Anaheim Ducks – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Every disaster has a silver lining, and vice versa

September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 Neil 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.

More fallout from that OC Vibe development by the Anaheim Ducks that will use $400 million in city bonds but be paid off by the team owners, maybe mostly hopefully: The city of Anaheim needs to build a fire station to support the new development, but may get sued by Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno for wanting to do so in the Angel Stadium parking lot. There are a lot of moving parts in every development deal, which is why Judith Grant Long spent a decade writing her book just to figure out what stadiums even really cost.
Still more reports that Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman wants to build a downtown stadium, or have someone else build him a downtown stadium, one of those two, though it looks like all he really said was he was talking to the Chiefs owners and Jackson County about the team’s future. Good thing he didn’t reminisce about the time he took his wife on a date to see Lou Piniella, or we might have been subjected to a whole feature article.
The latest revelations in the “Brett Favre used welfare money to build a volleyball arena for his daughter’s college” scandal are that 1) Favre wanted to build a football practice facility too and 2) he at one point suggested saving money by building it with prison labor. Then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant texted back to Favre: “But we have to follow the law. I am to old for Federal Prison.😊😎.” That’s for the Department of Justice to decide, Phil.
New York state (not New York City, New York Yimby needs to read its own articles before writing its headlines) has hired an architect for its redesign of Penn Station, and Madison Square Garden is still staying put in the initial plans, look, you can see it right there. New York Mayor Eric Adams says he’s still “open” to discussing with Garden (and Knicks and Rangers) owner James Dolan the possibility of tearing down the arena and building a new one elsewhere, but as the Penn Station redevelopment is not his project — again, he’s mayor of the city, not the state, states don’t have mayors — this is just another example of his mouth opening and things coming out.
A Pittsburgh court has struck down the city’s “jock tax” on income of out-of-state athletes playing in the city, which probably will have some small impact on the finances of the city’s sports facilities, but mostly I’m impressed that the court case took so long that one of the plaintiffs is Jeff Francoeur, who retired from baseball in 2016.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers stadium has been invaded by bees, time to build a new one, bees are even worse than cats!
I’m not exactly sure why the St. Louis Post-Dispatch devoted a story to its own coverage of the opening of St. Louis Arena (1929-1999) 93 years ago, but there are some nice construction photos, as well as classic observations like “great Visitors will bring added business to local interest and will stimulate St. Louis hospitality and progressiveness anew Welcome to the new Arena civic asset.” I take back everything I said about newspaper copy editing being a dying art.

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Anaheim to spend somewhere between $0 and $400m on Ducks arena development

September 28, 2022September 28, 2022 Neil deMause

I spend a lot of time on this site savaging other news outlets for lousy reporting on stadium and arena deals, and indeed there’s a lot of coverage that could be improved if editors would even read their own articles before writing the headlines. But some deals are so expertly designed to obscure who the hell is actually paying who for what that I’m willing to extend at least a little sympathy to the poor journalists who have to figure out what to write in the 15 minutes they have before having to put up their next post.

Take, for example, Anaheim’s announced plan, which got preliminary approval from the city council last night, to issue $400 million in public bonds on behalf of OC Vibe (apparently officially spelled “ocV!BE,” but we’re not going to get ridiculous here), a 95-acre development of stuff that Ducks owner Henry Samueli plans to build around the team’s Honda Center. That $400 million, reports Voice of OC, isn’t really public money, because it will be repaid out of the Ducks owners’ arena revenues; or maybe it is really public money, because maybe it won’t be repaid by the Ducks:

[Anaheim spokesperson Mike] Lyster said the revenue from the city-owned Honda Center would go toward bond repayment under a proposed agreement with Anaheim Arena Management, which is headed up by Ducks owner Henry Samueli…

The deal’s got the markings of a government subsidy, if you ask Victor Matheson, a sports economist and professor at the College of the Holy Cross…

Matheson wrote that if Anaheim Arena Management goes bankrupt the city will bear the risk.

Okay, so the question here is less who’s selling the bonds than who will pay them off — if Anaheim can just use its bonding capacity to do Samueli a solid, but Samueli writes all the checks, that’s indeed not much of a subsidy. (Matheson’s point about the Ducks going bankrupt stands, but that’s a pretty unlikely scenario.)

The question then becomes WTF OC Vibe and the city mean by “revenue.” There are a squillion possibilities here: 1) money that Samueli will peel off his profits and send special to pay off the bonds; 2) money that Samueli is sending to Anaheim anyway as lease payments but which will now go in a box marked “4 OC Vibe”; 3) money that is currently being collected at the arena, but by the city, not Samueli; 4) money that may or may not exist, depending on how much revenue Samueli brings in; 5) money that Samueli is paying in taxes, or should be paying in taxes, which is only “private money” if you buy into the Casino Night Fallacy. Those are all very different things, which is why it’s important to be precise about who would be spending what and under what circumstances.

Fortunately, I was able to track down someone who pointed me to the Anaheim city council’s staff report for last night’s meeting; less fortunately, it just says that the bonds will be paid off with “lease payments … payable from revenues generated by the Honda Center and other sources included in the definition of ‘Gross Revenues’ under the Amended and Restated Facility Management Agreement.” Heading over to that document, we find that “gross revenues” is defined as “any and all payments, fees and deposits of every nature received by Manager or Owner” — the former being the Ducks, and the latter the city of Anaheim. So that could be team money, or it could be city money, and there’s no real way to tell from the paperwork alone.

It’s possible more light was shed on this at the Anaheim council hearing, but I didn’t stay up to watch it, and nobody in Orange County has woken up this morning to write about it on the interweb. Which means we’ll have to wait to see what the morning news brings once it’s morning in California — I’ll post updates here as soon as I see or hear anything more.

INITIAL UPDATE: Lyster provided some more info in the comments below, and Voice of OC has more in their just-posted report. The upshot: The city of Anaheim is currently supposed to get half of all arena profits over $6 million a year, though it’s never actually seen any money since the Ducks management has kept net revenues too low for profit-sharing to kick in. Assuming that profits rise eventually, though, then some money that would otherwise go to the city would instead get kicked back to pay for this additional development — though Lyster argues that the city would get more back in taxes than it would lose in profit-sharing, based on, uh, this entirely unfootnoted deck slide.

Needless to say, that makes for unknowns on top of unknowns, making an evaluation of the public costs of this deal like trying to figure out the winners and losers in a trade that entirely consists of conditional draft picks. I’ll see what other numbers I can dig up, though, and will revisit this in a future post — for now, though, “somewhere between $0 and $400 million” is probably the best we can do.

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

December 4, 2020 Neil deMause

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

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

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

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Friday roundup: New Rangers stadium scam movie, Nevada arena petitions rejected over technicality, and many many dumb ideas for getting you (or cardboard cutouts of you) into stadiums this year

July 3, 2020 Neil deMause

Welcome to the end of another crazy week, which seems redundant to say, since that’s all of them lately. I spent a bunch of it working on this article on what science (but not necessarily your local newspaper) can tell us about not just whether reopening after lockdowns is a good idea, but what kinds of reopening are safe enough to consider. And important enough to consider, since as one infectious disease expert told me, “It’s not ‘open’ or ‘shut’—there’s a whole spectrum in between. We need to be thinking about what are the high-priority things that we need to reopen from a functioning point of view, and not an enjoyment point of view.”

And with that cheery thought, on to other cheery thoughts:

If you’re a fan of either sports stadium shenanigans or calamitous public-policy train wrecks in general — and I know you are, or why would you be reading this site — you should absolutely check out “Throw A Billion Dollars From The Helicopter,” a new documentary about the Texas Rangers‘ successful campaign to extract half a billion dollars from the city of Arlington so they could play in air-conditioning. It’s a story that has everything: a mayor who was elected as a stadium-subsidy critic then turned around to approve the biggest stadium subsidy in local history, George W. Bush grubbing for public money and failing to do basic math, grassroots anti-red-light camera activists getting dragged into stadium politics, a trip back to the Washington Senators’ final home game before moving to Texas which they had to forfeit because fans ran on the field and walked off with the bases, footage of that 1994 Canadian TV news story I always cite about how video-rental stores comedy clubs in Toronto were so happy with extra business during the baseball strike that they wished hockey would go on strike too, plus interviews with stadium experts like Roger Noll, Rod Fort, Victor Matheson, Allen Sanderson (the man whose line about more effective ways than building a stadium for boosting your city’s economy gave the documentary its title), and me. Rent it here on Vimeo if you want some substitute fireworks this weekend.
Opponents of the publicly funded minor-league hockey arena for the Henderson Silver Knights got enough signatures to put a recall on the November ballot, but have had their petitions invalidated for not including a detailed enough description of their objections on every page. This will almost certainly result in lawsuits, which is how pretty much every battle for public oversight of sports subsidy deals ends — that, and “in tears.”
The San Diego city council approved the $86.2 million sale of the site of the Chargers‘ former stadium to San Diego State University, which plans to build a new $310 million football stadium there. Whether this is a good deal for the public is especially tricky, because not only do you have to figure the land value of a 135-acre site in the middle of an economic meltdown, but also San Diego State is a public university, so really this is one public agency selling land to another. It’s all more than I can manage this morning, so instead let’s look at this rendering of a proposed park for the site that features bicyclists riding diagonally across a bike path to avoid a woman who stands in their way with arms akimbo, while birds with bizarre forked tails wheel overhead.
You know what would be a terrible idea in the middle of a pandemic that has closed stadiums to fans because gathering in one place is a great way to spread virus? An article telling fans what public spaces they can gather in to catch a glimpse of game action in closed stadiums, and Axios has you covered there! And so does the Associated Press!
Sure, hundreds of thousands of people have died and there could be hundreds of thousands more to go, but won’t anyone think of the impact on TV network profits if there’s no football to show in the fall?
And speaking of keeping an eye strictly on the bottom line, the NFL is considering requiring fans (if there are any) who attend NFL games this fall (if there are any) to sign a waiver promising not to sue if they contract Covid as a result. But can I still sue if someone goes to a football game, contracts Covid, and then infects me? I’m not actually sure how easily one could sue in either case — since you can never be sure where you were infected with the virus, it would be like suing over getting cancer from secondhand smoke — but I always like the idea of suing the NFL, so thanks for the idea, guys!
New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner says he wants to see fans at Yankee Stadium “in the 20-30 percent range,” a number and prediction he failed to indicate he pulled from anywhere other than his own butt. Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs are reportedly planning to open rooftops around Wrigley Field at 25% capacity for watching games this year, something that might actually be legal since while would mean about 800 fans in attendance, they wouldn’t all be in attendance in the same place, so it could get around rules about large public gatherings.
If you want to spend $49 and up so a cardboard cutout of yourself can watch Oakland A’s games, you can now do that on the team’s website. If that sounds like a terrible deal, know that with each purchase you also get two free tickets to an exhibition game at the Coliseum in 2021 (if there are any), and if you pay $129 then you also get a foul ball mailed to you if it hits your cutout, all of which still sounds like a terrible deal but significantly more hilarious.
If you were hoping to make one last trip to Pawtucket’s 74-year-old McCoy Stadium to see Pawtucket Red Sox baseball before the team relocates to Worcester after this season — it was on my now-deleted summer calendar — you’ll have to settle for eating dinner on the field, because the PawSox season, along with the rest of the minor-league baseball season, has been officially called off. Also, the Boston Herald reports that the Lowell Spinners single-A team won’t be offering refunds to those who bought tickets for non-canceled games, only credits toward 2021 tickets — shouldn’t ticketholders be able to sue for not receiving the product they paid for? I want somebody to sue somebody, already! When will America’s true pastime be allowed to reopen?
Here’s a New York Times article on how new MLS stadiums are bucking past stadium trends by being “privately financed, with modest public support for modernizing infrastructure,” which is only true if you consider $98 million (Columbus) and $81 million and up (Cincinnati) to be “modest” figures.
I apologize for failing to report last week on the Anaheim Ducks‘ proposed development around their hockey arena, less because it’s super interesting or there is amusing vaportecture than because it’s supposed to be called “ocV!BE,” which is the best name ever, so long as you want to live in a freshly built condo in what sounds like either a randomly generated password or an Aughts rock band.

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Friday roundup: Tampa won’t divert road money to Rays stadium (probably), Columbus may spend $100m on Crew stadium, Anaheim signs Ducks lease extension as new mayor vows to placate Angels

November 23, 2018November 23, 2018 Neil deMause

You know who the real turkeys are this week? Nah, my heart isn’t in making Thanksgiving puns, just read the news, folks:

Three of seven Hillsborough County commissioners have promised that a new sales tax for transportation projects won’t mean diverting money from the existing transportation project to, say, a Tampa Bay Rays stadium, which the mathematically inclined will notice isn’t actually a majority of the county board. It’s still not super likely that the county will try to raid transportation funds to pay for a stadium, unless maybe it’s for transportation costs related to one, and there’s still several hundred million dollars in construction costs unaccounted for, but anyway it’s worth keeping at least half an eye on as we head toward the team’s December 31 lease opt-out deadline.
A paid consultant working on a new downtown arena for Saskatoon says it could have a “catalytic effect,” because of course he does, really, Global News, you ran an entire article that’s just interviewing one guy employed on the project? For this you want me to disable my ad blocker?
Forbes’ Mike Ozanian reports that “a person with knowledge of the deal to keep Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew in that city” says the new owners will pay $150 million for the franchise and spend $150 million toward a new downtown stadium, while “the public would foot the other $100 million.” Nobody else seems to be reporting on this, so maybe we should wait to be sure that Ozanian didn’t get his plus and minus signs mixed up again.
The Atlantic’s Rick Paulas suggests that we end stadium extortion by forcing pro sports leagues to massively expand and then institute promotion and relegation, which would sort of work, if there were an easy way to accomplish this through antitrust legislation, which you’d think if Congress could manage that they could manage the much more straightforward measure of taxing sports subsidies out of existence, but who knows, maybe a “market-based” solution would go over better in these times, sure, what the hell. “Of course, cities could also elect leadership that will defend them against bad deals,” notes Paulas, which isn’t a bad idea either.
Anaheim has signed a lease extension to keep the Ducks in town through 2048, involving the city selling the team 16 acres of land for $10 million — which if the stymied Angels deal is any guide would probably be a small discount, though Anaheim officials claim it’s market value — but the city will get a cut of arena profits after the first $6 million a year instead of the first $12 million, a threshold that’s never been hit. There are a lot of (small) moving pieces here, but I’m willing to say this is probably not too bad a deal, especially compared to some of the much, much worse lease extensions that cities have agreed to. Next is to to see about getting Angels owner Arte Moreno to accept the same logic, now that newly elected mayor Harry Sidhu is vowing to change “the hostile political environment in Anaheim” and “keep the Angels in Anaheim where they belong,” okay, Anaheim residents are probably going to have to settle for just a good Ducks deal.
Atlanta Falcons COO Greg Beadles tells NPR it’s not team owner greed that causes stadium food prices to be so high, it’s just that after teams force concessions companies to bid as high as possible for stadium contracts, the only way they can make money is to charge through the nose for food! Anyway, NPR gets busy talking to fans at a Falcons game about whether they’re happy the team lowered its food prices, and they’re happy about it, so no time to fact-check whether team execs’ statements make any damn sense. Free refills on soda, woohoo!

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Kings owners met with Anaheim Ducks owner about move

January 12, 2011 Neil deMause

Those Anaheim Kings rumors got a smidge more believable yesterday, as Sacramento radio station KFBK reports that Kings owners Joe and Gavin Maloof met “recently” with Anaheim Ducks owner Henry Samueli to discuss a move south:

The plan as told to me includes moving the Kings to the Honda Center in Anaheim. Samueli will give the Maloof’s 100-million dollars to pay off some debt as well as help pay off territorial rights to the Clippers and Lakers. Should the Maloofs default on that loan, then Samueli would assume some control of the team. What is not clear is how much control Samueli would get.

Also not clear: What the lease would look like at Anaheim’s Honda Center, and whether there’d be enough revenue to go around to make both the Maloofs and Samueli happy. (According to KFBK, the two sides met previously in early 2010, but the Maloofs didn’t like Samueli’s proposal.) Also, who told KFBK’s Rob McAllister (he just says “a source”) that this was the plan — this could be Samueli leaking it to try to build momentum for an Anaheim move, the Maloofs leaking it to try to scare up support for a new Sacramento arena, or something else entirely. Just because two sides met to discuss a move doesn’t necessarily mean they found anything to agree on.

In other news, as the Ball Don’t Lie blog headlines it, “Kings to name arena after sham energy bracelets.” Now that’s the kind of publicity for your product you just can’t buy. Oh wait, you can.

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