Category: Philadelphia Flyers

Friday roundup: $2.5B Philly stadium development could demand public money, KC sales-tax vote too close to call

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday again, and you know what that means: Time for the cavalcade of bullet points on news we didn’t have time for the rest of the week (or which just broke since Thursday morning, that happens too).

  • The Philadelphia Phillies and Flyers owners say they’re going to partner on a $2.5 billion mixed-use development in the teams’ shared parking lots, with restaurants, shops, hotels, apartments, and a 5,500-seat performance stage. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports: “Asked if the project would require public tax dollars, the company said that it was still working on an estimated cost, and that there were many ways to finance the development,” which is decidedly not “no”; stay tuned on this one.
  • Apparently it is allowed to conduct polls in Missouri during the early voting period, and one conducted in Jackson County on the April 2 referendum on a 0.375% sales tax surcharge extension to fund Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects is … tied, basically, with “yes” ahead by 47-46% but with a 4.5-point margin of error. The poll was taken last weekend before the latest news that community groups are urging a “no” vote, and by the Remington Research Group, which is connected with the “yes” campaign, so all this doesn’t look great for the team owners, though of course they still have more campaign spending to do.
  • Asked if state and city money would be required for the $2 billion Royals stadium — since team owner John Sherman is only putting in $1 billion and the county sales tax surcharge would only generate $250-350 million, sure seems like yes — team EVP Sarah Tourville told Fox4KC: “What I’ll tell you is that the Royals are committed to putting private capital into the stadium. We’re committed to a billion dollars of private capital in the stadium district.” That’s also decidedly not “no.”
  • The Arizona Coyotes briefly posted some arena renderings on their team app on Tuesday, and they’re super-tiny images that don’t have any fireworks at all, come back when you have something high-resolution, guys. Team owner Alex Meruelo still doesn’t actually have the land to build an arena on, since he first has to win an auction for state land where the bidding starts at $68.5 million, then also find the money to build the thing, but baby steps, and baby images, first, apparently. A Sportsnet reporter warned last weekend that the Coyotes could relocate if they don’t win the land auction, but 1) there might not be time to do so before the 2024-25 season and 2) we’ve been hearing this for decades now about multiple arena plans, wolf-crying caveats apply.
  • Oakland A’s management has agreed with the Las Vegas Stadium Authority on a community benefits agreement worth at least $2 million a year, which is less than they’re paying 34-year-old relief pitcher Scott Alexander. Also, community benefits agreements are supposed to be signed with community groups that can oversee and enforce them; teams can sign them with local politicians, sure, but that generally turns out very badly.
  • Speaking of going very badly, “Oakland A’s again block all replies on Twitter after realizing how much everyone hates the A’s” is an excellent headline about how very badly things are going for A’s execs right now.
  • The Chicago Bears could use personal seat license sales to fund “a significant portion” of a new lakefront stadium, reports Crain’s Chicago Business, which also notes that the team used PSLs to fund a portion of its 2002 renovation of Soldier Field — a portion of the team’s share, not the public’s share, don’t get crazy now — and that those licenses’ “value would evaporate” if the team moved to a new stadium. “Buy the right to buy tickets and keep it forever or until we tear down the stadium and build a newer one, whichever comes first” would not seem to be the best marketing strategy, but team owners do seem to rely on sports fans having short memories.
  • I was all set to see where sports subsidies would fall on Phil Mattera’s list of biggest mega-scandals, but sadly he ranks these by how much in penalties companies have paid for their misdeeds, and sports team owners have so far escaped prosecution for their crimes, unless you count the St. Louis Rams settlement.
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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: Nashville votes out Titans stadium boosters (but is stuck with stadium), Philly could see battle of billionaires over Sixers arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time today, so without further ado or preamble, let’s see what else happened this week:

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Sixers owners offer to let Flyers be their tenants rather than vice versa, pretend any of this makes sense

access_time personNeil deMause

Billionaire Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris, who has already proposed building a $1.3 billion arena in Center City near Chinatown using no public money except for property tax breaks and possible state funds that could actually amount to a whole lot of public money, on Friday had one of his fellow execs announce that they would happily host the Flyers at their new home as well:

“We’d love the Flyers to come, we’re having discussions with them. We don’t know what will happen,” [part-owner David] Adelman said. He added that “hopefully [the proposed arena] aligns with [Comcast’s] goals as well.”

For the Flyers to move makes zero sense on the face of it: Not only is the hockey team currently in the middle of a $300 million renovation — conducted by Gritty, apparently — to add things like (checks) uhhh, themed bars, but agreeing to become the Sixers’ tenant rather than being their landlord at the current arena seems like a definite downgrade.

But then, there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about this new arena plan. Sure, one generally prefers to be the landlord than a tenant, but is it really $1.3 billion better (less whatever subsidies the Sixers owners end up extracting)? Especially when having two major arenas fighting for the same sports and concert market — and each having to pay off their own pile of construction debt — is just going to make each of them less lucrative? Adelman told the Philadelphia Business Journal that the ownership group is “willing to accept lower than market returns on this project” because they see the new arena as a “social mission” that “can be a catalyst for Philadelphia,” all of which is nice PR glurge, but there’s a big difference between “lower profits than we could potentially get by spending the money elsewhere” and “throwing money down a hole that we’ll never see back,” and there’s plenty of evidence that an arena gamble like this could end up the latter.

The most plausible explanation for the Sixers owners’ move, really, is as a scheme to try to displace the Flyers at the top of the Philadelphia arena heap. We’ve seen this tons of times before: It didn’t make much sense, for instance, to build a new Newark arena for the New Jersey Devils what with the old Meadowlands Arena still drawing concerts nearby, but once the Meadowlands was shut down, the Devils had a monopoly on that market. It’s the concert-industry equivalent of the pre-Amazon days when Barnes & Noble would open an outlet right across the street from a successful local bookstore: In the short run, there may not be enough customers to go around, but if you can be the last store standing, you’ve just seized somebody else’s business without having to go through the trouble of buying it.

If that’s what the Sixers owners are up to — and this latest invite to the Flyers to come bunk with them makes it seem likely, though it could also always just be more PR glurge meant to counter Philadelphians’ questions of “Why do we need another new arena exactly?” — then it’s an awfully big risk in the hopes of getting to be the big dog in the Philadelphia arena market. Which, if the Sixers owners were just gambling their money, then it’s their money, but once they’re asking for tax breaks and the right to mess up Chinatown, it becomes the public’s problem as well.

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Friday roundup: Grading Mariners subsidies on a curve, Cobb County could close parks to pay off Braves debt, Beckham punts on another stadium deadline

access_time personNeil deMause

Congratulations to the team that had never won the hockey thing winning it over the other team that had never won the hockey thing because it was a new team! And meanwhile:

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