Category: Washington Commanders

Friday roundup: A’s charging $200 each for Sacramento tickets, DC hires NFL-linked firm to study building NFL stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

How much additional stadium news was there this week? So much so that I skipped posting anything yesterday, just so I could start on the bullet points for this roundup. That’s just how much I care about you, the readers of this site. (Also I couldn’t bear to write entire posts for any of these, they were all either too silly or too depressing or both.)

On with the news:

  • There were rumors that Oakland A’s management was going to force fans to also buy Sacramento River Cats season tickets if they wanted A’s season tickets in Sacramento next year, but it turns out that’s not true. What is true: A’s fans wanting season tickets will have to commit to buying them for the “duration” of the team’s stay in Sacramento, and tickets will run between $185 and $250 per seat per game. (UPDATE: The Sacramento Bee reports that that’s only for “premium” season tickets; it’s unclear if there will be non-premium season plans, or if so what they will cost.) At least A’s players won’t have to suddenly acclimate themselves to playing in front of crowds bigger than the intimate affairs they’ve grown used to since owner John Fisher alienated all his fans in the Bay Area.
  • Washington, D.C. is exploring building a new Commanders stadium by agreed to pay $565,000 for a feasibility study to ASM Global, which Fox5DC describes as “a company with extensive experience managing NFL stadiums,” but which is more accurately described as a subsidiary of Legends Entertainment, which is co-owned by the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys. Surely they will deliver an unbiased and comprehensively researched cost-benefit analysis of building an NFL stadium in D.C., why would you ever think otherwise?
  • Not only is the city of St. Petersburg forcing its top employees to pay back $250,000 in bonus checks it sent out for overtime work on the new Tampa Bay Rays stadium project, now city administrator Rob Gerdes has suspended city HR director Christopher Guella for a week as punishment, despite Mayor Ken Welch having defended the bonuses as “within budget and my administrative authority.” Gerdes says this is because the bonuses actually turned out to be illegal; Welch insists it’s just because he wanted to avoid a bad look, though if so he really should have checked first with Barbra Streisand about how well that works.
  • Illinois labor leaders are pushing for the state to fund sports stadiums for the Chicago Bears and White Sox and Red Stars, because “unions want to build,” according to AFL-CIO president Tim Drea. And they don’t like building the things that won’t get built if the state saves a few billion dollars by not building stadiums? Somebody get them on the phone with the Nevada teachers union, they have a lot to talk about.
  • Two Cleveland city councilmembers walked around the Browns stadium during an exhibition game and asked more than 3,000 fans if they’d rather the team stay at the lakefront or move to Brook Park, and most said they prefer the lakefront. Of course, since these were people at a game at the lakefront, you’d expect them to skew more toward wanting to see games there, since people who skip going to games because they’re at the lakefront wouldn’t be at a game at the lakefront. Anyway, what did the fans say about how much they want the city government to spend on a new or renovated Browns stadium? Oh, they didn’t ask about that? Opening day is two weeks from Sunday, plenty of time for the councilmembers to plan a new round of canvassing.
  • The Dome at America’s Center, former home of the St. Louis Rams, needs $150 million in upgrades, according to the stadium authority that runs it and surely would never lie about something just to get a nicer space to rent out at public expense. The dome is currently rented out for “assemblies for large conventions, Metallica and Beyoncé concerts, and even some lower-level professional football games,” which surely will make it easy to earn back $150 million, so long as Metallica never stops touring.
  • Saskatoon needs to come up with $400 million in public money toward a $1.22 billion development to include a new arena for the Saskatoon Blades, and it plans on raising the money via a long list of uhhhh, we’ll get back to you: maybe hotel taxes, maybe TIF property tax kickbacks, maybe money from the province, who knows? “What would the city look like without SaskTel Center or without TCU Place?” asked Saskatoon director of technical services Dan Willems. “Would we be able to attract newcomers and help major employers attract talent to our city without these types of amenities?” Shh, don’t tell him.
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Friday roundup: Kansas-Missouri stadium border war gets hot, yet another non-economist cited as economics expert

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy heat dome Friday! Hope those of you in the parts of the U.S. that are broiling are staying inside watching soccer tournaments and cranking the air-conditioning and … okay, maybe that isn’t the best plan. We’ll try to come up with a better one before the Paris Olympics, which will once again provide athletes from around the world with the opportunity to compete for medals and maybe die of heatstroke. (Or mutant sharks. But more likely heatstroke.)

Where was I? Oh, right, stadium and arena scams, plenty of those to go around while we wait for the world to boil:

  • Missouri elected officials are up in arms over Kansas elected officials’ passage of legislation to allow selling billions of dollars of tax-funded bonds to lure the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals across state lines, and are also prepared to work on their own stadium subsidy legislation in response. “Today’s vote regrettably restarts the Missouri-Kansas incentive border war, ” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, adding, “We remain in the first quarter of the Kansas City stadium discussion.” Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson, calling the Kansas stadium bond legislation “a wakeup call to Missouri,” said he expects his state to put together its own legislation later this year. It’s all going according to plan!
  • Meanwhile, some developer dude took it upon himself to hire an architecture firm to design a rendering of a Royals stadium on the Kansas-Missouri border, with most of the stadium in Kansas but the right field wall in Missouri, that wouldn’t cause any problems figuring out which state would collect sales taxes to then kick back to team owner John Sherman. Lots of nice fireworks and people flinging their hands in the air, though.
  • WTOP reported Wednesday: “The projected benefits of a new Washington Commanders stadium being built in D.C., which were detailed in a report the city released last week, are largely honest and reasonable, according to a University of Maryland economist who reviewed it.” Unfortunately, three sentences later the radio news station revealed that Michael Faulkender is actually a finance professor, not economics, which is not the same thing at all. The University of Maryland does have an economist who’s an expert in stadium deals, but WTOP didn’t ask him for his opinion, they must have wandered into the wrong classroom building, that probably happens a lot.
  • Facing a vote on whether or not to commit to spending $775 million in public money on upgrades to Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s stadium, the Jacksonville city council yesterday pushed back — on spending $94 million on affordable housing and homelessness prevention as part of an accompanying “community benefits” package. The council says it’ll still come up with the money after taking “some time this summer to work on this,” and it doesn’t affect the $150 million from Khan for community benefits (over 30 years, so really only worth about half that amount), so nothing to worry about, elected officials never go back on their promises!
  • Charlotte was apparently “working on [a Carolina Panthers stadium] deal for a year and a half” before letting the public in on the details, yeah, that might be a story.
  • I personally prefer not to get my news in video form, as you’ve no doubt noticed from the endless scroll of plain text that is this website, but if you do, this report from More Perfect Union on “How Sports Team Owners Scam Communities Out of Billions”  is worth checking out: It has me in it, and also an A’s fan organizer saying “we’re all about kicking John Fisher in the nuts,” what’s not to like?
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Friday roundup: St. Pete gives initial okay to Rays’ record $1.6B stadium subsidy, final vote set for July

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody — we’ve made it to the end of another week again, which seems to keep taking longer and longer, I blame the Moon.

And on to the news briefs, starting with a not-so-brief to cover what would get its own item if this were any other day of the week:

  • The St. Petersburg city council took its first vote on the proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium project yesterday — St. Pete is one of those cities where the council has to vote on things twice, just to be sure — and as expected, it narrowly passed, with five out of eight councilmembers in favor. The official city expense is $212.5 million in property-tax kickbacks on the stadium site plus $130 million in infrastructure spending, but this leaves out a ton of hidden subsidies that Rays owner Stuart Sternberg would be getting:
    • About $300 million (present value) in future tax money from Pinellas County
    • $320 million worth of future property-tax reductions from the city and county
    • $700 million worth of land in exchange for payments worth just $80 million, making for a $620 million public gift

    That comes to a public subsidy of roughly $1.6 billion, which would shatter the Tennessee Titans‘ record of $1.26 billion, at least until the next stadium project comes along. There’s still a final council vote to be taken on July 11, before which the city still needs to provide final documents — a local Sierra Club organizer called the process a “runaway train,” while Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers asked the city to “reconsider this rushed and chaotic timeline” — but the writing does seem to be on the wall. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said, “I think they’ve done a phenomenal job in Tampa Bay, competing, and I think enhanced revenue streams just provides flexibility that can only make things better,” which I think means he’s happy, my universal translator doesn’t do Manfredese.

  • A consulting report for Washington, D.C. estimates that a new Commanders stadium in the district could create $1.26 billion in “yearly economic output,” and while I haven’t read the full document yet, economist J.C. Bradbury has the best response anyway: “I fear going into the details grants some legitimacy to the idea that there is some debate over the economic impact of stadiums. If the consultants feel the decades of economic research on the subject is in error, they are free to submit their challenges to peer review.” (The city also commissioned a second report on how to finance said stadium, but has no plans to release it, so you know it’s got to be juicy — fire off the FOIA requests!)
  • Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles spoke yesterday about why she thinks a $650 million Carolina Panthers stadium renovation subsidy in exchange for just a 15-year lease extension would be good deal despite Charlotte residents apparently thinking otherwise, and one thing she said was: “This is an investment in our future. That’s why is strongly support what we’re doing with Tepper Sports. Yes, I wish we had the ability to do this on our own. But we have to partner with Tepper Sports and our hospitality industry.” We wish we could pay for the whole stadium renovation, but sadly we have to let the team owner who would benefit from it chip in is certainly a choice, let’s just say that.
  • MLB is apparently requiring all teams’ new nonrelocation agreements to allow playoffs games at a neutral site, and Athletics stadium czar Dave Kaval says that’d be great for Las Vegas, which could be in line to host a neutral-site World Series if baseball ever decides to do like the NFL does with the Super Bowl. Given that it’s going to take decades for every team’s nonrelocation agreement to expire and be rewritten, and that Las Vegas could be uninhabitable by then, that’s maybe not the most convincing argument, but Kavals gonna Kaval, especially when he needs to distract from the mess that is the team’s Vegas stadium plans.
  • R.J. Anderson wrote a super-long look at the public ownership model for pro sports teams for CBS Sports this week, and while I have some quibbles — in particular, it tends to conflate community ownership by fans (the Green Bay Packers, German soccer teams) with public ownerships by municipalities (several Canadian Football League teams and minor-league baseball teams) — it’s a good, in-depth overview. Whether either fan ownership or public ownership would necessarily put an end to stadium subsidy demands is an open question: The Packers did demand money to upgrade Lambeau Field, and sports leagues have leaned on municipally owned teams to build new stadiums. But as Anderson notes, at least fans and municipal officials have other priorities than just squeezing every last penny of profit out of teams, so there would be some benefits like cheaper tickets and fewer move threats, which would at least be a start.
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How not to do news coverage of a new Commanders stadium at the RFK site

access_time personNeil deMause

Look, I get it. It’s tough enough to report on often-convoluted stadium deal finances when the details are known; when it’s a proposal still in the works, like Washington, D.C.’s long-discussed plan to build a new Commanders stadium on the former RFK Stadium site, it’s like trying to nail mud to the wall. Any news coverage is going to require a lot of digging into what internal conversations local elected officials are having and what other cities are doing, plus a healthy dollop of speculation. It takes time and effort and is likely to obsolete as soon as more specifics are released.

Or, you can just do like WUSA did, and just go with one number that is irrefutable, whether or not it’s relevant:

According to data obtained from DC’s chief financial officer, by 2030 the District is predicted to be more than $1.7 billion in debt, including the $520 million the city just shelled out for renovations at Capitol One, as part of a deal to keep the Wizards and Capitals from leaving D.C. That puts the District smack up against the city’s limit on debt based on D.C. law. Essentially, the D.C. government is out of borrowing power.

“Out of borrowing power” sounds pretty definitive, but the WUSA segment then undercuts its own conclusion by noting that some types of bonds — including those based on tax increment financing, where future property tax payments are kicked back to pay for stadium construction — are exempt from the bond cap. And the guy who they choose to explain this, remarkably, is former district councilmember Jack Evans, who spearheaded almost every D.C. stadium subsidy plan until being forced to resign after taking money from companies who would benefit from legislation he was pushing.

What makes WTOP consider Evans an expert in this case rather than an unindicted co-conspirator is presumably that he, equally remarkably, was hired by the district to conduct a study of how to fund an NFL stadium. And Evans has much to say about that, it turns out:

Evans said the study, which focused on successful stadium funding models locally and nationally, was completed in mid March. But months later, the DC government still hasn’t released the results.

“I would say the overall conclusion is that sports stadiums actually produce enormous revenue for the cities,” Evans said. “You’ll have economists say it never does anything, and in some cities it doesn’t.”

But Evans says D.C. is different. Nationals Park, which revitalized Navy Yard, is paying off its debt far faster than planned.

Okay, so: The results of Evans’ study aren’t available, and Evans isn’t going to make them available. But WUSA is going to let Evans characterize the conclusion as that “sports stadiums actually produce enormous revenue for the cities,” without either asking Evans to show his work or checking in with actual economists to see if D.C. really can be different. Or even whether the Nationals stadium paying off its debt faster than planned is really a good thing. (Spoiler: It’s not really, since it just means that the various tax revenues that are funding it are coming in faster than expected — and being kicked back to the team owners faster, but it’s still the same total outlay by taxpayers.)

Evans specifically recommends a TIF to raise money for a Commanders stadium, which is kind of hilarious if you remember that Evans was last seen writing an op-ed about how a Virginia arena for the Capitals and Wizards was a terrible idea because it relied on TIFs. Though not nearly as hilarious as where WUSA chose to stage its interview with Evans, which was apparently in the room where he keeps his personal vibrating football stadium:

Truly, how could anyone who has one of these be anything but unbiased about NFL stadium funding? Cut, no need for more interviews, everybody knock off for the day.

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Friday roundup: Vegas A’s details still TBD, Jags plan worse than reported, $90m Cleveland soccer subsidy floated

access_time personNeil deMause

It was a bit of a slow news week for once — a rarity in this year of a constant firehose of sports subsidy battles — but we still got Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan demanding $775 million in public money for stadium upgrades. And a bunch of other stuff happened! Let’s scroll through the news detritus:

  • The Oakland A’s have presented a nonrelocation agreement to the Las Vegas Stadium Authority, and plan on submitting an actual financial plan for building a stadium sometime this summer, according to Mick Akers of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board chair Steve Hill insists that A’s owner John Fisher “has the ability” to fund the rest of his stadium out of his own pocket if he wants, but keep in mind Hill works on behalf of the A’s stadium project in his spare time, so big grains of salt apply. Meanwhile, Bally’s says it’s still thinking about where on its land the A’s stadium would go — given that’s it’s too big to fit anywhere, maybe they could put it in that thing their aunt gave them that they don’t know what it is?
  • That $150 million apiece from the Jaguars and the city of Jacksonville for community benefits like public housing turns out not to be an actual 50/50 split, as the city would spend it over the next five years while Khan would have 30 years to spend the money. That’d be more of a 37/63 split in terms of present value, or even worse depending on how backloaded Khan’s spending is.
  • Someone at one of the community “huddles” on the proposed Jaguars stadium asked Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan if the plan shouldn’t be put up for vote in a public referendum, and Deegan responded, “I believe the referendum was my election back in May.” Did voters know that’s what they were casting ballots on? That must have been one long candidate statement.
  • The proposed owners of a proposed NWSL women’s soccer team and MLS Next Pro minor-league men’s soccer team in Cleveland have revealed renderings for a new downtown stadium, while also noting in passing that they want $90 million of the $160 million cost to be paid for with city, county, and state money, plus team “investors.” Did we mention there’s an animated video walkthrough? “We’re not just investing in a game. We’re investing in a future,” said Greater Cleveland Sports Commission CEO David Gilbert, and when that future has kick-ass action-movie music, who could say no?
  • In case you’re wondering what the eight members of the St. Petersburg city council think of the Tampa Bay Rays‘ $1.5 billion stadium subsidy plan, the answer is: could be better (Brandi Gabbard), opposed (John Muhammad), in favor (Ed Montanari), could be better (Deborah Figgs-Sanders), in favor (Copley Gerdes), opposed (Richie Floyd), opposed (Lisset Hanewicz), generally in favor (Gina Driscoll). That would seem likely to lead to lots of horse-trading to win over Gabbard, Figgs-Sanders, and Driscoll, somebody go find them some development money for projects in their districts, stat!
  • Plans to turn over the RFK Stadium site to the District of Columbia, possibly for use as the site of a new Washington Commanders stadium, hit a snag this week as Montana Sen. Steve Daines objected that the team hasn’t done enough to honor the designer of its old logo, Blackfeet Tribe member Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, saying “they could do something very significant in terms of ensuring the legacy of that logo.” Nobody seems to know what exactly Daines has in mind, possibly including Daines, but as bills like this are generally passed by unanimous consent, he must be appeased before the land transfer can take place, so this could get truly batshit.
  • Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim said that hosting seven 2026 World Cup matches is “the equivalent of 30 to 40 Super Bowls,” and that sound you just heard is thousands of economists’ souls crying out in agony.
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Friday roundup: KC pol seeks to revive sales tax hike for Chiefs only, A’s stadium plans still extremely ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a week, for a lot of reasons as well as my trip yesterday to an unseasonably hot Philadelphia to talk with city council staff and community members about the 76ers‘ much-unloved arena plans, so I’m declaring editorial privilege to go straight to an abbreviated news roundup:

That’s all I have in me today — if I missed anything, feel free to bring it up in comments. Have a good weekend, and try to stay cool!

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Friday roundup: KC Star urges “no” vote on Royals/Chiefs sales tax; property tax breaks could cost KC schools, libraries $600m

access_time personNeil deMause

Moving a little slow today as I head home from the Sports Economics Conference 2024, which hopefully can become a regular event. As a reward for your patience, here’s audio of yesterday’s journalism panel discussion with me, Ken Belson of the New York Times, and Pat Garofalo of the American Economic Liberties Project, plus lots of questions from the assembled luminaries of the sports economics field. (That’s our host, Dennis Coates of that meta-study fame, introducing us, and the other co-authors of that paper, J.C. Bradbury and Brad Humphreys, make cameos as well.)

And now, if the Amtrak wifi is willing and the creek don’t rise, let’s move on with this week’s news lightning round:

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Friday roundup: Utah still unclear on where it’d get $1.4B in MLB/NHL subsidies, White Sox have lots of friends in high places

access_time personNeil deMause

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.
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Friday roundup: White vetoes Royals/Chiefs tax vote, everybody losing mind over White Sox vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Everybody’s talking about that new Chicago White Sox stadium proposal despite it not actually being a proposal yet, but first, potentially big news out of Kansas City:

  • Jackson County executive and eight-time Gold Glove winner Frank White yesterday vetoed the planned April vote on a sales tax extension to raise more than $500 million for the Royals and Chiefs, saying he won’t support it “without robust, binding agreements in place” on leases and community benefits agreements. The county legislature doesn’t have the votes to override it right now, and the deadline to make the April ballot is Tuesday, so expect a whole lot of frantic gamesmanship over the weekend — we’ll see if the teams actually commit to anything substantial, but props to White for trying, anyway.
  • Crain’s Chicago Business has investigated who would pay for a new White Sox stadium in the South Loop, and come up with a resounding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Gov. J.B. Pritzker weighed in yesterday to say “I think you know my views about privately owned teams, and whether the public should be paying for private facilities” but also “there are things that government does to support business all across the state” and “we’ll be looking at whatever they may be suggesting or asking,” so somebody’s ready to haggle over the price. Crain’s does confirm that the site is in a TIF district that would get property tax kicked back to pay for construction, but also that stadiums are typically owned by the public so they don’t pay property taxes anyway, so lots and lots of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ here.
  • Somebody posted a bunch of renderings of a possible White Sox stadium of unknown origin that had previously been posted to Twitter then deleted, and yup, they look like generic renderings. NBC Sports Chicago complains that “the renderings have the stadium face the wrong way” and “it’s a no-brainer to face the stadium towards the river so (hopefully) White Sox players can hit home runs into the water” — can somebody please inform NBC Sports Chicago of how the sun works?
  • “Are we really talking about a new stadium for the White Sox when we still don’t know how two people got shot during a game at their current one?” Sure, that’s a take.
  • Oakland A’s execs are visiting Salt Lake City to see if its Triple-A stadium could be a temporary home until the team (maybe) moves to Las Vegas, after visiting Sacramento yesterday and probably other sites to come. Somebody has suggested an appropriate rebranding, all good, no notes.
  • Virginia probably isn’t going to consider building a Washington Commanders stadium while it’s considering spending over a billion dollars on a Wizards and Capitals arena, meaning new Commanders owner Josh Harris will have to settle for getting Maryland and D.C. to bid against each other, or else wait a bit until the arena issue is resolved, still plenty of options there.

There was other stadium-adjacent news this week — MLB TV carrier Diamond Sports cutting a deal with Amazon to escape bankruptcy, New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan getting sued for sexual assault charges that somehow involve both Harvey Weinstein and the Eagles — but I’m still technically on vacation here. Have a good weekend, and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled outrage on Monday!

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Total Virginia subsidy for Caps, Wizards arena could top $1.5B, aka “just a lot of public money”

access_time personNeil deMause

The Washington Post did a late Friday news dump revealing that they’d obtained a 37-page JPMorgan study of the proposed Capitals and Wizards arena project in Alexandria, Virginia that filled in some of the missing pieces of the deal. The main takeaway, according to the Post, is that “the net cost to taxpayers would ultimately reach an estimated $1.35 billion,” which is an impressively ridonkulous number; let’s break down all the details, though, and see what we get:

  • The state of Virginia would issue two bonds, one for $1.05 billion and one for $416 million. The former would be repaid by a combination of tax kickbacks from the project, parking revenue, and the sale of naming rights for the project; the latter would be repaid by team rent.
  • Virginia would kick in another $150-200 million in money from existing transportation bonds, this despite Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s vow that “there is no upfront investment or inclusion of any taxes already being collected by the Commonwealth.” (One unnamed state official told the Post that this was “sort of an asterisk” on the governor’s statement; the governor said that the area would need transportation spending anyway, but didn’t say if without a giant arena project that would otherwise amount to $200 million.)
  • Alexandria would kick in $106 million, about half of it for a concert hall, though it’s possible the city would get some of that back from parking revenue. (Mayor Justin Wilson told the Post that this money wasn’t “going to enrich a billionaire” because it was an “investment for the city.”)

Clearly, to come up with a total subsidy figure, we’re going to need to know how much of that $1.05 billion bond will be repaid with siphoned-off tax money, and how much with actual project proceeds. But while the Post didn’t provide a breakdown, it fortunately did share the JPMorgan report with your friend and mine, Kennesaw State economist J.C. Bradbury, and Bradbury answered that question for me via email (from memory while on the road, so take these as estimates): Of the total debt service, about 60% would be paid off with tax money, 25% from parking and naming rights, and 15% from team rent. If I’m doing the math right, that means that if we’re talking a total of $1.466 billion in project bonds, that would involve about $880 million in tax money; add in the transportation bonds and city spending, and we’re looking at somewhere around $1.15 billion in tax money going into the project.

On top of that, previous reporting has indicated that the arena would be owned by the state, which would exempt it from property taxes. If that’s worth the $380 million we previously estimated, then the total taxpayer subsidy could clear $1.5 billion.

Bradbury, noting that the recent Tennessee Titans stadium set a high bar for stadium subsidies at $1.2 billion, summed up the proposed Virginia deal to the Post as “just a lot of public money,” and that looks pretty undeniable regardless of what final number is arrived at. In exchange, the public would get back an as-yet-undetermined trickle of new sales and income taxes, while (yes, billionaire) team owner Ted Leonsis would rake in the actual money from ticket sales, concessions, naming rights to the venue itself, and all the other stuff you get from actually running an arena.

There are still a ton of side agreements to be worked out before it gets finalized, as well as official approval from the state legislature and city council, so this isn’t the most expensive sports subsidy in history yet, but it could well turn out to be. Two random people on the street have differing opinions on this!

The Post had a busy weekend on the Virginia arena front, also reporting that Leonsis wants to move out of D.C. once he’s paid off his mortgage because he doesn’t like the terms of his mortgage (so very much wut), as well as that a relocation by Washington’s NBA and NHL teams would put pressure on D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to ante up for a Commanders football stadium, “because of the public perception that she ‘lost’ the Wizards and Capitals.” One unnamed “person with direct knowledge of the Commanders’ stadium search” told the Post, “Obviously, D.C. needs a sports team. They need more than one sports team,” which very much sounds like the Post allowing a source to hide behind anonymity to dish opinions and spin, a big journalistic no-no. The Post’s own ethics policy further promises:

There are situations in which we will publish information from a single source, but we should do so only after deliberations involving the executive editor, the managing editor and the appropriate department head. The judgment to use a single source depends on the source’s reliability and the basis for the source’s information.

I would love to get a transcript of that multi-editor conversation in which the reporters argued that, yes, this unnamed Commanders or district official is 100% reliable that D.C. “needs a sports team,” and/or that this assertion was factually confirmed by a second source. Credit to the Post for getting ahold of the JPMorgan report and asking Bradbury to do a proper analysis, but when two reporters on the other side of the newsroom are promoting sports subsidies as a political necessity, it’s hard to hand out all that many props.

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