Category: St. Louis Blues

Friday roundup: NFL funds its teams’ stadiums too, but still wants plenty of public cash

access_time personNeil deMause

It was the NFL owners’ meetings this week, which meant a whole lot of headlines about how the league is providing money toward new or renovated stadiums for a bunch of its teams: $295 million for Dallas Cowboys upgrades, $200 million toward a new $2.1 billion Tennessee Titans stadium, and $100 million for Denver Broncos upgrades. All this is coming via the NFL’s G-4 program, funding that is often termed loans but, since it gets “repaid” with ticket sales money the teams would normally have to share with the league, it’s really grants.

If you’re wondering why the NFL goes through the trouble of shuffling money around this way — asking for a cut via revenue-sharing and then handing it back for stadium projects — it’s complicated. G-4 evolved from G-3, which was originally created way back in 1999, when Robert Kraft was threatening to move the New England Patriots from Boston (well, Boston-ish) to Hartford. The NFL, which had recently seen the Houston Oilers move to Nashville and the Los Angeles Rams move to St. Louis in search of new stadium deals, appointed a committee to see if there was a way to discourage owners from abandoning larger cities for smaller ones, thus hurting the league’s ability to demand top dollar for national TV rights. To lead this committee, the league appointed one Robert Kraft.

You can probably see where this is going: Kraft’s committee approved a plan whereby the NFL would allow teams to withhold some revenue-sharing money if it used it to build new stadiums — but only for teams in the top six markets. The 6th-largest market at the time just happened to be Boston, and Kraft became the first recipient of funds under the league’s new G-3 provision.

Immediately, other team owners claimed it wasn’t fair that the Patriots, one of the richest teams in a league full of rich teams, were getting to use their money to build a new stadium that would benefit mostly them, and so G-3 (and its successor, G-4) was expanded to the entire league. This didn’t make a ton of sense in terms of keeping teams in big markets, but it did make for lots of spending on upgrades, so it was in the league’s interest, maybe, at least if the upgrades brought in more money than they cost, which was more likely to be the case when there was a pile of public money involved too.

To that end, G-3 and G-4 were designed to require “public-private partnerships,” meaning the NFL would only kick in if local taxpayers did first. But somewhere along the way, the league started bending that rule: While the Titans, for example, are supposed to get more than a billion dollars in tax money for their new stadium, the Broncos are getting just $12 million, and the Cowboys nothing — so a more accurate reading of the rule might be “public-private partnerships, or be Jerry Jones.”

And that’s The Story of G-4, or How NFL Stadium Funding Got Weirder Than Mere Billionaires Ripping Off Taxpayers Would Have You Expect. It’s not great news, exactly, since it doesn’t mean team owners are asking for any less public money, but it does go to show that sports leagues do have ways of funding new venues without demanding tax dollars, if they wanted to, which they don’t, because why wouldn’t you want tax dollars? Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.

Was there other news this week? You betcha:

  • The Buffalo Bills stadium still hasn’t gotten a final environmental signoff from the New York state legislature or a community benefits agreement between the team and the county, but it has over a billion dollars in state and county money, so the rest can (and will) wait till 2023 sometime, don’t you worry.
  • The state of Ohio just got around to approving its $30 million share of spending on stadium upgrades for the Cleveland Guardians, to go along with $255 million from the city and county. That’s been expected all along, but it’s still worth taking note of, especially when building the stadium in the first place only cost $350 million (in 1994 dollars, but still).
  • Speaking of the Titans, their newfound antagonist, metro councilperson Bob Mendes, has proposed reducing the state’s spending on their stadium from $500 million to $450 million and spending the other $50 million on children’s services. That’s probably mostly a rhetorical gambit to show that, no, this isn’t money that has to be spent on a stadium, it could go to kids if the state decided to do that, but also a way of pointing out that if a stadium would really generate $3 billion in future tourist taxes like its advocates claim, why not spend the upfront money on more pressing needs and give the Titans owners any surplus that comes in later? That’s not likely to go over well with team execs, but like I said, rhetorical gambit, it’s more to make a point than actually get approved, so well enough played, Bob Mendes.
  • We Are NY Horse Racing released an economic impact study claiming that upgrades to Belmont Park will produce “billions of dollars in economic impact” and I’m sorry, I can’t finish this sentence without laughing, go read the stenography journalism yourself.
  • More new Tampa Bay Rays stadium renderings, this time for a proposed stadium on the Tampa side of the bay, though they’re not detailed enough to make much fun of. The roof does have some weird wrinkly thing going on, which presumably has something to do with skylights, but given that we’re extremely likely never to hear of this proposal or this design ever again, I’m having a hard time getting into it.
  • And finally, enjoy this story of a St. Louis suburb that destroyed its bond rating by building a practice rink for the Blues then ran out of money to pay for it, because of COVID or something, definitely not because a $55.7 million hockey practice arena could never possibly pay for itself. (If the article is paywalled after the first few paragraphs, just let a bot write the rest for you, it’ll probably be as reliable as most local newspaper reporting anyway.)
Share this post:

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

access_time personNeil 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.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Indiana and Missouri rack up another $390m in team subsidies, and other dog-bites-man news

access_time personNeil deMause

Sadly, there’s another loss to report this week: Rob McQuown, who for the past decade has been one of the core tech and admin guys at Baseball Prospectus, passed away on Tuesday. I never met Rob personally, but in my days writing and editing for BP we exchanged emails a ton, and he was always a sharp and good-humored presence keeping the site running behind the scenes. (He wrote some excellent fantasy baseball coverage for a while, too.) I haven’t heard the details of his death, but I do know it was way too soon, and my sympathies go out to all his friends and family and colleagues who are mourning him this week. Here’s a lovely podcast tribute by Ben Lindbergh to Rob’s multifarious and too-often underappreciated gifts.

And now, to the news:

  • The Indianapolis City-County Council gave final signoff to $290 million in subsidies for the Indiana Pacers, which along with new and past operating subsidies brings team owner Herb Simon’s total haul to more than a billion dollars. The team’s new lease lasts until 2044, but I’d wager that Simon won’t wait that long before going back to what’s been an insanely lucrative taxpayer well.
  • The state of Missouri has reportedly approved $3 million a year for 20 years, coming to a total of $70 million, for upgrades for the St. Louis Blues, Kansas City Royals, and Kansas City Chiefs stadiums — yeah, I don’t get how that math works either, especially when this was previously reported as $70 million for the Blues plus $30 million for the K.C. teams, and has elsewhere been reported as $70 million for the Blues and $60 million for the K.C. teams, but I’m sure it was copied from a press release somewhere, and that’s what passes for fact-checking these days, right? This brings the teams’ total haul to … let’s see, the K.C. teams got $250 million previously, and the Blues owners got $67 million in city money, so let’s go with “around $400 million,” about which you can say that it’s at least cheaper than what Indiana taxpayers are on the hook for, and that is pretty much all you can say.
  • The city of Anaheim is still waiting on its now-overdue appraisal of the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium land so it can open talks with team owner Arte Moreno on how much he should pay for development rights on the stadium parking lots. Mayor Harry Sidhu has appointed a negotiating team, though, which includes Sidhu himself, something that has drawn criticism since Angels execs donated to his election campaign. Sidhu also stated that “our theme parks, sports venues and convention center are a matter of pride, but their real purpose is to serve residents by generating revenue for public safety, parks, libraries and community centers and by helping us keep taxes and fees low,” which is not likely to help convince anyone that he understands sports economics like his predecessor did and isn’t just repeating what his funders tell him.
  • Oak View Group’s Tim Leiweke is trying to build a 10,000-seat arena in Palm Springs, and economists point out that this won’t help the local economy much because “you’re crazy if you think I’m flying to Palm Springs to see your minor league hockey team,” and Leiweke says Palm Springs is just different, okay, because so many attendees will be people who are already coming to town to play golf, gamble, or stay at local resorts. How this makes it a major economic plus when those people also see a concert when they’re in town Leiweke didn’t say, but who’re you going to believe, a bunch of people who study economics for a living or a guy who was once the youngest GM in indoor soccer?
  • A Cincinnati nonprofit is trying to raise $2 million to preserve affordable housing around F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium, and the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority says that maybe building more market-rate housing will allow low-income residents of existing buildings to stay put. Yeah, that’s really not going to work.
  • Nobody in Miami-Dade County has studied the impact of building a new Inter Miami stadium right next to the city’s airport, and some county commissioners think that maybe that might be a thing they’d want to study.
  • Here’s a good, long R.J. Anderson article on three cities vying for MLB expansion teams (Portland, Montreal, and Raleigh) that should provide reading material for the inevitable endless wait for MLB to actually expand. (I’m also quoted in it, right before Jim Bouton.)
  • And here’s another long article that quotes me, this one by Bill Shea of The Athletic on how stadium subsidies have changed since the Great Recession (some sports economists say it’s tougher to get public money now, I say “Bah!”).
Share this post:

Friday roundup: Remembering Jim Bouton, and the latest in stadium shakedown absurdities

access_time personNeil deMause

One day maybe 16 or 17 years ago, I was sitting at my computer when my phone rang and a voice at the other end said, “Hi, this is Jim Bouton. Can I speak with Neil deMause?”

Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor that the author of Ball Four (and winner of two games in the 1964 World Series) was calling me, we got down to business: Bouton was in the midst of writing a book about his attempts to save a nearly century-old minor-league baseball stadium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and had some questions about how attempts to save old ballparks (and save the public’s money on building new ones) had gone in other cities. We soon fell to chatting amiably about the nuances and absurdities of the stadium game — I’m pretty sure Jim had only one setting with people he’d just met, which was “chatting amiably” — and eventually ended up having a few conversations about his book and his work as a short-term preservationist and ballclub operator. (The preservation part was successful — Wahconah Park is still in use today — but he was eventually forced out from team management.) I got to meet him in person for the first time a couple of years later when he came to Brooklyn to talk with local residents then fighting demolition of their buildings to make way for a new Brooklyn Nets arena, an issue he quickly became as passionate about as everything else that touched his sense of injustice; when I learned (at a Jim Bouton book talk, in fact) that the initial edition of Field of Schemes had gone out of print, he enthusiastically encouraged me and Joanna Cagan to find a publisher for a revised edition, as he had never been shy about doing for his own books, even when that meant publishing them himself.

The last time I talked to Jim was in the spring of 2012, when he showed up at a screening of the documentary Knuckleball! (along with fellow knuckleball pitchers R.A. Dickey, Tim Wakefield, and Charlie Hough) to help teach kids how to throw the near-magical pitch. We only got to talk briefly, as he was kept busy chatting amiably with everyone else who wanted a moment with him. Soon after that, he had a stroke, and eventually developed vascular dementia, which on Wednesday took his life at age 80.

I’m eternally grateful to have had a chance to spend a little time with one of the nicest, smartest, funniest world-famous authors and ballplayers you could ever hope to meet, especially when we crossed paths on a topic that was so important to both of us. The image I’ll always retain of Jim, though, was of getting ice cream with him near his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and him looking at my cup and exclaiming, “Sprinkles! That’s a great idea!” and then sprinting back into the shop to get some added to his as well. To the end, Jim Bouton remained boyishly intense about things that were truly important, whether fighting General Electric to save an old ballpark or eating ice cream, and that’s a rare and precious gift. My sympathies to his wife, Paula, and to all who loved him, which by this point I think was pretty much everybody.

And now, to the nuances and absurdities of this week’s stadium and arena news:

Share this post:

Missouri approves $41m worth of renovations for Blues arena that St. Louis just paid $67m to renovate in 2017

access_time personNeil deMause

The state of Missouri has approved $70 million in spending over 20 years for renovations to the St. Louis Blues arena — and if you feel like this just happened a couple of years ago, you’re almost right: That was $67 million in city money, and will cover scoreboard, sound system, and seat upgrades; the state money will pay for escalators, roofing and heating, and air conditioning, because apparently that’s what was left to buy on the Blues’ gift registry.

This will be totally worth it, say public officials, because competitiveness!

“Without renovations, and without public-sector support for those renovations, we run the risk of being less competitive in pursuit of national events,” said Frank Viverito, president of the St. Louis Sports Commission, a nonprofit organization that attracts and manages sporting events.

Also because hockey is fun!

The fact that the Blues currently are making a run in the NHL postseason was mentioned by more than one state lawmaker during House debate on Wednesday, including by some who eagerly described going to hockey games.

(I’m having trouble finding documents to confirm this 100%, but the Blues owners appear not to have agreed to any sort of lease extension in exchange for the subsidies, presumably because St. Louis and Missouri official are even bigger morons than their neighbors over in Indiana.)

Since the payments are deferred a bit, the state’s $70 million in nominal subsidies is worth more like $41 million in present value, so that reduces the sting a bit. Though the legislature also tacked on approval to pay another 10 years’ worth of $3-million-a-year lease subsidies to the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, which adds to the sting, though at least those are subsidies that were planned for all along, so it’s not really a new waste of cash, just an agreement to keep up with the commitment to an old one? Maybe it’s best just to say Who can put a price on state-of-the-art escalators? and leave it at that.

Share this post:

How cities haven’t actually fallen out of love with funding sports stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

The May issue of Governing magazine has an article with the provocative headline, “How Cities Fell Out of Love With Sports Stadiums,” though it’s really mostly about why St. Louis balked at throwing money at an MLS stadium and fought back against paying for arena upgrades for the Blues after getting burned when the Rams got the most sweetheart lease deal in history and then used a lease loophole to move back to Los Angeles just 21 years later.

All that is good and fine, as is the article’s discussion of how “the economic impact reports singing the praises of sports development have largely been discredited.” But in the service of trying to make the story into “regular folks used to fall all over themselves to hand money to sports teams, but now they’ve smartened up,” writer Liz Farmer oversimplifies or just plain gets wrong a number of things about the stadium subsidy game and how it’s played, which is going to be a problem if any people in the business of actual governing take it as gospel. Let us count the ways:

“When [Rams owner Stan] Kroenke came along and had the gall to start making demands for a football team that hadn’t had a winning record since 2003, the city was — quite literally — spent. St. Louis was suffering under the same socioeconomic and fiscal pressures as Cleveland, Detroit and most other Rust Belt cities. Its population was declining rapidly, and it was stuck paying off debt for the existing stadium until 2022. Residents were increasingly skeptical when it came to investing in gaudy entertainment amenities the lower-income population couldn’t afford to use.”

St. Louis’s population has been declining since 1950 — if anything, it’s leveled off some in recent years — though its county population has soared as more people moved to the suburbs. And residents were pretty darned skeptical before, too: Way back in 2002, St. Louis citizens approved a referendum requiring that all public subsidies for sports facilities would need to go to a public vote. Unfortunately for voters, courts ruled that the target of that referendum — the Cardinals stadium deal that had just been approved prior to that — was grandfathered in, but it’s not like public resistance in St. Louis is anything new.

“The era of taxpayer-financed stadiums came about almost by accident. Seeking to limit the use of government bonds in stadium financing, the federal Tax Reform Act of 1986 included a provision that capped at 10 percent the direct stadium revenue — mostly from ticket sales and concessions — that could be used to pay for the cost of the facility. That meant that governments would have to raise broad-based taxes, such as on sales or business, to cover the rest of the cost.”

Not quite. What the 1986 tax reform law was attempting to do was to rein in cities’ use of federally tax exempt bonds for private projects — not just stadiums, but all kinds of development — by saying, “Look, only really public amenities, okay? Don’t just offer discounted bonds to anybody who asks and then stick federal taxpayers with the bill.”

Unfortunately, the way that Congress chose to address this was by defining public amenities as things that were paid for by the public — if more than 10% of the cost was paid off by private funds (or special taxes that were just private funds masquerading as public dollars to get eligibility), low-cost federal bonds were off the table. Unfortunately, what that did was to increase the leverage of sports team owners, who could now say, “Yeah, sorry, we would love to put in more money of our own, but then it would increase the financing costs, and we can’t have that, can we?”

This is by no means what started the era of taxpayer-financed stadiums, though: Team owners were already demanding new stadiums and arenas left and right, using the usual playbook of methods to do so (move threats, claims of economic benefits, etc.). The tax reform law further titled the scale toward bigger demands, but it didn’t create the demands in the first place — and while getting rid of tax-exempt bond subsidies would be a nice step, it wouldn’t put an end to stadium subsidies in the slightest.

“But Congress didn’t account for the fan loyalty and pride that — at the time — made raising local taxes more acceptable.”

Fan loyalty and pride are still on full display, but sports fans are taxpayers, too, and have been resisting handing their tax dollars over to sports team owners as much as anyone since the beginning. Just ask Frank Rashid.

“The boom was driven in part by demand from teams and fans for a more sophisticated sports experience than the drab concrete coliseums they were used to.”

If by “more sophisticated sports experience” you mean “more pulled-pork sandwiches and nicer cupholders,” sure. But plenty of sports venues have been torn down in recent years to make way for new facilities that are arguably even drabber than the ones they replaced.

“The Washington, D.C., soccer team, D.C. United, spent years negotiating with the nation’s capital over a new soccer-specific stadium. Those talks effectively shut down once the economic downturn hit in 2008, and the team spent another seven years shopping around in the surrounding counties — even going as far as Baltimore — trying to find a local government that would pay for the facility. None would bite. Ultimately, the team stayed in D.C. and is paying to build a stadium on land the city spent $150 million acquiring. The deal includes a non-relocation agreement.”

In addition to that free land, D.C. United is also getting $43 million in property tax breaks, making it the most expensive MLS soccer stadium subsidy in history. The tide is turning!

“Kiel Center Partners, the firm that owns the NHL Blues, had asked the St. Louis City Board of Aldermen for $64 million to finance upgrades to the Scottrade Center. Had the city’s voters not been distracted by the soccer stadium proposal and by a heated mayoral election, the financing might have met more resistance. Some aldermen did question whether the city’s 1994 lease with the team required it to pay for upgrades, but still the proposal narrowly passed. If it had been submitted to a popular vote, it most likely would have failed.”

Again, “if voters had been asked, they would have voted it down” is likely true of all of St. Louis’s past sports subsidy deals. (Possibly not the original Rams deal, though if they’d known that it would allow the team to move away by claiming their two-decade-old stadium was no longer “state of the art,” they might have balked at that, too.) And voters didn’t get to vote because the city council just up and decreed that they wouldn’t be allowed to, despite that 2002 referendum, so it’s tough to see how this is a sign of increased political resistance.

“So the hockey team got its way. Things like that still happen. But they don’t happen easily, and they don’t happen with broad public support. Several years ago, for instance, when the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings wanted a publicly funded stadium, the state legislature rejected the proposal. Eventually the team got its money, but with a state law capping public contributions to the $1 billion project at $498 million.”

OMG, the Vikings owners actually had to ask for stadium subsidies multiple times! And then they had to settle for a mere half-billion dollars in cash, except counting tax breaks and other hidden goodies it’s actually costing taxpayers more like $1.1 billion, so, uh.

In the end, the Governing article isn’t a terrible one, and it does touch on a lot of details of the stadium scam that Governing likely wouldn’t have been caught dead discussing 20 years ago. (Now there’s some progress.) But if the takeaway is that the general public loved sports stadium plans, but now have realized they were duped, that’s not the story at all: Actually it’s been a battle from the beginning between team owners trying to extract as much public money as possible, and taxpayers and some of their local representatives trying to push back. And while maybe a few more elected officials are pushing back harder, there’s pushback against the pushback, too. So this whole mess isn’t ending anytime soon, much as I wish it were so I could retire this blog and go back to treating sports as the purely apolitical, fun pastime that it never really was.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Battles over Blues arena, Vegas bond subsidy, Belmont land for Islanders

access_time personNeil deMause

Let’s get right to this week’s remainders:

Share this post:

St. Louis puts temporary hold on Blues practice rink that bulldozed public park

access_time personNeil deMause

The St. Louis County Council voted 4-3 last night to put on hold construction of the new St. Louis Blues practice rink that, it turned out a few days ago, is destroying public parkland without the required permission of the National Park Service:

“When council members called the developers of this project, they were told that the land disturbances that were taking place in Creve Coeur had nothing to do with the ice rink, it was for stormwater,” [council char Sam] Page said. “We know that now to be false … It’s important to tell the truth and follow the rules.”

The council’s decision to put the rink — sorry, it can’t be avoided — on ice came despite heavy turnout by youth hockey parents, who Blues execs had asked to come show support for their construction project, which would also include amateur rink space. More than 17,000 people have now signed a petition calling for the rinks not to be built in the park.

Meanwhile, the cost of the rinks appears to have gone up, from $59.3 million to $66 million, including $38.3 million in public bonds, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The bonds would be repaid via a complicated series of lease agreements with a nonprofit organization — I still haven’t been able to find all the details, though the Post-Dispatch does report that the county would be on the hook for as much as $450,000 a year in “backstop payments” if money fell short. Seems like lots of reasons to call a timeout on this one, really — now let’s see how everyone does going forward on that whole telling the truth and following the rules thing.

Share this post:

Blues don’t wait on Park Service permission, go ahead and bulldoze park for practice arena

access_time personNeil deMause

If you remember the long battle over the new New York Yankees stadium, you may remember how one key hurdle was getting the approval of the National Park Service for the project, since the stadium site was on parkland that had previously gotten federal funds, meaning it either needed to be maintained as open space in perpetuity or replaced with equal land elsewhere. (A requirement that was eventually met, sort of, by building a new park years late on the other side of a highway.)

The St. Louis Blues are currently working on building a new practice rink on 40 acres of similarly federally funded parkland in suburban Maryland Heights — using $6 million of county money, in addition to the county land — and so are stuck in the same boat of waiting on the NPS. Except, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger, the Blues owners aren’t waiting:

Today, the site tapped for the ice complex is scraped bare by bulldozers. On both sides of Marine Avenue in the northwestern corner of the federally protected park, trees, grass, wildlife and wildflowers are gone, replaced by acres of dirt being flattened and raised by heavy construction equipment every day.

That work, key county officials claim, has nothing to do with the ice project, which has yet to get the approval it needs from the National Park Service to go forward.

Messenger reports that Sheila Sweeney, CEO of the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership, insists the park was bulldozed not for the Blues, but for “an unrelated stormwater project.” Only one problem:

The proposed site of the Blues practice arena project is 13750 Marine Avenue, which besides being in the county park is also in the city limits of Maryland Heights. That means the company doing the grading work needed a permit from the city.

That permit was issued July 6. It lists the description of the work to be done:

“Construction of an Ice Center.”

Environmental groups are fighting the use of parkland for the hockey complex, with a Change.org petition that notes that not only is Creve Coeur Park valuable green space, but it sits in a floodplain, making it maybe not the best place for a permanent sports facility. And now the chair of the St. Louis County Council has called for a timeout on the project, on the grounds that “information that now appears to be incorrect, misleading, or incomplete” and that “we were purposely misled.” Better late than never, I guess, though maybe it would have been nice to do this before the chainsaws came out.

 

Share this post:

Blues’ $67m arena subsidy hit with lawsuit as city comptroller refuses to issue bonds

access_time personNeil deMause

Speaking of arena upgrade lawsuits, St. Louis’s plan to provide $67 million in public subsidies toward a redo of the Blues‘ arena, which was passed back in February, is facing a court challenge of its own:

Opponents of the publicly funded $64 million renovation to Scottrade Center filed suit Friday to keep the city from paying for the project, alleging the plan is unconstitutional in Missouri.

And on the same day, a spokesman for St. Louis Comptroller Darlene Green said she had no intention of signing the financial agreement that would fund the city’s commitment to the arena.

“The Comptroller has not approved the transaction to issue bonds for the renovation of Scottrade Center, as it would incur debt to the city’s general fund for nonessential services and negatively impact the city’s credit,” Green spokesman Tyson Pruitt said.

The Blues owners insist that Green, who was one of the prime critics of the Rams‘ stadium subsidy plan, doesn’t have the jurisdiction to refuse to issue the bonds, any more than La Liga did to refuse to accept Neymar’s transfer fee from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain. (Note: This is not meant to suggest a legal precedent between FIFA rules and St. Louis city regulations, just an excuse to mention my favorite part of the recent Neymar madness.) As for the suit, filed by currently alderman Cara Spencer, former state Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford — who has long been a prominent critic of sports subsidies in St. Louis, dating back to the Cardinals stadium deal —and former city counselor James Wilson, it’s based on a Missouri constitutional provision that public money can’t be granted to for-profit corporations for the purposes of boosting their profits. A bunch of states have these provisions on the books, and pretty much none of them are ever enforced — courts generally rule that the real purpose of the subsidies is “creating public economic benefits” or somesuch. It’ll be interesting to watch, though, not least because the arena renovations have already begun, so if the lawsuit prevails presumably the Blues owners would be on the hook for all the costs themselves; or, you know, would have to find some other public body to try to hit up for money, which is always possible too.

Share this post: