Category: Atlanta NHL team

Friday roundup: Rays stadium deal falls apart more completely than their roof, San Antonio considers massive tax subsidy for new Spurs arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry that this has turned into Tampa Bay Rays week here, but stuff keeps happening. And last night, perhaps the most happeningest stuff happened, with the St. Petersburg city council meeting and 1) voting 4-3 to approve spending $23 million toward repair of the Tropicana Field roof; 2) voting 5-2 to put off selling $450 million in bonds for a new stadium and surrounding infrastructure; then 3) voting 7-0 to undo the vote to spend on fixing the roof, after Rays co-president Brian Auld declared “our agreement effectively died” with Tuesday’s county commission vote to delay issuing bonds and “I don’t believe we can make the economics around this arrangement work any more.”

A new council vote on the city bonds is now possible for January 9, assuming the county re-votes to approve its own bonds on Dceember 17. But even in the unlikely event that that happens, two new anti-stadium city councilmembers will have taken office by then, making city approval unlikely. Plus there’s increasing expectation that Rays owner Stu Sternberg will officially cancel the stadium plan anyway in the interim; Auld said that he didn’t even care about the roof repair vote, saying wasn’t confident repairs could be completed by 2026 he would “have more certainty” working out a settlement with the city instead. (Auld also apologized for “the tone” in which team execs’ letter before Tuesday’s county vote declaring the stadium deal “suspended” was received, saying it wasn’t meant to be a threat — whatever it was, it clearly backfired.)

This is crazytown, especially when you consider that this whole thing was set off by the four county commissioners who joined two prior stadium deal opponents in voting to delay the stadium bond sale in October, in order to be all respectful of the losses to Hurricane Milton and everything, apparently without considering that they might lose their pro-stadium majority on election day before their next meeting. As unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, it looks like unless Sternberg and his cronies can find a way to flip one county commissioner by December 17 — and threatening to move the team sure didn’t do the trick — everything is going back to square one now, with Sternberg shaking trees to see if anyone else wants to give him $1 billion for a stadium somewhere, while MLB has to go back to sitting on its hands waiting for this mess to be resolved before discussing expansion. Not to mention that without a repaired Trop, the Rays could be playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Tampa, even as the Oakland A’s are playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes at you fast.

Meanwhile, that wasn’t even the only big city council meeting about sports venues yesterday: In San Antonio, the city council held hearings on using tax money to help fund a potentially $4 billion redevelopment including a new Spurs arena. I didn’t watch the meeting, but fortunately University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoff Propheter did and liveposted about it on Bluesky, so let’s just revisit some of his highlights:

Leading finance mechanism for the district will be a hotel tax and sales tax TIF that will span 3 mi from the district center. The zone can capture all of the 6% hotel tax and 6% sales tax. Holy sh*t that's a lot of money that can be captured. Doesn't mean they will use the full amount.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:02:39.800Z

Without evidence, the assistant city manager says that most people that went to a Bad Bunny concert at the Alamodome weren't from Bexar County. Did they survey every attendee and double check their addresses against IRS or DMV records?

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:12:25.690Z

"locals bring visitors because of the authenticity"…I don't understand what this means.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:17:22.930Z

Showing potential funding sources…and as usual, tax expenditures aren't on the list. When you give tax breaks, you are spending money. We know the team and others will end up with tax breaks. Those should always be part of funding discussion.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:18:51.102Z

courage: how does more tourists lead to better homelessness solutions? better housing solutions? better paying jobs–not just low wage ushers or retail workers? How many residents will be able to attend a spurs game compared to today or stay at a hotel in the district? great questions.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:30:35.069Z

courage strikes me also as cautiously optimistic, which puts the council tally at 8-3 if a vote were held today is my guess. I'm assuming the mayor would support.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:33:16.645Z

and the special session is over. Overall thoughts: lots of ideas, nothing concrete, and a lot of silly reasoning. A sport entertainment district is not a novel idea despite some members believing so. Members seem to believe that diverted tax dollars to the project don't hurt existing services.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:38:41.620Z

 

After all that, do we still have the stamina for the week’s bullet points? Let’s try a couple, at least:

  • Athletics owner John Fisher pulling out of his stadium deal with Oakland to instead move to Las Vegas (maybe) might have blown up his plans to get discounted land in Santa Clara for a San Jose Earthquakes practice facility as well, with the city board of supervisors slamming the brakes on the deal after retiring supervisor Joe Simitian said he’s “not convinced [the Earthquakes] would be a good-faith partner” and warned that the sweetheart land deal represented “essentially a $100 million giveaway to a private enterprise.”
  • Speaking of Oakland, the city finance department issued a warning last Friday that the city is on the brink of bankruptcy and can’t count on money from the on-hold sale of the Oakland Coliseum to bail it out — then reversed course and quietly replaced that report on the city’s website with a new, less apocalyptic one.
  • This week was so nuts that a piece of the Dallas Cowboys roof falling off barely even makes the small print. Team owner Jerry Jones doesn’t want a new stadium, at least, or else we know where this would be headed.
  • And we haven’t even gotten to voters in Forsyth County, Georgia approving a TIF district to kick back tax revenues to pay for $225 million in bonds toward an NHL arena, assuming Forsyth County, which is 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, can land an NHL team. We will revisit this if an Atlanta expansion team gets past the dreaming stage, or if this firehose of Rays stadium news ever stops, whichever comes first.
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Atlanta exurb Forsyth County votes to spend $390m on arena for nonexistent NHL team

access_time personNeil deMause

Plans to build a $2 billion NHL-ready arena development in Atlanta’s northern exurb Forsyth County — memorably summed up by Georgia-based economist J.C. Bradbury as “This is nutz” — got an unexpected boost yesterday when the county board of commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of a memorandum of understanding to provide $390 million in public money toward the project, provided it actually lands an NHL team.

There are a bunch of caveats to the MOU, which is nonbinding, so really more a letter of intent:

  • While the overall project cost is $2 billion, much of that is for housing, office, hotel, and retail buildings that would be constructed in four phases between now and 2033; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution didn’t report what would happen to the public funding if those buildings were delayed or never built. The AJC describes the county’s $350 million in arena funding as “splitting the costs,” implying that the arena itself would come in at $700 million. (There would also be $40 million in county money toward a parking deck.)
  • The county would get some money back: $2 million a year in rent from an NHL team plus $1 per ticket sold. This would return maybe $50 million or so in present value to taxpayers — assuming, of course, that a hypothetical NHL franchise agreed to it in an even more hypothetical lease.
  • There are a ton more hurdles before any of this can become official: the state legislature would need to approve a hike in the county hotel-motel tax from 5% to 8%, and county voters would have to approve the creation of a Tax Allocation District (what Georgia calls its TIFs) in a referendum.
  • Who would own the arena? Who would get the proceeds from things like naming rights? Would it be exempt from property taxes? Reply hazy, ask again later.

There’s also the question of whether the NHL would even grant another expansion franchise to Atlanta — or Atlanta-ish, as the proposed arena site is 30 miles north of downtown — after the Flames and Thrashers both skipped town in past decades. League deputy commissioner Bill Daly reportedly said in December that he thinks a new Atlanta team would do better than the old ones, but what else is he going to say, “No, please don’t offer us a new arena, we would prefer not to have a bidding war for expansion franchises”?

This is all very speculative right now, but absolutely worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime, let’s enjoy the bizarro vaportecture renderings, and wonder where exactly that orange car thinks it’s heading:

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Car dealer says he’s building $2B NHL arena project 30 miles north of Atlanta, not nearly enough people laugh

access_time personNeil deMause

What with there only being a limited number of major-league sports teams in North America, and with leagues having a monopoly on who gets let into the owners’ club, if you’re a rich person with a hankering to be an owner, there are pretty much only two things you can do: Stand up and loudly wave cash around in hopes someone will sell you a team, or declare that you’re ready to build a stadium or arena for one and hope it gets you on the map. That’s what former NBA player Jackie Robinson has been saying in Las Vegas for nearly a decade, it’s what the Salt Lake City MLB hopefuls did last week, and now it’s apparently the turn of Georgia auto dealer Vernon Krause, who says he’s going to build a $2 billion arena and “entertainment hub” on the northern outskirts of Atlanta. Krause’s goal would be to bring the NHL back to the city, or at least thereabouts, for the first time since the Thrashers left town in 2011 — though to hear him and local officials talk, it’s really less about hockey than about bringing excitement and economic glory to the culture-starved residents of Atlanta’s exurbs:

“As a global entertainment hub, The Gathering at South Forsyth will provide residents, employers and visitors with the ability to see their favorite musician, experience a family-friendly ice show or eat at a James Beard-awarded restaurant without having to sit in their car for hours,” Krause said in [a press] release…

“The Gathering at South Forsyth will be an economic driver like no other,” Forsyth County Chairman Alfred John said in the release.

Krause, who has never developed anything before, compared his dream project to The Battery, the Atlanta Braves stadium-and-other-crap development in Cobb County just to Atlanta’s west. As you might expect, this is not sitting well with Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury, who studied the Braves project and found it was costing Cobb taxpayers $15 million a year.

More on Bradbury’s Twitter by the time I’ve finished typing this post, probably.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the project’s “public cost is uncertain” but that it would certainly require a ton of new roads and infrastructure, for starters. The Forsyth County Commission is set to meet next Tuesday to discuss the plan in further detail; I, for one, hope someone explains what the deal is with the giant flaming guitar.

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