Friday roundup: If not for John Fisher schadenfreude, we wouldn’t have any freude at all

access_time personNeil deMause

Hello, Canadians, and Americans who couldn’t find a way to get out of town for the holiday weekend! This Friday roundup is handcrafted especially for you!

I wish the news were better, but we have to go with what we’ve got:

  • The latest bad news from Sacramento: So few people want to go to A’s games that tickets are selling for a fraction of what they were at the start of the season, leaving season ticket holders with a massive case of buyers’ remorse: “It is really rough,” one told SF Gate. “I’ve given away a bunch of them. I’ve given them to friends. The other day, I set a record: I sold $90 seats for 12 bucks. So, it’s kind of pretty bad.” At least worries that season ticket holders will miss out on playoff games if they’re not playing in Sacramento are probably moot: The A’s can’t see a playoff spot with a telescope right now, and that’s even before they trade their best pitcher because he keeps complaining about how much their stadium sucks.
  • Speaking of the A’s, I got quoted a lot in this Guardian article on their LOLgroundbreaking in Las Vegas, check it out if you enjoy John Fisher schadenfreude. Economist J.C. Bradbury is also cited as speculating that the A’s could end up in Salt Lake City or elsewhere next season, which he rushed to clarify doesn’t mean he thinks SLC is a long-term solution either (“too small,” yup, checks out).
  • Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie needs to make a decision on whether to build a new stadium to replace their 22-year-old one, says CBS Sports, because “the clock is ticking due to the lease expiring in seven years” and no no no no that is not how leases work, you can renew them, I just can’t even. Lurie hasn’t actually said anything about wanting a new stadium beyond being asked if he’d like a roof on one and saying he’s “torn,” but rest assured that the sports media is going to keep up the pressure for one regardless.
  • The Niagara Reporter took a look at Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino’s plans to build a $200 million hockey arena and determined that to meet its revenue projections it would have to attract a junior league hockey team (as yet uncertain), host 60 concerts a year (typical similarly sized venues average 12 to 20), and host 60 youth tournaments a year, which the Reporter deems “impossible” — and even then still would fall short of meeting the city’s $13 million a year in debt service.
  • “Pioneer League’s Northern Colorado Owlz fold after playing start of season in Colorado Springs following being evicted from their Windsor stadium for ‘health and safety’ reasons and are replaced by new Colorado Springs team with all of the same Owlz players and staff” is quite the story, if only for all the interesting questions it raises about when a sports franchise is no longer the same sports franchise. Also Colorado Springs already had a Pioneer League team, and they’re called the Rocky Mountain Vibes? So very many questions.
  • In case you needed more reason to block the Daily Mail from your news feeds after it was banned as a source by Wikipedia for being unreliable, this article (Wayback link, they don’t deserve the traffic) headlined “NFL team finally given green light to build new $600 million stadium” when it’s a $2.4 billion stadium and the Cleveland Browns owners still want another $600 million to go with the $600 million in state money they just got should be the icing on the cake.
  • How are subsidies going in the non-sports world, you ask? Well, California just raised its tax credit for film and TV production from $330 million a year to $750 million, meaning 35% of all filming costs in the state will now be covered by taxpayers. This has worked out extraordinarily poorly for states in the past, and stories of wasteful tax expenditures continue to pile up, but elected officials keep on insisting it’s necessary to keep economic activity from leaving the state, sound familiar?
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DC council may delay $7B stadium vote, could Commanders owner seek Trump bailout?

access_time personNeil deMause

The battle lines, such as they are, on the proposed Washington Commanders stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in D.C. are pretty clear: Mayor Muriel Bowser has proposed a deal that would involve more than $7 billion in city cash, tax breaks, and land discounts, and wants it passed by July 15; council leaders, most prominently chair Phil Mendelson, say they want to wait until September to vote in order to “make the deal even better (sic) for taxpayers” in unspecified ways. Mendelson, undeterred by the mayor’s (and Commanders owner Josh Harris’s) preferred deadline, has even set public hearings for July 29 and 30, which temporal experts say is actually after July 15.

Bowser was asked by sports radio talk show host Kevin Sheehan on Monday how concerned she was about all this on a scale of 0 to 5, and stopped just short of Defcon 1:

Bowser: “That’s a good question. Listen, I’m concerned right now that everybody buckle down and get to work. I’m not concerned about our deal. Our deal is solid. It pays off for D.C. And at the end of the day, I think everybody wants the same thing. So I would put my level of concern, because, you know, when you’re a big city mayor, you’re concerned about everything, I’d put it at a 4.”

Sheehan: “Well, that’s one away from very concerned!”

Bowser: (laughs)

This looks like usual political standoff stuff, where Bowser is trying to bigfoot the council into rushing a Commanders stadium bill in the next two weeks despite all the outstanding questions about it, and Mendelson is saying all in due time. Bowser’s only real leverage is to threaten that Harris could walk away from the deal if it’s not approved promptly — which he could, sure, but he would be insane to do so, given that he has a shot at a record-shattering $7 billion and up in subsidies from D.C., whereas his next best offer from anywhere else is nothing at all, certainly not by July 15.

Though Fox 5 Washington suggests one other (don’t use a football metaphor, don’t use a football metaphor) end run (dammit) that Harris could theoretically attempt:

Speaking with Mendelson yesterday, he did confirm that he has heard talk that the Commanders have a Plan B which may involve going to President Trump and members of Congress to make it happen on time.

It’s unclear whether Mendelson said that before or after he and some other councilmembers had dinner with Commanders execs to discuss the stadium plans. Either way, it would clearly be unprecedented for the federal government to step in and force a city to fund an NFL stadium, but everything is already so far beyond unprecedented — both in terms of what Harris is asking for and what the Trump administration is up to — that nothing would be surprising anymore.

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Ohio governor signs $600m state subsidy bill for Browns stadium, $600m more in city/county cash still pending

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that was anticlimactic: After insisting he was opposed to the state legislature’s plan to pay $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium by using an omni-TIF, Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill to do just that last night, either because he knew any veto would get overridden or because he just didn’t care enough to fight about it. (The state budget bill that DeWine signed also changed the state’s Art Modell Law to no longer prohibit teams from relocating in-state.) The $2.4 billion stadium project in Brook Park is now all set, except for all the ways it isn’t set at all:

  • Former Ohio attorney general Marc Dann and former state representative Jeff Crossman announced plans to file a class action suit against the state borrowing the money from its unclaimed property fund, which Dunn called an “unconscionable, unconstitutional, and blatantly illegal confiscation of Ohioans’ private property.”
  • It’s still unclear what will become of the $600 million in city and county money that Browns owner Jimmy Haslam previously said would be part of the stadium funding, Cleveland19 reports that “the Browns would fund the remaining $1.8B to complete the project, also covering overruns,” while News5Cleveland reports that “they’re looking to taxpayers to cover up to $1.2 billion of the tab for the stadium,” good work, local news teams!

This is a bit of a trend, it seems, state governments ponying up for public cash before local governments have decided on their share: We just saw this happen in Missouri with the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, which got around $1.5 billion combined in state funding last month while awaiting even more money from whichever city and county they end up playing in. The difference with the Browns is that they didn’t even have an offer from another state that Ohio needed to worry about matching — in fact, Haslam had previously said he would stay put in Cleveland if the state turned down his request. There’s bidding against yourself and then there’s bidding against yourself, and Ohio really broke new ground here, good work, local legislators!

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Arizona’s $500m in D-backs stadium subsidies could actually be worth over $600m

access_time personNeil deMause

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the bill on Friday providing state funding for renovations for the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ stadium, after it passed the state senate the previous week, and then celebrated by hugging the team mascot, as one does. Which makes it a good time to ask the question: Exactly how much money are Arizona taxpayers on the hook for under the deal, anyway?

Throughout the process, the public subsidy has mostly been described as capped at $500 million, to be collected from state, county, and city sales taxes on purchases at Chase Field as well as part of the state income taxes paid by D-backs and visiting players. (The Arizona Republic, in a rare moment of candor for a major newspaper, noted that “Right now, those sales and income tax dollars fund government services, everything from road construction to operating K-12 schools.”) But it’s a fuzzy cap — there’s an “inflation adjustment” that allows the $500 million figure to grow over time, potentially to as high as $1 billion:

Caps the total TPT and income tax diversions at $500,000,000 and requires the Maricopa
County Stadium District Treasurer to annually increase the cap by 3 percent beginning in 2027
and until December 31, 2055.

That is a super-weird way of defining a “cap”: Since the tax revenues aren’t all going to pour in at once, it’s entirely possible for the Diamondbacks to stay under the limit until 2055, at which point it will hit $1.143 billion. If we divide that figure up evenly over the 28-year term, that would be $40.8 million a year, for a present value (at a 5% discount rate) of $627 million — meaning if Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick took out a stadium renovation loan at 5%, he could afford to borrow $627 million and the public would pay it off.

That’s not the only way Kendrick could hit the cap, though. Let’s say sales and income tax revenues come in faster than that, at $60 million a year. It would then reach the cap at $692 million in 2038, which would only be about $530 million in present value. Or let’s say tax revenues start at $30 million a year, then rise by 3% a year after that — in that case, they would hit the cap at $958 million in 2049, with the payments over time amounting to a present value of around $566 million.

Or, let’s take the Arizona legislature’s fiscal analysis of the bill, which projects that sales and income tax revenue would amount to just $15.7 million in the first year. If that number only rises by 3% a year, then Arizona gets a bargain: The tax revenue never reaches the cap, and only amounts to $340 million in value. If hot dog prices and player salaries rise faster than that, though, then the public cost goes up again: A 6% a year increase in tax receipts would almost fill the entire cap by 2055, making the public cost in present value again over $600 million.

That’s a whole lot of maybes, and how on earth Kendrick will determine how much money he has available to spend on stadium upgrades is a great question, though he doesn’t really have to decide now: The tax money will be placed in a stadium district fund, which the team will be able to draw on for stadium costs over time. So if Kendrick wants to, say, spend $300 million now on new video boards or food preparation facilities or a retractable roof that reliably retracts, then more later once he sees how much public money can draw on, he can easily do that. (Kendrick has promised to put in $250 million of his own money, too, though he hasn’t promised it in any legally binding way.)

And this, dear readers, is one reason why there’s no central database of stadium subsidies: Figuring out how much public money is actually going to go to sports team owners over the course of a deal can be really, really hard, and may not be clear until several decades down the road. If anyone wants a number to use going forward, it’s probably fair to say that the D-backs subsidy will cost Arizona taxpayers “as much as $600 million” — that’s good enough for government work, no pun intended.

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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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Ohio passes $600m in veto-proof Browns funding, revises Modell Law to allow in-state moves

access_time personNeil deMause

The Ohio legislature indeed passed a budget yesterday that included $600 million of state money for a Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, as promised. But the final vote also shifted the playing field in two significant ways:

  • The votes in each house were by more than 60% supermajorities (23-10 in the senate, 59-39 in the house), meaning that even if Gov. Mike DeWine vetoes the stadium provision, the legislature now has the votes to override it.
  • The budget includes changes to the Art Modell Law prohibiting Ohio teams from moving out of their host cities without permission if they received public stadium money, instead limiting it to a prohibition on teams moving out of state. This would presumably head off any lawsuit against the Browns moving to Brook Park.

This obviously changes things significantly, cutting off the two main avenues for stadium opponents to block Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s plans to relocate to a new domed stadium on Cleveland’s outskirts. But it also raises one new potential problem: By borrowing money from the state’s unclaimed property fund in order to do an end run around Cuyahoga County — which was originally slated to issue bonds, except county executive Chris Ronayne is a Browns move opponent — it could face different legal challenges that the state would be unconstitutionally using private funds without compensation. (SI reports that some former Democratic legislators have already threatened to file such a suit.)

And even with the $600 million in state cash, Haslam would still come up a bit short of the $2.4 billion he’s seeking to build a Brook Park dome. The Browns owner is committed to spending $1.2 billion, the state would provide $600 million by kicking back every tax under the sun collected in and around the stadium site, and the city of Brook Park would supposedly siphon off $422 million in income, parking, and ticket taxes and send it to Haslam for stadium costs. That leaves $178 million that was supposed to come from county hotel and rental car taxes, except, once again, Ronayne is expected to try to block that; it’s possible that Haslam could just cover that portion and be happy with his $1.022 billion in state and city tax money, but all that is as yet uncertain.

But potential new lawsuits and remaining funding holes aside, Haslam’s plan to get Ohio taxpayers to pay him more than a billion dollars to move the Browns from one part of the state to another just took a giant leap forward — even though Haslam said he wouldn’t move his team out of Ohio even if he didn’t get the stadium money. Maybe savvy negotiators don’t need leverage after all? Don’t tell Jerry Reinsdorf, you’ll just give him ideas.

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Residents threaten to block Sacramento soccer stadium tax district without more affordable housing

access_time personNeil deMause

Every so often I’m asked why some cities are able to avoid huge public subsidies for their sports teams while most others pay through the nose, and I point out an important geographic distinction: Most of the “smart” cities are on the West Coast, where for various historical reasons, it’s way easier to get voter referendums on the ballot to constrain the actions of local legislators. That turns out to be pretty huge, as winning over an entire voting populace, while by no means impossible, is a lot trickier than winning over a handful of elected officials — so you get scenarios where team owners have to put up a lot more of their venue costs themselves, as we’ve seen with the San Francisco Giants and Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Kraken.

And now we have one more data point in the “it’s the referendums, stupid” theory, as the $92 million in tax money that the Sacramento city council approved for a new stadium for Sacramento Republic F.C. owners Kevin Nagle and the Wilton Rancheria tribe is now at risk of blowing up thanks to an obscure California law that lets local residents object to special tax districts:

There are currently only two residential buildings in the Railyards: The A.J. Apartments and the Wong Senior Center. Both include affordable housing.

Of the roughly 250 people who live in them, state law requires that if half protest the formation of the railyards’ proposed special tax district, the district can not be created for at least a year.

Residents of the proposed tax-kickback district showed up in force at a city council hearing yesterday, along with representatives of the hotel and food service workers union Unite Here Local 39, to demand more affordable housing as part of any stadium deal. City officials are currently counting and verifying signatures on the objection, a process they say will take up to a week — it doesn’t seem like it should take that long to count to 126, but sure, that’s fine.

Direct democracy laws like these are a bit of a double-edged sword: They give residents a way to override elected officials who aren’t interested in the opinions of their constituents, but they also make it easier for NIMBY types to block things they don’t like, or at least make demands in exchange for not blocking them. (There was a huge battle recently in the Bay Area over the BART transit system wanting to build new housing in its parking lots, which ended with the state legislature giving BART the power to override local zoning on its own property, which was a whole kerfuffle.) How this one plays out remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a stumbling block that doesn’t appear to have been anticipated when the council greenlit the Republic stadium two weeks ago — and one that would be unimaginable in much of the rest of the country.

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Ohio legislature to send $600m Browns subsidy bill to governor, dare him to veto it

access_time personNeil deMause

Good news, everyone! The Ohio state legislature has decided to vote today on a way to pay for $600 million in state costs for a Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, and the solution is: Borrow it from the state’s unclaimed funds account and repay it over time by siphoning off tax revenues collected in and around the stadium.

WKYC-TV describes this as “provid[ing] $600 million for the proposed Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park using unclaimed funds,” which it isn’t really — it’s the same omni-TIF deal as the legislature proposed back in March, just with the initial money being borrowed from the unclaimed property fund. This primarily would get around one major stumbling block in the original plan: The state wanted Cuyahoga County to sell bonds that would be repaid by the omni-TIF, but county executive Chris Ronayne hates the idea of helping the Browns move to Brook Park, so having the state loan itself the money gets around that issue.

That just leaves the bigger stumbling block, which is that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still hates the TIF plan and prefers his own plan to raise sports gambling taxes and use that money instead. The stadium funding package is part of the state budget, but DeWine has the power to make line-item vetoes, and could do so if the legislature passes it today and sends it to his desk.

The main real news here, then, is that it’s finally decision time for DeWine: Shoot down the legislature’s plan to gift Browns owner Jimmy Haslam with $600 million in state tax money in hopes of reviving his alternative plan for gifting Haslam with a different $600 million, or acquiesce in order to get the stadium across the finish line. Either would arguably be terrible ideas — two different state budget analysts have warned that there’s no evidence that Ohio would be able to recoup the money by new spending at the stadium, which makes sense when you consider that it would mostly just be hosting the same events as the Browns’ current stadium, only a few miles to the southwest. There’s also the question of the other $600 million in city and county money that Haslam wants from increased county hotel and rental car taxes and city income, ticket, and parking taxes, but everyone seems to be planning to cross those bridges when they come to them, so: Bring on The Decision 2025: DeWine’s DeLemma!

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A’s hold world’s weirdest groundbreaking in Vegas, actual stadium construction remains TBD

access_time personNeil deMause

The not-yet-Las Vegas Athletics held a groundbreaking for their proposed new $1.75 billion Las Vegas stadium yesterday, and let’s skip right past all the pomp and circumstance and get to the good bit:

You know, groundbreakings are always just media events: Get a bunch of shovels and hard hats, hand them to local dignitaries, snap some photos, and move on. Anybody can have a groundbreaking — former UNLV basketball star Jackie Robinson, for example, staged one in 2014 for his planned $1.4 billion retractable-roof arena project in Las Vegas, and that was the last time any dirt was shoveled on that project, which finally expired quietly in 2023. And I did predict on Friday that Monday’s event would be a Potemkin village of fake construction work, so this wasn’t entirely unforeseen.

And yet! Even I could not have dreamed up John Fisher standing alone on a podium in front of a collection of backhoes that were just props rented for the occasion — plus the actual ground being broken being just some dirt on a table, which made for a super-weird visual. Props (the other kind) to Doug Puppel of the Engineering News-Record for asking about the Bob the Builder cosplay, and to that nameless PR person for answering honestly.

Of course, Fisher holding the world’s most awkward media event is nothing new — the man specializes in awkward — and doesn’t in itself mean that the A’s will follow in Robinson’s footsteps and never do any real construction work. Builders McCarthy Building Companies and Mortensen told KTNV that drilling was set to begin Monday night, and there is a construction schedule of sorts, though it’s just a list of “milestones” to be achieved in each calendar year. So, you know, maybe?

Except there’s still that nagging question of where Fisher will get the money to pay for it. He has produced a letter vowing that he and his family are committed to spending “up to $1.1 billion” on the stadium project while at the same time trying to sell minority shares in the A’s at inflated prices and reportedly trying to sell the San Jose Earthquakes to raise additional cash. That KTNV article was headlined “How will the Athletics pay for their new ballpark? We break down the money,” and this was as far as the breakdown went:

$380 million in already approved state taxpayer funds can be used.

The Fishers have a $300 million loan.

$1.1 billion is expected to be covered by the Fishers.

So we’re still right where we were all along: Fisher has a nine-acre plot of land, dreams of a spherical armadillo, and a $1.1 billion budget hole to fill. And now, a one-day backhoe rental bill to pay.

Dignitaries and near-dignitaries at the groundbreaking mostly insisted on seeing the glass as half full. Nevada assemblymember Steve Yeager told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You always want to see what happens with the economy. But I don’t think we would be having this groundbreaking if this wasn’t going to be a go.” Former Nevada state Sen. Scott Hammond noted that people were initially skeptical that Raiders owner Mark Davis would get his stadium built as well, and predicted that Fisher would find money for his project, though he admitted that funding is “still a work in progress.”

And what did Fisher himself have to say about coming up with the missing money?

“We’ve got a number of people who have committed so far, and we’re continuing to raise capital,” Fisher said. “But this will probably help because people all want to see: is this real? … As the structure comes up, I think people are going to be able to look at it and, you know, sort of say, ‘Wow.’”

One thing we can all agree on: People are going to look back at this entire A’s-to-Vegas process and say, “Wow.”
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PA gov is “worried” about spending state money on Steelers, Eagles stadiums but will “dialog” with them

access_time personNeil deMause

Two headlines from today:

Pennsylvania governor to work with Eagles, Steelers on stadium needs

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro says there will be no state money for sports venues

Yeah, that’s not confusing at all. What did Shapiro actually say?

“I’m very worried about the overall budget,” Shapiro said Sunday ahead of the scheduled NASCAR Cup Series race at the track. “I’m very worried about the overall economic situation given the federal cuts. You want to balance investing in tourism, investing in sports, investing in great arenas and facilities, with making sure that you’re also investing those dollars in things that Pennsylvanians need most.

“I will tell you that we want to make sure the Steelers, we want to make sure the Eagles, and all of our pro teams have outstanding places to play. That are welcoming for fans. That generate revenue. We’re going to continue to dialog with them about what they need and what’s possible.”

That’s noncommittal in the extreme, and exactly the kind of middle-groundism that is de rigueur for elected officials when asked about their stadium subsidy plans: Of course we want to keep the team owners happy, but not if it means spending unnecessary taxpayer dollars. There’s still plenty of wiggle room there to endorse necessary taxpayer dollars, or tax breaks or whatever that can be waved off as not really public money — don’t forget that Pennsylvania was one of the first states to use tax-increment financing to fund stadiums (for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s NFL and MLB teams), leading to the memorable quote, “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”

The news coverage leaves unclear why Shapiro was even talking about the Eagles and Steelers — as noted, he was at a NASCAR event at Pocono Raceway, and was mostly talking about how to potentially bring NASCAR to Philadelphia without undermining the state’s existing NASCAR track before veering into NFL stadium talk. Regardless, he seems to have left at least some of the assembled reporters convinced that he is ruling out state money for football stadiums even while not actually committing to ruling it out, which is some boss level governoring right there.

UPDATE 4:38 pm ET: NBC Sports’ Mike Florio, who ran the article under the second headline above after reading the AP story under the first headline, has gone back and actually watched the video of Shapiro’s interview and realized that he got it completely wrong, though he’s blaming AP for the screwup. In any case, Florio has clarified that Shapiro was asked by a reporter about state money for the Steagles, and ducked the question. Further updates never, hopefully. 

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Field of Schemes