Category: Edmonton Oilers

Friday roundup: Bengals land $350m in county stadium cash, will seek more from state

access_time personNeil deMause

The stadium deals are coming fast and furious now: Hamilton County and the Cincinnati Bengals owners have reached an agreement on a lease extension, four days before the team owners could have extended their current lease unilaterally. The new lease, approved yesterday by a 2-1 vote (Alicia Reese, dada poet, abstained) will run through the 2036 season (with five two-year options afterwards), and the team will receive $350 million in county money toward $470 million in stadium upgrades. The team will start paying rent for the first time (beginning at $1 million a year, gradually rising to $2 million), while continuing to receive 93% of parking revenues.

That’s a little over $30 million in public money per year of lease extension, which would be high but still short of the $43 million a year that the Carolina Panthers received last year. But the real question is: Did Hamilton County succeed in getting out from under that state-of-the-art clause that requires taxpayers to buy the team anything that other teams’ stadiums have, famously including holographic replay systems should they ever be invented? Neither the Bengals’ statement nor the county’s statement mentions this, and if it’s still in place, then you have to wonder why the county didn’t just let Bengals owners the Brown family renew the old lease and pass on giving them $350 million in cash.

And it could end up being more than $350 million: Hamilton County stated that “Commissioners plan to pursue state support as capital grants become available to grow the size of the renovation project” — which would be insane for the state to do in exchange for exactly nothing in return from the team owners, but the Ohio state legislature isn’t exactly known for its sanity lately.

More news as events warrant, then, but it certainly looks like a big win for the Browns, not to be confused with this week’s big win for the other Browns. And while we await more news, here’s more news:

  • The Kansas City Chiefs owners have officially requested an extension on Kansas’s offer of state money for a new stadium, either because they really want to move to Kansas or because they want to scare local Missouri lawmakers into sweetening the pot on the state money that was already approved there. The Kansas legislature will discuss the extension proposal on July 7; in the meantime, state senate president Ty Masterson declared: “The letter from [Chiefs president] Mark Donovan indicates that the drive to bring this historic project to Kansas is moving down the field. Now that we are in the red zone, this extension will provide stakeholders sufficient time to ensure the ball crosses the goal line” — at which point the English language itself died of metaphor overload.
  • The community revitalization levy (Canadian for TIF) that provided $300 million in tax money for a new Edmonton Oilers arena is set to expire soon, so of course the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce wants it extended for another 20 years, or else: “Extending the CRL is about making a generational investment in our city, and it directly responds to what we’re hearing from local businesses. A vibrant Downtown isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have,” said ECC CEO Doug Griffiths. Some of the money would go toward expanding the Oilers’ ICE District Fan Park, which is less a park than an event space that Oilers owner Daryl Katz can use to hold GWAR concerts; “We shouldn’t be doing secret deals behind closed doors for one or two businesses. That’s just wrong,” objected city councillor (Canadian for councilmember) Michael Janz in advance of public hearings yesterday and today.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays need to figure out where to play their home playoff games if they make the postseason, and if you want to read Ken Rosenthal expounding semi-coherently on it — sample text: “Come October, a team known for disrupting the sport might provide its wildest wrinkle yet: a public-address announcer bellowing, ‘Welcome to the 2025 postseason at Steinbrenner Field!'”— here’s the Athletic paywall, go to town. (Or, psst, you can always try archive.ph.)
  • The Marietta Daily Journal reports that the Atlanta Braves‘ stadium is producing more tax revenues than it’s costing Cobb County in tax expenditures; no, it’s not, points out Kennesaw State economist J.C. Bradbury, who notes that this fails to account for the 60% of county costs that are covered by sources other than property taxes, which puts the county comfortably back in a sea of red ink.
  • The Washington, D.C. city council has scheduled public hearings on a proposed Commanders stadium for July 29 and 30, which makes it clear that the council won’t be voting to approve the potential $7-billion-and-up subsidy deal on July 15 as team officials and Mayor Muriel Bowser had hoped. Any delay past July 15 would “jeopardize D.C.’s ability to attract premier concerts, global talent and marquee events — including the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup” and “slow new jobs at a time when the District needs them the most,” a Commanders spokesperson harrumphed. Council president Phil Mendelson says he still expects a stadium deal to be approved this summer; the big question is whether the council will do anything to trim the proposed record-breaking public costs or will just greenlight basically what Bowser approved. If nothing else, the hearings should be a good opportunity to fill out some of our bingo cards.
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Friday roundup: Silver Knights face arena suit, Prokhorov seeks to ditch Nassau lease, journalism spirals the drain

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! MLS has resumed play with an MLS Is Back tournament in Orlando (at least for all the teams other than the two that dropped out because they had too many coronavirus-positive players), and MLB starts its season next Thursday, and restarting sports leagues are soaking up all of the United States’ available testing capacity and ballplayers are getting called “pansies” for wearing masks to the grocery store. Also, another of the few remaining news outlets just laid off a ton of quality people, including several I used to work with, because journalism is one of the many nice things we apparently can’t have anymore.

If all that doesn’t cheer you up, here’s a passel of stadium-and-arena-related news that probably won’t do the trick either:

  • The Henderson city council voted unanimously yesterday to reject a petition seeking to overturn the city’s decision to spend $60 million on a minor-league hockey arena plus some other stuff, which should probably come as no surprise given that it’s the same council that voted to approve the Silver Knights arena in the first place. (The petitions were initially rejected because of a technicality about whether enough information was included on every page of the petition, but the council was under no obligation to consider the legal requirements rather than just voting for what they wanted to happen.) Petitioners could now seek to sue the city, which is how these things always seem to turn out.
  • Former Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is in negotiations to get out of his lease with Nassau County on the Nassau Coliseum, Nassau Executive Laura Curran revealed Tuesday. This could work out well for all concerned, or it could let Prokhorov get out of his lease obligations by having shut down the arena and held it hostage; the devil will be in the details of the talks, and Curran didn’t divulge anything about those.
  • The Palace of Auburn Hills, former home of the Detroit Pistons, got blowed up real good on Saturday, as one does when one is a 32-year-old sports arena in the early 21st century. And if you thought you already saw images several months ago of the Palace being torn down, that’s because you did, but history repeats itself, the second time with dynamite.
  • The Edmonton Oilers‘ four-year-old arena was partially flooded by a hailstorm, but don’t worry, the NHL says it will still be able to use it for its planned restart on August 1. Or maybe Edmonton will have to build another new arena in the next two weeks, it’s always hard to say with these things.
  • Fivethirtyeight tried to evaluate whether the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium is a better place to see a ballgame than their old one by overlaying one seating cross-section on the other and determining that the last row of seats is 33 feet closer to the field horizontally and only a few feet higher vertically, so that’s an improvement! Except that they failed to take into account that the new stadium has 8,000 fewer seats than the old one, so really you want to compare the worst seats in the new place to the 40,000th best seat in the old place, since the people in the last row of the old place will now be watching at home on TV. I remember when Nate Silver still made sure his writers did their math correctly, those were good times.
  • D.C. United is surveying fans to ask them if they’ll feel safe attending soccer matches in person later this summer, because who better to ask for advice about public health policy than random soccer fans?
  • Have you been missing sports columns about how your city needs to replace its arena despite not having a major-league team to play in it because the old one is a “graying ghost that is all but begging for a retirement cake” and besides even Tulsa has a newer one, oh the shame? The San Diego Union-Tribune is on it!
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Friday roundup: I, for one, support our new dancing robot overlords

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday, everybody! Let’s see what’s going on:

While I’m sorely tempted to stop right there, we do have some other news this week to cover, so let’s continue:

  • Oak View Group, the operator of the New York Islanders‘ new Belmont Park arena currently under construction for a planned opening next year, is reportedly interested in taking over operations of the Nassau Coliseum as well, according to Newsday “sources.” I mean, so would I if the price were right, and given that current operator Mikhail Prokhorov is $2 million behind in rent and threatened with eviction, OVG probably thinks it can get a good deal here, but still it’s hard to see this as anything other than throwing a few pennies at shutting down a rival so as not to risk any competitors making a go of it.
  • Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury has looked at the impact of the new Atlanta Braves stadium that “was intended to serve as an anchor for further economic development in the suburban business district of Cumberland that would ripple throughout the county,” and found that local commercial property values actually went down relative to similar properties elsewhere in the Atlanta metro area. Bradbury theorizes that businesses may not want to locate near all the traffic congestion of a sports stadium, or be scared off by the tax surcharges put in place to help fund the $300 million public cost. “This finding is consistent with the vast literature on the economic impact of sports venues and events,” concludes Bradbury, which is economistese for “We told you so, over and over and over again, but you wouldn’t listen.”
  • Restaurant owners in Edmonton are so desperate for business that one declared himself “super-excited” at the prospect that visiting NHL teams might place some takeout orders, and the Edmonton Journal sports section is so desperate for hockey news that it ran a whole article about it. Wait, that was in the business section? These are not glorious times for journalism.
  • The National Women’s Soccer League used a forgivable loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program to help pay players when its season shut down, which sounds like (and is) a subsidy but is also exactly how the PPP is supposed to work: covering salaries to keep people from being laid off during a pandemic, thus keeping the economy from collapsing even more than it is otherwise. Sure, it would have been nice if the program hadn’t run out of money before most businesses could access it, but given that the maximum player salary in the NWSL is $50,000 a year, it’s hard to complain too much about them being less deserving than anyone else.
  • The way the PPP was not supposed to work was for companies to hold onto employees and then lay them off as soon as they’d certified for the forgivable loans, but that’s what New Era did in Buffalo, and now Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is so mad that he’s refusing to call the Buffalo Bills stadium by its New Era-branded name, which will totally show them.
  • Lots of NFL teams are planning for reduced capacities at games this fall, while the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is preparing for his players to “all get sick, that’s for sure.” And that’s the state of the NFL in a nutshell right now.
  • Hawaii can’t spend $350 million on replacing Aloha Stadium with a new stadium and redeveloping the area around it because somebody made a typo in the legislation and wrote 99-year leases instead of 65-year leases, everybody laugh and point!
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Friday roundup: Nashville and Miami stadiums still on hold, cable bubble may finally be bursting, minor-league contraction war heats up

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Scottish Independence Day! And now for the rest of the news:

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Friday roundup: Buffalo saber-rattling, Edmonton parking fee shortfall, Chicago music venues go to war against soccer plans

access_time personNeil deMause

And in other news of the week:

  • This was actually last week, but I missed it then: Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait has led the city council in voting to conduct a new appraisal of the Angel Stadium property as Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno prepares to opt out of his team’s lease next year. Councilmember Kris Murray, one of the two no votes, argued that this was tantamount to telling the Angels to leave; Tait replied that knowing how much the land was worth would be crucial to any stadium negotiations the incoming mayor will have with Moreno. The Gang of Four is going to miss Tom Tait.
  • The owners of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres have hired consultants CAA ICON and architecture firm Populous to “give us options” for renovating or replacing the teams’ existing venues. This is not necessarily the first step toward demanding new buildings, but it’s more of a step than the Pegulas have taken thus far, so certainly bears watching.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been giving away unused tickets for free to their season ticket holders, to try to fill up the seats at their underattended games. Finally something that Los Angeles Chargers fans can point and laugh at! Both of them!
  • The $8.7 million a year that Edmonton was projecting to bring in from parking fees outside the Oilers‘ new arena turns out to be somewhat less: just $2.5 million a year, leaving the city with a roughly $57 million hole in its arena budget. City councillor Jon Dziadyk immediately leaped into action, blaming the reduced parking fees on people not wanting to drive downtown because there are too many bike lanes.
  • Hey, remember that minor-league soccer stadium a major Chicago developer wanted to build as part of a major Chicago development, originally pegged to luring Amazon to town but now with a life of its own? Turns out the whole thing would be funded by tax increment financing kickbacks, and would include three to five new concert venues to be run by the entertainment giant Live Nation that local concert venue operators say would drive their non-subsidized clubs out of business. The Chicago Tribune reports that the fledgling Chicago Independent Venue League “already had its new logo, a peregrine falcon wrapped with a snake, printed on black tee-shirts,” which honestly is going to be tough for any soccer team to top.
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Ex-Edmonton mayor: If I hadn’t given Katz $300m, Oilers might have moved … somewhere

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Edmonton Oilers‘ new $676 million arena set to open next month, there’s lots of attention being paid to the roughly $311 million that taxpayers are kicking in towards the cost, and whether the public is getting a good enough deal for its money. But former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel, who approved the arena plan, tells CBC News that he was negotiating with a gun to his head:

“Anytime I thought that it wouldn’t happen, I was always worried that we’d end up losing a hockey team. … I think it was a big, big card that the Katz Group were able to play. In most negotiations, the city always has the upper hand, because we control the world around us. In this instance, we did not control the world around us. … To take any chance of losing that team would have been a big mistake.”

I’m not sure what Mandel is talking about with “most negotiations” — in pretty much every negotiation with a private business, there’s at least the implied threat that it will leave town, which is how we got into this whole mess — but let’s take a walk down memory lane to see how much of a threat it was that Oilers owner Daryl Katz was going to take his team and walk if he didn’t get $300 million in city cash. Katz flew to Seattle to tour their arena that is too small for hockey, and he mumbled something about needing to secure the team’s “longterm sustainability in Edmonton,” and … that’s about it. Katz’s “big, big card,” if he had one, was certainly never revealed to the public, and if he secretly revealed to Mandel a plan to move the Oilers to Albuquerque if he didn’t get his way, nobody’s telling.

Idle move threats, of course, are incredibly common in sports, for the simple reason that they provide benefits to both sides: The team owner gets a stick to use in negotiations, and the elected officials he’s negotiating with get cover when later accused of giving away the store. (“But we had to approve all that money, or else he was going to leeeeeeeave.”) There’s simply zero evidence, though, that Katz was really going to move the Oilers if his arena subsidy wasn’t approved — he might have thought about it, sure, but finding a better market than Edmonton willing to throw money at his team would have been a tough challenge: Seattle didn’t have an arena to play in (or interest in putting up lots of public funds for one), Quebec is a good bit smaller than Edmonton, Kansas City’s arena manager has no interest in a sweetheart hockey lease, Las Vegas is Las Vegas, etc.

So whatever else you want to say about Mandel’s arena negotiations, he had way more control of the world around him than he makes out — if only because “fine, go play in the street if you like” would have been a perfectly reasonable retort, if only to see what Katz then came back with. (I mean, he came back with flying to Seattle for the weekend to frighten Mandel, but that shouldn’t count.) It’s something that at least a few mayors in other cities have learned to do — come to think of it, CBC News really should have pressed Mandel about this issue, but I suppose self-imposed gullibility is everywhere.

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Edmonton fills lingering Oilers arena funding gap, city cost now tops $300m

access_time personNeil deMause

When last we checked in on the Edmonton Oilers‘ $676 million arena plan a little over a year ago, owner Daryl Katz was about to break ground, despite a lingering $50 million funding gap thanks to putting a line item in the budget marked “put a bunch of money from province here.” Arena construction is now well underway — lookit! — and a source has been found for the money that Alberta will still not be providing. Care to guess who? Everyone guessing “Daryl Katz” can put your hands down:

The city is preparing to pay an additional $32 million toward the downtown arena because money expected from the province hasn’t materialized.

Okay then! For those scoring at home, I think that’s now $311 million that the city of Edmonton has agreed to kick in for the arena project, which is a whole mess of loonies.

The good news, such as it is, is that the TIF district (CRL district in Canadian) created by the city to kick back taxes for use on the project is bringing in revenue faster than expected, meaning the city’s “just assume lots of revenue and hope it comes in” plan might actually work out. Of course, that’s revenue that now can’t be used on providing services for all the new development in the CRL district, or anything else the city might have wanted to use it on in the absence of an arena, but at least they won’t have to sell any hospitals.

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Oilers arena clears yet another final hurdle, might actually get built soon despite funding gap

access_time personNeil deMause

The new Edmonton Oilers arena plan is officially underway, according to Oilers owner Daryl Katz, with contractors having agreed to cover any overruns above the $480 million construction price. (The total cost is $676 million, counting land, a pedestrian bridge, and a new light rail link.) The Edmonton Journal calls this the “final obstacle” in the way of the project, which has been in the works seemingly forever.

It seems like there was something else that needed to be resolved … oh, right, the at least $50 million funding hole. It looks as though Edmonton is happy to just issue an IOU for that and figure out how to pay for it later, however, so it’s safe to break ground. Which is pretty much where we’ve been since last May, but hey, a rich guy held a press conference, it’s gotta be news, right?

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Edmonton set to break ground on Oilers arena in March, paying-for-it, schmaying-for-it

access_time personNeil deMause

The city of Edmonton may still be between $50 million and $130 million short on being able to pay for a new Oilers arena, but that’s not going to stop them from breaking ground:

Edmonton’s downtown arena is on course to meet its $480-million construction cost and should be ready to start construction in March, city manager Simon Farbrother says.

“I would say we’re very close to the end,” he said Thursday.

It sounds like Oilers and city representatives have been working with contractors to ensure that the project won’t bust its $480 million budget ($605 million counting land and infrastructure), which would leave it just $50 million short, plus however much the city will end up needing to dig in its pockets for if the local Community Revitalization Levy (aka a Canadian TIF) only produces the amount of revenue the city expected in the first place, and not the amount it decided to project when it suddenly realized it had a funding hole to fill.

The city is apparently still hoping to apply to the province for funds for at least another $25 million — which has never worked before, but can’t hurt to keep asking, right? — but if it doesn’t get it, it can always shuffle some money around and figure it out later. Because that’s worked out so great elsewhere.

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Oilers’ “big announcement” is just selling naming rights to nonexistent arena for undisclosed sum

access_time personNeil deMause

The Edmonton Oilers‘ “big announcement” on their planned new arena has been announced, and it is:

Rogers Communications has now acquired the naming rights for Edmonton’s future downtown arena.

Calling it a “moment of pleasure and joy for everyone involved,” Edmonton Oilers president Patrick LaForge told a Tuesday news conference the naming rights agreement moves the $480-million arena in downtown Edmonton “closer to reality.”

Hey, I guessed it!

How much the Canadian TV giant will pay to name the as-yet-nonexistent hockey venue “Rogers Place” — not to be confused with Rogers Centre and Rogers Arena — is unknown: Even Edmonton Mayor Don Iverson said he doesn’t know the dollar figure. In fact, it may be unknowable without fancy accounting tricks, as the naming-rights deal is just an expansion of Rogers’ sponsorship deal for the Oilers’ TV broadcasts, website, and mobile app.

Not that any of this matters much, since according to the Oilers’ deal with Edmonton, all naming-rights money goes into the pocket of team owner Daryl Katz, who’s already said he’s spending as much as he’s gonna towards the $676 million arena project. That means the $50-130 million funding hole is still empty. So the arena is only “closer to reality” in the sense that there’s now a corporate name to put on the renderings — which is kind of a shame, as I was looking forward to pictures of the Your Brand Here Centre.

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