Category: Washington Commanders

One of the frustrating aspects about trying to write about the Trump administration — actually one of the less frustrating aspects all things considered, but still pretty frustrating — is what in olden times used to be called Kremlinology: deciphering what the nation’s leader actually means by parsing every nuance of what he says. So I’ve been avoiding weighing in on the “Will Donald Trump intervene in the Washington Commanders stadium situation question?” until more facts are in, but it looks like we’re unlikely to get any, so away we go:

As covered last week, D.C. council president Phil Mendelson said he heard that Commanders owner Josh Harris had a “Plan B” for expediting approval of his proposed $7 billion–plus stadium subsidy, and that was to get Trump and/or Congress involved somehow. Once that was out in the journosphere, someone asked Trump about it over the weekend, and he answered, sort of:

“It’s a very important piece of property; it’s a great piece of property,” he said. “So, we’ll see. But if I can help them out, I will. You know, ultimately, we control that; the federal government ultimately controls it. So, we’ll see what happens.”

On Tuesday, Trump added some more:

“We could run DC. I mean, we’re looking at DC,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting Tuesday, where he was holding court at length in front of cameras. “We’re thinking about doing it, to be honest with you. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly.”

Divining what’s going on in Trump’s head from this, let alone what he’s actually likely to do, is pretty much impossible. The federal government “ultimately controls” D.C.’s budget, but 1) that’s Congress, not the White House, and 2) unless I’m mistaken, even Congress doesn’t have the power to pass its own spending bills for D.C., only to approve or block the city’s own budget measures. And Trump’s second statement appears to have been about combatting crime, not building a football stadium, if it can be said to be “about” anything at all other than pwning a Democratic city leadership.

It is true that Harris has been an informal Trump advisor as well as recently giving the president a custom jersey and calling him “the ultimate Commander,” which is a proven way to get on his good side. It’s not clear what Trump can do to force the D.C. council to pass a stadium bill this month rather than putting it off until the fall, though: Threaten to cut even more of the city’s funding than he already has? Abduct Mendelson and send him to El Salvador? It’s not like there’s even $7 billion in the D.C. budget that he could try to expropriate and give to Harris — the money being promised is mostly in the form of an insanely sweetheart lease deal on federal land controlled by D.C. — though that’s not to say he won’t try issuing an executive order insisting that it happen anyway.

Bowser chimed in this week with her own vague intimations, replying to a question about House oversight committee chair James Comer, who pushed through the legislation that transferred the RFK stadium site to D.C.’s control: “He authored the legislation, spearheaded through the Congress, helped with it in the Senate, and I don’t think he’s willing to see it die at the Council of the District of Columbia.” Implying … what exactly? That Congress could try to repeal that legislation and then give the land to Harris itself? That Bowser is just invoking the name of a Congressperson and warning the council, “Don’t make Comer come in there?”

Most of this is almost certainly just politicians answering questions posed to them by the media with tough-sounding talk, so it’s unlikely there’s some grand scheme at work here. It is true, though, that Harris and Bowser desperately want to get this stadium deal finalized before anyone starts asking too many questions, so if vague threats can serve as a two-minute warning to make the council feel some urgency, no harm in throwing some out there. We may know more as Harris and Bowser’s self-imposed July 15 deadline for council action approaches, but it’s impossible to predict without a much more robust Kremlin-to-English dictionary,

The battle lines, such as they are, on the proposed Washington Commanders stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in D.C. are pretty clear: Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed a deal that would involve more than $7 billion in city cash, tax breaks, and land discounts, and wants it passed by July 15; council leaders, most prominently chair Phil Mendelson, say they want to wait until September to vote in order to “make the deal even better (sic) for taxpayers” in unspecified ways. Mendelson, undeterred by the mayor’s (and Commanders owner Josh Harris’s) preferred deadline, has even set public hearings for July 29 and 30, which temporal experts say is actually after July 15.

Bowser was asked by sports radio talk show host Kevin Sheehan on Monday how concerned she was about all this on a scale of 0 to 5, and stopped just short of Defcon 1:

Bowser: “That’s a good question. Listen, I’m concerned right now that everybody buckle down and get to work. I’m not concerned about our deal. Our deal is solid. It pays off for D.C. And at the end of the day, I think everybody wants the same thing. So I would put my level of concern, because, you know, when you’re a big city mayor, you’re concerned about everything, I’d put it at a 4.”

Sheehan: “Well, that’s one away from very concerned!”

Bowser: (laughs)

This looks like usual political standoff stuff, where Bowser is trying to bigfoot the council into rushing a Commanders stadium bill in the next two weeks despite all the outstanding questions about it, and Mendelson is saying all in due time. Bowser’s only real leverage is to threaten that Harris could walk away from the deal if it’s not approved promptly — which he could, sure, but he would be insane to do so, given that he has a shot at a record-shattering $7 billion and up in subsidies from D.C., whereas his next best offer from anywhere else is nothing at all, certainly not by July 15.

Though Fox 5 Washington suggests one other (don’t use a football metaphor, don’t use a football metaphor) end run (dammit) that Harris could theoretically attempt:

Speaking with Mendelson yesterday, he did confirm that he has heard talk that the Commanders have a Plan B which may involve going to President Trump and members of Congress to make it happen on time.

It’s unclear whether Mendelson said that before or after he and some other councilmembers had dinner with Commanders execs to discuss the stadium plans. Either way, it would clearly be unprecedented for the federal government to step in and force a city to fund an NFL stadium, but everything is already so far beyond unprecedented — both in terms of what Harris is asking for and what the Trump administration is up to — that nothing would be surprising anymore.

NBC Washington’s Ted Oberg has done an analysis of the proposed Commanders stadium deal and claims that it will repay its taxpayer cost, and I watched it so you don’t have to. A quick summary:

• “All sales taxes, food and beverage taxes, and ticket taxes generated at the stadium stay in a fund used solely for stadium expenses and upkeep.”
• The resulting tax fund initially was estimated at $4 billion, but consultants Convention, Sports & Leisure later increased that figure to $5 billion. “The I-Team was told the consultant behind the report you paid for didn’t want to do press or answer our questions.”
• D.C. administrator Kevin Donohue said the jump in projected revenue came from more aggressive assumptions about how fast restaurants and other businesses would open around the stadium.
• The TV station filed an open records request for the initial projections and discussions between city officials and CSL around them — but were turned down.
• D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute director of economic policy Shira Markoff says that district taxpayers deserve better answers about the full cost of the stadium deal.
• NBC Washington also asked for a copy of the city’s master plan for the project, including 6,500 units of housing, but were turned down.

And that, pretty much, is it: The D.C. mayor’s office says this will be a great deal for taxpayers, NBC Washington asked for details, and the mayor’s office wouldn’t provide them. I’ll give it maybe a C+ — it’s fine as far as it goes, but when you have experienced sports economists willing to make estimates about the actual cost, not to mention plenty of damning history for those consultants, including screwing up a previous economic impact report in D.C. itself, there’s so much more you could have done with this than “we asked questions, we didn’t get answers.” As someone who has edited investigative journalists, I’ve got to say that this is the kind of work I would send back for more fleshing out — “you’ve got an idea for a story, but you don’t really have a story yet.”

Here are some questions that are worth asking, if either NBC Washington or any other D.C. journalists feel like going for a better grade:

• Why was Convention, Sports & Leisure chosen to do the city’s economic projections, despite their terrible track record and close ties to the sports industry? Was there any kind of search conducted, or did D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser just pick someone who could be relied on to provide a professional-looking clear plastic binder?
• How was it decided that Commanders owner Josh Harris would not only get full development rights to the RFK Stadium parcel, he would get 30 years of free rent and 90 years of total exemption from property taxes, with no commitment even to make payments in lieu of taxes, as other developers have done?
• How much of the tax spending “related” to the stadium would actually be new to D.C., and how much would be cannibalized from other spending in the city?
• What new city service costs would be incurred to support 6,500 units of new housing plus new businesses, and how would those be paid for if the development wouldn’t pay property taxes and sales taxes would be kicked back to the team?

Those are just a few off the top of my head, but it’s a start. Maybe I should come up with 20 more and we could make a bingo card? I’ll get to work on that.

The fight over whether to devote $7 billion or so in tax expenditures and lease breaks to a new Washington Commanders stadium has, for the moment, turned into a fight over when to fight over it:

• D.C. council president Phil Mendelson said that he plans to “cabin” Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request for $850 million in the city budget, setting the money aside but not actually allocating it until there’s a full development agreement in place, likely in the fall. “It’s just ludicrous to me that we would even get it done by [July] 28th,” when the budget is due, Ward 1 councilmember Brianne Nadeau told WTOP. “We’ve never put together a stadium deal in less than seven months in this city, let alone one that subsidizes a billion dollars of investments.”
• Bowser retorted that if a stadium deal isn’t finalized in July, “our agreement dies,” saying team officials are “outraged” and they “feel blindsided.”
• Mendelson re-retorted that “it’s not even close to characterize their reaction as ‘furious,'” hey, the mayor said “outraged,” get your angry adjectives right!

Whether the Commanders deal gets voted on in July or waits till the fall is important, of course, because rushing stadium bills through legislative votes is a standard tactic of subsidy proponents, so deeply integrated into the stadium playbook that we gave it a name way back in the first edition of Field of Schemes (“the two-minute warning”). Delaying the debate until the fall would, if nothing else, allow for time for a full investigation of the actual costs and benefits of the proposed Commanders deal beyond what the clown consultants came up with, and possibly some debate over how to trim some of the craziest subsidies, like the 90-year deal for at least $6 billion in property tax breaks and discounted rent that Commanders owner Josh Harris would get as a side dish with his $1 billion in city stadium cash.

Meanwhile, yesterday the No Billionaire’s Playground Coalition held a press conference at which former D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute head Ed Lazere said “it’s a real contrast that we are focused on subsidizing a billionaire at a time when residents will be suffering as a result of these budget cuts” and University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoffrey Propheter said the “20 acres of heavily discounted rent” was “the big pot of money” that D.C. would be giving up. Propheter also said that if the local economy does well, the lost future rent could amount to as much as $20 billion — I was part of the press conference, though my comments about how the Commanders stadium deal is like an iceberg with most of the subsidies hidden below the surface didn’t make the WTOP cut — making a $6 billion city cost ($7 billion counting direct stadium funding) the more optimistic scenario. Either way, it would be a record-shattering stadium deal, so you can understand why some city councilmembers might want to take a moment to breathe before deciding on it — and why Harris is eager to get it approved fast, before anyone takes a closer look at the fine print.

It was always going to require some sleight of hand for D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to announce a budget that closed a $400 million funding gap while simultaneously approving billions of dollars for a Washington Commanders stadium, and yesterday Bowser did her darnedest to make it all sound reasonable. How much of it was actual budget magic, though, and how much was rhetorical tap dancing is open to interpretation:

• In her operating budget, released yesterday morning, Bowser moved a bunch of expenses to the 2026 and 2027 budgets, effectively kicking the can down the road to figure out in those years. She also cut future benefits for welfare recipients, eliminated a child tax credit, reduced city workers’ family leave, and trimmed other spending.
• At the same time, Bowser put off a planned sales tax increase and added tax breaks for tech companies, both costing the district money but which she described as pro-business measures designed to stave off a possible economic recession.
• On the capital budget side, some of the $1.1 billion in cash that D.C. will need to put into the Commanders stadium immediately — the other $6 billion or so will come via future tax and rent breaks — will be provided by “refinancing and restructuring existing debt,” according to City Administrator Kevin Donahue, who didn’t explain how exactly that’s working with interest rates at record highs. Bowser also said she plans to tap the tax streams that had been used to pay off the Nationals stadium, which is confusing because the D.C. council already approved using that money on future Nationals stadium upgrades last winter.

In short, Bowser’s moves technically qualify as balancing the D.C. budgets, but mostly by resorting to a bunch of “we’ll figure it out later” and a heaping helping of “you won’t miss money we’re letting the Commanders owners keep if you didn’t know you could have gotten it in the first place.” That’ll be cold comfort to the 25,000 D.C. residents getting their health care cut because they’re poor but not poor enough, but you can’t put a price on being “pro-business.” Or rather, you can, but you don’t want to say it out loud, that would be telling.