, only Uncle Ben ever stays dead for good.
  • The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics just applied for another billion dollars in building permits for their planned Vegas stadium, everyone gets that applying for a permit doesn’t mean you’re actually committing to spend the money on the project, right? Maybe requiring personal seat licenses to buy some A’s tickets in Vegas will help raise the needed funds to employ the permits, anything is possible.
  • Nope, nobody got back to me from Wyandotte County about how their Kansas City Chiefs stadium subsidy numbers were arrived at, I’ll just assume it was the traditional “dart board and add lots of zeroes” algorithm.
  • If you have time to kill next Thursday at 3 pm Eastern/noon Pacific, tune in to Alissa Walker’s Torched Talk with me and Chris Tyler from Strategic Actions for a Just Economy on whether it’s worth it to Los Angeles to host the 2028 Olympics, and what the city could do to try to extricate itself if it’s not. Zoom link is here, calendar it now, see you then!
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Friday roundup: Bucs want “major renovation,” won’t say yet who’d pay for it

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s main event will be the liveblog of day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which tons of presentations on stadiums and stadium-adjacent topics, but first here’s the regular Friday weekly news r0undup, written entirely on Thursday! If anyone’s roof blew off this morning, it’ll just have to wait till Monday.

  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer wants a “major renovation” of his stadium once the Bucs’ lease expires in 2028, funded by, uh: “We’re going through a phase right now where we’re assessing the stadium and what might be needed. And I know [Hillsborough County and the Tampa Sports Authority are] assessing the stadium and what might be needed, and once both of us are done with our assessments, then we come together and go talk about it, work through things.” Asked last summer about Bucs stadium funding, Tampa city spokesperson Adam Smith said team execs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to”; either that was code for “paying for this is the county’s problem” or Smith really believes in the power of positive thinking.
  • Unlike the [Sacramento] Athletics, the Tampa Bay Rays have managed to sell out their 10,000-seat minor-league stadium in their opening series, even at prices running more than $100 for every seat that comes with an actual seat. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano blames this on the Rays needing to make up for “a potential loss of revenue from ticket sales, concessions, luxury boxes and the associated costs of relocating for a year,” not the desire to capitalize on artificial ticket scarcity. It’ll be interesting to see if those high prices hold up once the Florida summer heat hits — for what it’s worth, there are still plenty of seats available for next week’s series against the Angels.
  • Speaking of the Rays, the clock officially ran out on their St. Petersburg stadium deal on Tuesday, and now owner Stu Sternberg is free to shop around for another city that wants to give him a billion dollars. Anyone? You in the back? You were just stretching your arms? I see.
  • Cincinnati Bengals VP Katie Blackburn was asked what’s up with the team’s lease that’s set to expire in 2026, and replied, “We could, I guess, go wherever we wanted after this year if we didn’t pick the up option up. So, you know, we’ll see.” NFL move-threat stan Mike Florio of NBC Sports called this “a powerful, loaded comment“; one might also argue that it’s exactly the kind of vague non-threat threat that you issue when you don’t actually want anyone noting that no cities have newer stadiums ready to offer. Potato, potahto!
  • The Jacksonville Jaguars need a place to play for two years while the city of Jacksonville is paying for stadium upgrades, so they’re asking Orlando to play them to play there, cool, cool.
  • A Massachusetts judge ruled that the demolition and reconstruction of White Stadium for the Boston Legacy F.C. can move forward, though opponents say they’ll continue to fight against it. (Boston Legacy, btw, is the new name for the much-derided BOS Nation F.C. women’s soccer team, presumably meant to honor the easiest way to get into Northeastern.)
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren says the team is now focused on building a stadium in Arlington Heights, except for the portion of its focus that is on the Chicago lakefront. More news as actual news comes in, not just attempts at leverage plays.
  • Los Angeles elected officials are finally starting to get steamed about how the 2028 Olympics are being planned in a city that is recovering from disastrous fires, though so far it seems to be mostly about where the sailing competition will be held. If history is any guide, the real outrage won’t come until the Games actually begin.
  • Wondering how the affordable housing promises attached to the Brooklyn Nets arena are going? Does “Empire State Development (ESD), the gubernatorially controlled authority that oversees/shepherds the project, says it might enforce the $2,000 a month penalties for each unbuilt apartment, though that process may be fraught” answer that question? If you’re wondering why ESD only “might” enforce the penalty clause that was designed to make sure developers actually build what they promised, ESD VP Arden Sokolow says that if the state fined them, “you wouldn’t be getting any housing there,” whereas this way … oh, would you look at the time, we’ll have to cut off questions there!
  • Former Anaheim mayor and illegal helicopter registrant Harry Sidhu was sentenced to jail time for deleting emails to hide them from an FBI investigation into soliciting bribes related to a proposed Los Angeles Angels stadium deal — if you had “two months in federal prison plus a $55,000 fine” in the betting pool, you’re a winner!
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Friday roundup: Special Tampa Bay Rays roof crisis edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Seems like all anybody wants to talk about today is what the Tampa Bay Rays will do now that their stadium roof blew off and also how insensitive it is to be talking about what the Rays will do when millions of people are still without power, so let’s get right to answering your questions and/or offending your sensibilities:

  • Rays management put out a statement yesterday saying “our priority is supporting our community and our staff” and “over the coming days and weeks, we expect to be able to assess the true condition of Tropicana Field,” which is PR for “dunno yet.” Playing without a roof apparently isn’t an option because the stadium doesn’t have a drainage system for when it rains, so it looks like the Rays and the city of St. Petersburg are going to have to look into a rush job of repairing the roof on a stadium that is set to close in three years regardless. Just in case, sportswriters are over are rushing to publish their lists of other places the Rays could play the start of next season, including various minor-league stadiums in Florida, the Oakland Coliseum, the Texas Rangers‘ still-standing old stadium next door to their new one, or, sure, Montreal, maybe its roof will be fixed before Tampa Bay’s is.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ stadium got off without much damage after being flooded during Hurricane Milton, but the first responders using it as a shelter did have to evacuate. All of this should be having people rethink the whole “stadiums can double as emergency shelters” thing, maybe?
  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren says a Chicago lakefront stadium is still “the focus” but his stadium architects are designing a building that would be “agnostic” with regard to location, which doesn’t really make sense — you have to at least know which direction fans would be arriving from and where the sun would be, for starters — but it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re trying to play off against each other multiple cities that have all shown little interest in throwing money at you.
  • If you’ve been wondering what’s up with Diamond Sports Group’s ongoing bankruptcy and its effect on MLB TV rights, Marc Normandin has a good writeup in Baseball Prospectus. Tl;dr: Two more teams have been dropped by Diamond (the Rays and Detroit Tigers) and the Texas Rangers had their contract expire, meaning it’s likely that MLB is going to end up running TV rights for a bunch of teams in 2025. For now it sounds like the league will be paying teams based on what they were getting from Diamond, but if you want to dream on a future where MLB holds NFL-like control over the whole league’s broadcasts and doles out money evenly and market size no longer matters, I’ve got you covered.
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Friday roundup: Olympics remain world’s greatest money suck, TB Times self-extorts for Bucs stadium, Rays $1B deal nears final approval

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a long, busy week for a lot of reasons, so let me just thank those of you who re-upped your FoS memberships (your swag will be in the mail shortly!) and get straight to the news, of which there is a ton, because the stadium game doesn’t stop just because it’s summer or there’s other stuff vying for our attention:

  • The Paris Olympics start tonight, and how’s that going? You say France is spending $3-5 billion on the Games in exchange for “uncertain” benefits, tourists are staying away because they don’t want to deal with all the Olympic disruptions and local museums and such are set to lose a ton of money, and Paris is forcibly relocating homeless people to make the city seem more attractive? Good, good, that’s what the Olympics are traditionally all about.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners aren’t asking for a new stadium, but that won’t stop the Tampa Bay Times from noting that the stadium is “aging” (aren’t we all, every day) and wondering if the Glazer family will want renovations or a whole new one. “Even after repeated requests from the [Tampa] Sports Authority for information, the Buccaneers have still not provided us with any renovation plans,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan told the paper, while Tampa spokesperson Adam Smith said the Bucs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to.” But the Bucs’ lease runs out in 2028, and all the other kids are getting new and renovated stadiums, so Times sports reporter Rick Stroud still spends 2700 words speculating on what a new or renovated stadium could look like and how it would be paid for, it’s always a time saver when your marks take the initiative to extort themselves.
  • Also in Tampa Bay, two Pinellas County commissioners are asking questions about the Rays stadium deal in advance of a Tuesday final vote, questions like “How much will this actually cost taxpayers?” (more than $1 billion, by best estimates) and “Will the public have to put in even more money to make sure affordable housing is built?” Unfortunately, it only takes four of seven commissioners to pass the deal, so there’s no guarantee the dissenters will get answers to their questions before Tuesday, though county officials said they’d ask.
  • Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and the owners of the Blackhawks are planning a $7 billion mixed-use project around the United Center, no details provided on whether this would involve public money or tax breaks or anything, they didn’t mention it in their press release so it probably isn’t important.
  • The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office did a study of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates stadiums, both of which were built with public money, but unfortunately even though it spelled out that it was calculating spending by both “fans whose main reason for travel is a Phillies game and casual fans who attend games because they happen to be visiting the region,” the final numbers just added up all spending in and around the stadiums and assumed it wouldn’t happen without them, very disappointing.
  • Not telling the Nevada Independent how to do its job, but if you’re going to roll with the headline “How Bally’s buyout might affect resort plans for A’s Vegas stadium site,” you might maybe want to include something about how it will affect that, you know?
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is laying off half the team’s non-baseball staff so he can make Sacramento River Cats employees do two jobs at once, this has been your weekly John Fisher Sucks post.
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Friday roundup: Every disaster has a silver lining, and vice versa

access_time personNeil deMause

When I was seven years old, my family drove down to Sanibel Island for vacation — twice in one year, for some reason — so I’m pretty familiar with the causeway bridge that was just wiped out by Hurricane Ian, which is very not good for anyone who is now entirely cut off from the mainland. I suppose I should make some observation about how the substitution effect means Sanibel’s loss will mean some other Florida beach spot’s economic gain, but too soon, people.

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Friday roundup: Titans seek $300m in tax kickbacks to keep stadium “first-class,” Bucs could be next

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy first Friday roundup of 2022! A couple of days ago I thought maybe we’d have a refreshing lull in new stadium demand news to start the year, but then hell started a-popping to make up for lost time:

  • When the Tennessee Titans moved from Houston in 1997, they became one of the teams to get a state-of-the-art clause requiring their city to spend whatever it takes to keep their new stadium “first-class” relative to other NFL stadiums. (The St. Louis Rams, who moved two years earlier, ended up using their clause to demand a whole new stadium, then when that didn’t happen to break their lease and move to Los Angeles.) Now, a year after dropping hints and some renderings about what kind of upgrades they were looking for, Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk has revealed the price tag: $600 million, half of which would be funded by kicking back future sales taxes from 130 acres of land around the stadium. This would be part of a lease extension for the Titans, which makes one wonder why the state-of-the-art clause in the old lease is even in play, but when you have Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. CEO Butch Spyridon saying “there’s a sizzle that comes with Nashville because of the entertainment industry” and “you can’t buy that kind of aura,” it may be too much to hope for hard-nosed bargaining.
  • “Tampa Bay Buccaneers will not seek a new stadium, county commissioner says” is the headline in today’s Tampa Bay Business Journal, but it leaves out what Hillsborough County commissioner Ken Hagan also said: “They’re going to want to ensure that we’re continuing to make that a world-class facility so you don’t need a new facility.” Bucs owners the Glazer family just got $29 million in renovation money in 2016 (plus $10 million in federal pandemic stimulus money in 2020); no word yet on what the Glazers will be asking for this time around, but given that Hagan is already setting this up as at least it’ll be cheaper than a whole new stadium, expect it to be a lot.
  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ended up not discussing Buffalo Bills stadium spending in her State of the State address, but a team spokesperson and Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz both say there should be an announcement soonish.
  • The Voice of San Diego has a long story about San Diego’s Frontier neighborhood, an integrated community with low rents built by the federal government to solve a World War II housing crisis that the city demolished in the 1960s in the name of “urban renewal” and replaced with its sports arena. There was a lot of that going around in Southern California at the time.
  • For those readers who complain that this site focuses too much on sports subsidies when plenty of non-sports construction projects get equally huge taxpayer gifts — there aren’t many, since most readers appreciate that life is short and corporate welfare is long, but I hear from you occasionally — here’s a story about how the state of Texas is giving Samsung $981 million in property tax breaks plus $260 million in infrastructure improvements for a new chip plant in the Austin suburb of Taylor. Good Jobs First has calculated that this will be the largest subsidy deal in Texas history, but Taylor Mayor Brandt Rydell responded, “Whether we would end up on some list and wind up being criticized for the project, that is not something we were concerned about.” Damn naysayers, always saying nay! Anyway, hope Taylor residents are okay with paying property taxes while the giant electronics company down the road doesn’t.
  • And finally, your moment of vaportecture:

https://twitter.com/jvhawkins/status/1478777675586101249

 

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Super Bowl foes’ billionaire owners got richer thanks to $468 million in stadium subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

As the proprietor of the world’s most comprehensive site on stadium and arena financing news (the competition is something fierce, let me tell you), I occasionally get requests for research help, and one of those came recently from the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, which were putting together a report on how much richer America’s sports billionaires have gotten during the pandemic. (The total is $98.5 billion, if you were wondering, a rise of 30% in wealth in just one year, enough to pay for $1,400 stimulus checks for almost half of those eligible.) I crunched the numbers on how much the wealth of those owners had been boosted by public stadium and arena subsidies, and the answer is:

Over the past several decades, according to data maintained by Field of Schemes, 28 pro sports teams owned by 26 billionaires have received $9 billion in taxpayer subsidies to help build or update stadiums and arenas and make other investments billionaires could presumably afford on their own. These publicly subsidized team owners have seen their wealth increase $45 billion in the last 10 months.

That public largesse for billionaire sports barons has included both teams in this year’s Super Bowl. The Chiefs received $250 million in taxpayer subsidies for stadium renovations in 2006. Taxpayers provided a total of $218 million in subsidies for construction and renovation of the Buccaneer stadium in 1998 and 2015.

Now, there isn’t a direct link between the stadium subsidies and the billionaires’ wealth boom during the pandemic — most of the benefits from the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers subsidies were absorbed by their billionaire owners years ago. If anything, the surge in concentrated wealth is more a reflection of how during troubled times, the rich generally find a way to get richer, as with Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, whose Quicken Loans empire has sent his personal value soaring 589% to more than $44 billion, thanks to the tanking economy leading to low interest rates and lots of cheap loan refinancing. According to the IPS/ATF report, even Oakland A’s and The Gap owner John Fisher has seen his wealth soar by 34% during the pandemic, despite the advent of Zoom work meaning nobody has had to buy any new pants.

The remedies proposed by the two organizations are to close loopholes that tax income generated by wealth at lower rates than wages — stock dividends and stock gains are currently taxed at a maximum of 20%, a discount that benefits billionaires way more than penny investors, those plucky Redditors notwithstanding — instituting wealth and estate taxes, and restoring the corporate income tax rate to 40% from the 21% that Donald Trump cut it to. Getting rid of stadium subsidies would be a drop in the bucket on top of this, but a $9 billion drop is still nothing to shake a stick at.

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The NFL’s plan is to keep poking at the virus until people start getting sick

access_time personNeil deMause

So this happened:

Before anyone gets too excited and/or horrified, the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Jacksonville Jaguars have all said they’re going to continue to operate at 20-25% capacity for the time being. This was just Gov. Ron DeSantis making clear that he lifted all restrictions on outdoor sporting events two weeks ago, when he also prohibited local governments from enforcing tougher restrictions or even fining people for not wearing masks. (If you’re wondering how that’s working out, virus rates in Florida haven’t surged so far, staying fairly level — though still high — but then, it generally takes more than two weeks for a surge to take hold, and also when you’re dealing mostly with stochastic spread via superspreader events, there is a lot of randomness involved as to whether and when a surge kicks in.)

So, props to the NFL for not immediately opening the fan floodgates in Florida, sure. But that’s hardly an indicator of a league that is concerned with safety above else. As we’ve seen this week — and as Barry Petchesky adeptly recounted yesterday at Defector — the league is currently dealing with a cascade of outbreaks on teams that has now caused a couple of games to be postponed, and could end up with even more. And, writes Petchesky, it was all totally predictable:

We don’t know a lot about COVID-19, but we know a few things about sports. We know bubbles, deployed by the NBA and NHL, and by MLB for its postseason, can work. We know that not-bubbling, like MLB tried for its abbreviated regular season, doesn’t work, at least not if your goal is to avoid having to cancel or postpone games. We know the NFL, due to the sheer size of its rosters and the massive logistical undertaking that staging a football game requires, probably can’t enter a bubble. We also know that it can’t afford to postpone many more games before a backlog pushes the Super Bowl into June.

That caveat re: MLB’s non-bubble is important: If the goal of “let’s let baseball teams all play in the home stadiums while still seeing their families and going to the grocery store and whatnot” was to keep anyone from getting infected, yeah, it was a disaster. But if the goal was to find a way to limp through a season with lots of postponements and makeup doubleheaders because players weren’t willing to be separated from their families for three months — the NBA and NHL were already up to playoff season, so their bubbles didn’t have to last as long — then it worked exactly as planned.

The NFL, of course, can’t stage doubleheaders, and can’t easily reschedule too many games without adding additional weeks to the season. And with 64-player rosters (48 active, 16 on a practice squad), plus a sport that involved a lot more contact than baseball (though we’re still not clear whether that’s the main risk or it’s just gathering indoors in clubhouses that mostly spreads the coronavirus), that’s a lot more dice being rolled every week than for other sports, so it’s absolutely no surprise that we’re seeing outbreaks.

Unlike MLB, though, which after some initial stumbles realized that you need to quarantine entire teams for a week or more after each new case turns up, the NFL seems to be charging ahead on a policy of Well, hopefully nobody else caught it. After New England Patriots quarterback Cam Newton tested positive on Friday, Sunday’s scheduled game between the Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs was delayed — all the way to Monday night. But it can take four or more days for an infected person to test positive, while they become infectious in as little as 48 hours. So even if Patriots players all tested negative before their Monday night game, someone on the team could easily have still been incubating the virus, and spreading it to their teammates. Which may in fact have happened.

The NFL has already been heavily invested in hygiene theater, touting its disinfecting drones and temperature checks for fans, even though neither does much at all to protect anyone from Covid. (All evidence is that the virus doesn’t spread much via surfaces, and while most people with Covid symptoms run a fever, nearly half of infected people don’t have any symptoms.) Hygiene theater is based on the idea that the easier something is to do, the more one should focus on it; the decision to hold the Pats-Chiefs game on Monday after just a 24-hour delay seems to have been the inverse: If it’s too hard to do, let’s decide it doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately, in a sport where doing much of anything to combat the spread of the coronavirus among players is really hard, that’s a recipe for, if not necessarily disaster, a whole lot of extremely risky behavior. And the NFL has another decision coming up that is going to be equally hard, if only for economic reasons: The Super Bowl is scheduled to be held on February 7 in Tampa, and DeSantis has now said that it’s okay by him if they sell out the place, and that would be worth tens of millions of dollars to the league. Even if the image of a packed Super Bowl that turns into another biological bomb may give league planners second thoughts, you know that somewhere in the league offices they’re wondering: Could we get away with 30% capacity? 40%? What if we have disinfecting drones hovering over every fan? How close can we get to the precipice of a superspreader event without going over?

And that appears to be the NFL’s policy, really: Keep inching up to the limits of what’s considered safe, see who gets sick, then inch up a little further if it’s not too embarrassing a number. As I’ve noted before, this makes for a very useful experiment about how many fans can be in one place outdoors before disaster strikes — if the NFL really wanted to do it right, it should dictate that some teams allow more fans and others allow fewer, to see what the threshold is for sparking outbreaks — but it’s an experiment with human lives, which when conducted without the humans involved knowing the risks and consenting to them is generally considered a crime against humanity. But then, playing with human lives is pretty much the NFL’s jam, so why quit now while you’re massively ahead?

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