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Bears to Illinois (via ESPN): Give us $2B so we don’t have to move to Indiana

access_time personNeil deMause

ESPN football writer Adam Schefter, who loves his unnamed NFL sources, was back at it yesterday with this tweet about the Chicago Bears and their stadium situation:

None of this really needed to be cited to NFL insiders, since Bears exec Kevin Warren already said basically the same thing last week. (Though it did get Schefter’s name in the national media a lot as a “senior NFL Insider,” if that floats his boat.) What does any of it actually mean, though, if anything?

Most sports team move threats, historically, are bluffs. That’s not because team owners are pathological liars — not all of them, anyway — but because threats are so easy to levy, there’s virtually no cost to them: If you hint that your team is going to move without a new stadium, and then come back the next year and repeat the exact same threat, it’s not like anybody’s going to call you on it. And better yet, if you can get local elected officials to issue relocation warnings by proxy, no one can even connect you with the threat in the first place.

In the Bears case, all this “Illinois is on the clock or else we’ll move the team to Indiana” should make one thing eminently clear: Bears owner George McCaskey would rather not move his team to Indiana. If he did, he’d already have accepted that state’s $4 billion-ish stadium subsidy offer, because there’s no way Illinois is ever going to match it. If Bears leadership is still dangling the hope of reconciliation before the Illinois legislature, it can only because he is hoping state officials will enrich their offer for an Arlington Heights stadium, and he can stay in his preferred state while getting Illinois taxpayers to cover part of his new stadium bill.

(Another thought: It’s possible that part of the message NFL officials mean to send via Schefter is that a new stadium in Chicago is 100% off the table — even if Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to insist otherwise — and so Chicago-area legislators should get over their upset at the Bears leaving the city proper and rally around legislation to at least keep the team in the state.)

How much money will Illinois have to come up with to turn McCaskey’s head? That’s unknown: He clearly wants the state to pass the “megaprojects” bill that could give him up to $2 billion in property tax breaks; it remains to be seen whether he’ll also hold out for the $855 million in infrastructure spending that Bears management previously floated. If McCaskey doesn’t get what he wants by the time the Illinois legislature adjourns in May, he’ll have to decide whether to take Indiana’s offer or send Warren to pull a David Samson and go back with one more “this time, we’re really moving if you do give us what you want” threat. Playing chicken is hard — though when the choice is between which multibillion-dollar check to accept, maybe not all that hard.

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Commanders try to hide ginormous stadium parking garages by drawing them as shorter and translucent

access_time personNeil deMause

What to do when your stadium plan includes two ginormous ugly parking garages, and you don’t want anyone to notice this fact before approving $6.6 billion in subsidies for it? If you’re Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, you simply direct your rendering artists to make the garages translucent:

What caught fans’ eye was that the parking deck nearest to the Anacostia River — but poking into the stadium view — looked translucent in the concept sketches (see below), masking its real-world impact.

[National Capital Planning Commission] Commissioners requested fuller renderings of that. “I have rarely, if ever, seen a beautiful parking facility,” said NCPC chair Will Scharf.

We spend so much time LOLing at the dumbness of vaportecture renderings here that it’s easy to forget that they serve a purpose: to show the planned project in the best possible light so those with the checkbooks will ooh and aah over it. And often that light is literal, as with the Commanders stadium, which in the above images glows with a spooky inner luminescence while the rest of D.C. is cast into darkness, except for the Capitol dome and Washington Monument, which are a blazing white but also don’t appear to be drawn to scale anyway, given that in reality the Capitol is over half as tall as the monument, as well as significantly closer. The boldest choice, though, is certainly that translucent parking garage, which indeed makes the stadium look better but also raises immediate questions like “Why do the garages look so short if they’re actually going to be two-thirds the height of the stadium?’ and “What translucent construction material will they use?” and “Will the garage be limited to translucent fans driving translucent cars?”

The National Capital Planning Commission still signed off on the Commanders stadium designs, but only because the garages are being developed separately and will be submitted to the commission at a later date. At least one commissioner, Tammy Stidham, a National Park Service lands and planning director, was puzzled by this, asking: “Help me understand why we’re not seeing the development of those [garages] with the stadium package. They don’t have independent utility. They would not be there if you were not building a stadium.”

In fact, the garages wouldn’t be there if Harris weren’t building a huge mixed-use development around a stadium — without that, he could just leave open-air lots like RFK Stadium used on the site, but then he would be missing out on the billions in tax and land breaks that he’s set to receive for the rest of the development. So the garages are pretty key, and “make them shorter and more spread out” doesn’t work if the rest of the land is to be used for other Harris-enriching activities. One local resident suggested instead scaling back on parking and increasing the capacity of the local Metro station or adding a new one, neither of which are bad ideas but both of which would add tremendous public costs to what’s already set to be the biggest public cost ever for a privately used sports stadium. Many, many questions that should be answered before the money is signed off on … well, at least before the stadiums are approved … hrm. Before the sun burns out, is that too much to ask?

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Friday roundup: Has Cleveland’s mayor actually found a way to make Guardians and Cavs owners help pay for own repair costs?

access_time personNeil deMause

No time for a lengthy roundup intro today, I’m too busy catching up with the latest problems resulting from sending Microsoft Outlook into space. Plenty of juicy bullet points, though, you can dig into those right now:

  • Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb is proposing establishing sales tax surcharge of up to 5% in and around the Guardians‘ stadium and Cavaliers‘ arena to help fund what could be $400 million in ongoing repairs and upgrades at the venues, expenses the city’s sports authority is required to cover under the teams’ leases but which it has no money for. Cleveland.com describes this as “Cavs and Guardians fans footing the bill,” but actually a lot of this could fall on the team owners, as fans are unlikely to put up with higher prices on tickets (or, to a somewhat lesser degree, hot dogs or souvenirs) just because taxes went up. One catch: Any “New Community Authority” would require any property owners to agree to join and be subject to the tax; the stadium and arena are owned by the sports authority, though, so it’s at least possible Bibb could force this on the teams over their objections. Lots of team prepare for such backdoor funding attempts by inserting “no ticket tax surcharge” clauses into their leases — I’m not spotting any in the Cavs and Guardians leases on an initial look, but feel free to search for yourselves.
  • NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell turned up the heat on the Chicago Bears stadium situation on Tuesday, declaring: “They need to find a solution for a stadium. … I think it’s really important that they come to a resolution on this relatively soon. … This is an important time to get this resolved sooner rather than later.” Okay, that’s less “heat” than “typical commissioner whingeing,” no reason to report on this as upping the pressure in any real oh come on, NBC Chicago.
  • Predatory lending tycoon Tom Dundon has been approved as the new owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, and he was not pleased at all that one of the first questions he got was why he hasn’t committed any of his own money toward an arena renovation that the team is seeking $600 million in public subsidies for. “No one’s ever told me I didn’t have skin in the game before,” snapped Dundon. “We don’t know each other very well. So, look, we’re going to negotiate and do a market deal.” Easy for him to say since he’s already landed the first $365 million in state funding, but at least maybe this will give local legislators a bit more backbone as they negotiating the remaining $235 million — especially since minority owner and venture capital succubus Sheel Tyle declared, “I don’t want people to be concerned or scared. We are committed to Portland, 100 percent. Full stop.” Somebody please alert Ron Wyden.
  • The Maryland legislature has killed legislation for the 2026 session to spend $217 million in public money on a stadium to host new Baltimore men’s and women’s soccer teams, partly because there’s community opposition to building it atop a public golf course that was the site of some of the first integration of the city’s public facilities. “When we introduced the legislation, the purpose was not to get it funded,” bill sponsor state Sen. Antonio Hayes told the Baltimore Banner, “the purpose was to keep the conversation going” — so you can rest assured we’ll hear about this again in the 2027 session.
  • Denver Broncos owner Greg Penner says he won’t be able to meet an “ambitious” 2031 target date for opening a new stadium without help from “a lot of key partners at the city level [and] at state level.” In particular, Penner still needs to finish acquiring land for the stadium — he said if the new stadium isn’t ready by 2031 he could just extend his lease at the old one, so it’s not clear why anyone would feel pressured by this deadline other than him, but this is just how team owners roll.
  • The Missouri legislature is considering cutting $2 million from its stadium maintenance budget and redirecting it to a fire department program in retaliation for the Kansas City Chiefs announcing they’ll move to Kansas in 2031 — though in the meantime, it would also reduce maintenance spending on the Royals stadium as well, assuming the Royals stick around.
  • World Cup participant countries typically get tax exemptions during their teams’ time spent in the host nation, but because Trump administration is only extending that courtesy to nations that have signed specific double-taxation agreements with the U.S., “It’s going to cost most non-European countries a lot of money to go to the World Cup” this summer, says tax consultant Oriana Morrison. And that’s before visiting fans pony up for the inflated cost of train tickets to the games in Massachusetts. Props to both the federal and local governments for finding ways to claw back some of the costs of hosting the World Cup, I guess, though taking it from the pockets of Haitians seems just slightly cruel and unusual.
  • Inglewood is spending $8.5 million to “revitalize” its downtown so that it’s more lively in advance of the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Summer Olympics, hey wait, weren’t Super Bowls and Olympics supposed to revitalize their surroundings? U.S. news media, we await your corrections.
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Buccaneers owners say if Rays are set to get public stadium money, it’s time they should too

access_time personNeil deMause

The Hillsborough County Commission voted yesterday to ask the county attorney whether paying almost half a billion dollars toward a Tampa Bay Rays stadium with a county sales tax that voters were promised wouldn’t be used for stadiums would be legal, and an answer is expected back by the commission’s next meeting on April 15. The commission also rejected a motion by Commissioner Joshua Wostal to release all internal documents on the proposed Rays project, instead voting to hold a public “workshop” once the details of a deal are finalized.

Meanwhile, though, Tampa area officials have another potential billion-dollar-plus fish to fry, as Buccaneers owners the Glazer family have decided this is a perfect time to remind the city and county that they would like a freshened-up stadium too, and would like public dollars to make it so:

[Tampa] Sports Authority CEO Eric Hart said at a board meeting Tuesday that the Bucs requested a meeting to get started.

Board member Tony Muniz asked if Hart had a ballpark estimate of how much public funding the Bucs may be seeking, though he guessed it would be in the hundreds of millions.

“It’s a significant number on these stadiums,” Hart said. “What that number looks like, I don’t know.”

Hart then pointed to other teams like the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills whose owners have gotten public money in excess of $1 billion for new stadiums, as well as the Jacksonville Jaguars, where owner Shad Khan is getting $775 million in taxpayer money toward $1.4 billion in renovations, as examples. “Look around the country and you can see what’s happening around in these arenas and the kind of money it’s taken to keep them state-of-the-art,” Hart said. “They’re significant, but they’re also big economic engines.” (Citation needed.)

There’s a deadline coming up of sorts for the Bucs, who must decide by the end of January 2027 whether to extend their lease for five more years beyond its current termination date of the end of the 2027 season. That’s really more pressure on the Glazers than on Tampa, since if they don’t extend their lease they’ll have nowhere to play in 2028 — it’s not like they’d be able to get a state-of-the-art stadium built elsewhere in a year and a half — but feel free to start the betting pool now for the date of the first article describing this as a looming deadline for Tampa area officials to “resolve the Bucs’ stadium issues.”

Tampa City Council chair and Sports Authority board member Alan Clendenin, at least, seemed to take the news of fresh Bucs stadium demands in stride:

“We’re talking about a baseball stadium and substantially more activation and enormous footprint of other economic development opportunities that didn’t exist,” Clendenin said. “And we actually have a team established in the Tampa Bay area, not one that’s threatening to leave.”

Clendenin said the sports authority sits in the “captain’s seat” and should maintain RayJay to keep it competitive. But he said the agency is not in the same position it was when it was first negotiating with the Glazers and the Bucs.

“You also don’t have to bend over and take it like the first deal,” he said to laughs Tuesday.

That’s promising in terms of at least one local elected seeming to have determined that the city has some leverage here, at least as much as any statement saying maybe this stadium deal will be better than a rape can be considered promising.

Anyway, this should all be a lesson that if you give public money to one local sports billionaire, the others will be quick to … I was going to say “me too,” but maybe in light of Clendenin’s metaphor that’s not the best.

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Eagles owner says decision on where team plays won’t be made on “a geographical basis”

access_time personNeil deMause

When the Philadelphia Eagles broke ground on their new publicly funded stadium 25 years ago, team owner Jeffrey Lurie exulted, “For the first time in the 68-year history of the Philadelphia Eagles franchise, we will have our own stadium. No longer will we be a secondary tenant.” Having your own place loses its luster once the new car smell is gone, though, so of course Lurie has spent the last year or so pondering when it’ll be time to get a new one. And with his 30-year lease expiring after 2032, Lurie seems to have decided that that time is soon, and the best way to get a really shiny one with lots of other people money is to get a good old-fashioned move threat going:

Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said Wednesday in his annual news conference at the league meetings that he “would hope in the next year or two, we’ll have some more definitive approach to where we’re going.”

Where we’re going? Are you threatening to move the Eagles, Jeff?

“It’s a long process. When we researched Lincoln Financial Field, it probably took us… 2-3 years of exploratory research,” Lurie said. “Now, our exploratory research is very much on looking at stadiums around the world and domestically. Is there anything we can learn from Nashville and Buffalo? Is there anything we can learn from the renovations in Madrid and Barcelona? It’s really important. We want to maximize fan amenities and attract the best possible environment for Philadelphia. And to do that, you’ve really got to do the exploratory research. Don’t rush into it. This is a big decision. Where’s the team going to be?”

And what will be the basis of this decision, pray tell?

“Whatever’s best for the fans,” Lurie said. “We’re not really (going) on a geographical basis. It’s whatever’s best for the fans. I can’t tell you where (Cleveland’s new stadium) is, Barcelona is, I don’t know. It’s just, honestly, the bottom line is whatever is best for the fans.”

It’s just a little weird that Lurie keeps referencing F.C. Barcelona‘s renovation of one of the most famous soccer stadiums in the world, which is of course in Barcelona, but I guess geography isn’t everyone’s thing.

Lurie didn’t actually say whether he would move the Eagles out of Philadelphia proper — and he did mention that extending his current lease beyond 2032 is possible, so he’s not entirely in hardball threat mode. But it’s still hard to believe he didn’t at least intend to drop a move outside of Philly as a hint. And NJ.com picked right up on it, asserting that “moving to New Jersey or Delaware remains a possibility,” citing no sources at all.

It should be no surprise that Lurie at least wants to plant the idea of a possible move outside Philadelphia proper in local officials’ heads, especially after the Kansas City Chiefs and Chicago Bears owners’ stadium subsidy demands got shot down until they created interstate bidding wars — as did, closer to home, the Philadelphia 76ers‘ dalliance with New Jersey. If his next public statement is “Delaware? I haven’t even heard of that, is it a place? Do they like football there?” then we’ll know the game’s truly afoot.

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Hillsborough official says Rays stadium will fail unless it uses tax money Hillsborough officials said wouldn’t be used for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Hillsborough County Commission has a hearing today on the proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium, and while this won’t be the final vote on the project — those are a couple of weeks away at least — it could involve one of the most important ones. That’s because one commissioner, Gwen Myers, is introducing a motion to ask the county attorney’s office if $467 million from the county’s 0.5% sales tax surcharge can be used toward the stadium, despite promises when it was passed that it would not be:

Voters approved extending the tax, which renews in December 2026 and runs into 2041, by a narrow margin after most of the current commissioners said it should be off-limits to new sports stadiums.

Commissioner Ken Hagan, who first introduced the tax as a potential funding source in February through a framework document prepared by his office, has said talks would fail without it.

“This agreement does not happen without the (tax),” he said. “It just doesn’t.”

(That’d be Ken Hagan, seen here in one of the totally impartial images on his reelection website.)

[Ed. note: It looks like Hagan actually made the “agreement does not happen without” the tax comment back in February, though the TB Times didn’t mention that in its report this week. Thanks to the Facebook commenter who pointed this out.)

At least three of the seven commission members — Myers, Joshua Wostal, and Chris Boles, all of whom argued in the run-up to the sales tax referendum that it couldn’t be used for stadiums — have raised questions about using Community Investment Tax money for the Rays, meaning this thing has a chance of passage if it can muster just one more vote. At that point, it would be up to the county attorney to determine not so much whether the county commissioners can call a backsies — it doesn’t appear from here like their comments during the 2024 ballot measure were legally binding — as whether the referendum language that the money could be used to “fund infrastructure for transportation and public works, public safety, public facilities, public utilities and public schools” would allow for a publicly owned, but privately used, baseball stadium.

Over on the Tampa city side, meanwhile, city council chair Alan Clendenin says there are still a pile of t’s to be crossed and i’s to be dotted in the rest of the deal as well:

Clendenin, who is a member of the Tampa Sports Authority, said at the agency’s meeting Tuesday that “it’s not even put to pencil at this point.” The city and county have forecast possible votes on an agreement April 15 and 16, respectively.

“It’s still all in flux. They’re still negotiating everything,” Clendenin said. “There’s still some very consequential items to be resolved.”

Clendenin didn’t go into detail about everything that’s still up in the air, but did say “we’re probably 80% there.” One item the council is still waiting on is an economic impact analysis due later this week from AECOM, an engineering consultant that has a pretty bad record on projecting economic impact — including being asked to determine the annual impact of a Buffalo Bills stadium and just adding up all the money spent on Bills games currently, even though none of that would be new if the team moved across the street, and not all of it would be lost if the team moved away and locals spent their entertainment dollars on something else. But the council is going to at least wait for their clown document before voting to fund a stadium, so yay due diligence or something?

Clendenin also said the city is waiting to see if the state legislature will approve state money for transportation work around the stadium. And both the subhead and the photo caption on Colleen Wright’s story in the Tampa Bay Times say that there are questions whether an upcoming vote on a memorandum of understanding with the team would be legally binding or not, though it looks like this information was cut from the story itself, hey, Tampa Bay Times, you know it doesn’t cost more to run more words on the internet, right?

Add it all up, and Rays owner Patrick Zalupski still has a bunch more hurdles to get past before he can tap $2.25 billion in public subsidies for a new $2.3 billion stadium on the site of a public community college campus. Which, put that way, he absolutely should have to, but “elected officials want to think for a minute before approving billions of dollars for billionaire” is genuine news these days, sorry for the universe we live in.

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Friends don’t let friends listen to what comes out of sports team owners’ mouths

access_time personNeil deMause

Imagine you’re a wealthy sports team owner in the middle of trying to strike a stadium deal. (You go get your top hat, monocle, and snifter of cognac; I’ll wait here.) What is the best thing to say in a public statement, on the occasions it seems necessary to deign to speak directly to the public? You don’t want to make the task at hand seem impossible, because that could be interpreted as a loss of momentum for your demands; but at the same time, you don’t want to make it seem a sure thing, because that could take the pressure off elected officials to grant you the bags of cash/tax breaks until the sun burns out/land grants from here to the distant shore that you so desire. How to thread that needle?

Let’s see how some actual sports team execs do it! Contestant #1:

“It’s always been my experience when you’re doing important work, it’s not easy,” [Kansas City Royals owner John] Sherman said. “It shouldn’t be easy, and these are complicated processes. Public-private partnerships, multi-jurisdictional, dealing with multiple entities as well. But I think we’re making progress. I’m as anxious as anybody to get this behind us.”…

“We’ve got a little bit of a cushion, but not a big one,” Sherman said. “It’s time to get on with it.”

This is pretty much the same as Sherman said last month, when he described the lack of a finalized stadium deal as “from the governor on down, there’s a lot of effort being put forth” but also “when you have a window of opportunity, you better run through it because those windows close.” You’ll also note the Sherman avoided mentioning what the holdups are, or when some decisions might be reached — to date, Sherman hasn’t even identified a site or sites where he might want a stadium built, but that’s a double-edged sword, since the more you narrow down your options the fewer potential bidders you have. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, or at least nothing in a lot of words, and hope that the media wanders off and pressures elected officials for some action instead.

(Sherman also got in a statement about how much he liked the Atlanta Braves‘ Battery stadium district when he visited this past week for opening day, because “there were bands playing” and “tons of people around.”)

Contestant #2:

“We’re confident that [the $600 million is] going to come through and obviously we’re starting a stadium,” [Cleveland Browns co-owner Dee Haslam said. “We’re building a stadium. So we’re full steam ahead, but we’re pretty confident. I mean, they’ve done it in the past for economic development and this definitely fits into that criteria.”

This is in reference, of course, to the $600 million that the state of Ohio promised to give the Browns owners last summer, yet which is being held up by lawsuits over whether the state can legally use unclaimed private funds to supply the cash. Dee and Jimmy Haslam are already moving dirt for the stadium and have an official groundbreaking set for April 30, so they have to be at least a little bit antsy about how to pay the construction companies. Nothing they say is likely to sway the courts, though, so they best they can do is express confidence in the system of “economic development,” which is that governments give a lot of public money to “job creators,” and then some number of jobs are created, or not.

And contestant #3, who is not strictly a team owner but plays one in the press conferences:

“We have the legislation passed in Indiana, and they’ve been a great partner to work with,” [Chicago Bears] president Kevin Warren said. “We are going through legitimate due diligence because we have working through traffic, and construction items, and transportation and all those kinds of different things. It’s progressing right on pace.

“Illinois, they’re still working on legislation and we have a wonderful piece of land in Arlington Heights — 326 acres. So we don’t have a set deadline, but I am confident that sometime this spring/summer, we’ll know.”

“We’ll know” is a strange way of saying “We’ll make a decision that is entirely up to us,” though less so if you take it as “We’ll see what offers we have on the table, and then we can decide which one should make us the filthiest rich.” As discussed here last week, Bears owner George McCaskey doesn’t have any pressing reason to make a decision before the Illinois legislature adjourned at the end of May, so we can expect another two months of kicking the can down the road while hoping that Illinois will match or even raise Indiana’s bid. (Or at least come close: It’s always possible that McCaskey would take a lesser deal to stay in the state where most of his team’s fan base is, though if so he’s sure never going to admit it.) “I am confident that sometime this spring/summer” there will be a Bears stadium decision is an especially clever turn of phrase, given that it sets an expected deadline without actually setting a deadline deadline that anyone can hold Warren to in case circumstances change over the next two months.

What did we learn from all this? Not much in terms of the actual state of stadium talks for the Royals, Browns, or Bears, which is why it’s almost certainly bad journalistic practice for the news media to start transcribing every time the local sports team owner opens their mouth. Ask questions about the stadium deal process? Absolutely. Run an article when the owner says something newsworthy? Sure. Give the local rich guy or gal unlimited column inches to spin the situation however they like, instead of going out and investigating what’s actually being discussed or what experts have to say about whether it’s a good idea? This is maybe not what you spent $130,000 on that journalism degree for.

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Maryland Gov. Moore facing 2027 deadline to okay Orioles development deal or face early lease exit, thanks to Maryland Gov. Moore

access_time personNeil deMause

If you can remember as far back as two winters ago, then-Baltimore Orioles owners the Angelos family agreed to sign a 30-year lease extension for Camden Yards in exchange for $600 million (or more) in state money for stadium renovations. The new lease had an out clause, though: If the Orioles owners can’t agree with the state on a development agreement around the stadium by the end of 2027, they can break the lease after just 15 years. As I wrote at the time:

What’s left now is for the state and Angelos to negotiate the development agreement, but [Maryland Gov. Wes] Moore has effectively tied his own hands in those talks, since if he doesn’t agree to what the O’s owner wants, Angelos can spend his $600 million and then walk. Or, more likely, spend the $600 million and then demand more in about a decade, since he’ll be able to point to his expiring lease.

The end of 2027 is getting ever closer, and for the Orioles owner — now private equity goon David Rubenstein, who bought the team from the Angelos family in 2024 — the above scenario is becoming ever more real:

Catie Griggs, president of business operations for the Orioles, said this week the priority for the club and the Maryland Stadium Authority was to complete the upgrades to the ballpark this winter.

“What I will tell you is MSA has been an incredible partner throughout the process of getting this done,” Griggs said, “so I have full confidence that as we enter the season to sort of pick our heads up to look around again, that they will continue to be great partners.”

That sounds like a … backhanded compliment? Veiled threat? One of those?

Early indications were that the development agreement could amount to a whole lot of extra free money for Rubinstein — as much as $7.1 million a year in new revenues just from taking over the historic warehouse in right field for 99 years, in exchange for less than $1 million a year in rent. And Rubinstein has the hammer in the form of that 15-year out clause, though I suppose Gov. Moore could be equally hard-nosed and say he’ll pull out of the entire development deal if it’s too rich for Maryland taxpayers’ blood, damn the extra 15 years of stadium lease. That could work, just so long as he doesn’t first … oh noooooooooo:

“The thing that we know is that we’re completely aligned on this being the long-term home of [the] Baltimore Orioles,” Moore said of the priorities for the city, state and team owners. “That was a key priority for me. Gone are the days when we were doing one-year deals and two-year deals. I would only accept a long-term deal because we need to have certainty for downtown Baltimore and certainty for the Baltimore Orioles, and I’m grateful that, with this new leadership team, we got that.”

Yup, Wes Moore is very, very bad at this.

If you want to learn more about how the Orioles stadium came to be, meanwhile, student journalists at the University of Maryland have put together a website with a bunch of videos that claim to be the “most complete telling of the Camden Yards story.” I haven’t watched it yet, because I’ve already read (several times) an extremely comprehensive story of the making of Camden Yards. But admittedly that didn’t include hour-long video clips of Edward Bennett Williams testifying, so if you have a ton of time and an enjoyment of YouTube, neither of which describes me, it may be fun to poke around in.

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Friday roundup: Can the Home Team Act save your home team, and other pressing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Let’s get this out of the way, since it’s blowing up on the socials: Yes, Sen. Bernie Sanders and another less famous guy (Rep. Greg Casar, a second-term representative from Austin and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus) yesterday introduced a “Home Team Act” that would require sports team owners to give one year of notice before moving or terminating a team — and also give local buyers the right to purchase the team “at a fair and reasonable price” first, with the price determined by a team of appraisers appointed by the Treasury Department. According to the bill, either private buyers or local governments themselves would be eligible to purchase the team, and any owners who jumped the gun would be subject to a $30,000-a-day penalty.

Removing team owners’ ability to threaten to yank a city’s team away if they aren’t bestowed with public subsidies would indeed be a huge step toward ending stadium shakedowns. And it’s justifiable on a couple of grounds: Not only do teams owe their livelihood to the local fan base, but leagues also routinely use their monopoly power to deny teams to cities if they, say, have one in the next state over, or just out of spite.

At the same time, though, there are plenty of questions about this bill. First off, this is Congress we’re talking about, which has not exactly shown the backbone to stand up to the sports industry — even Sanders and Casar, notes the Chicago Tribune, “acknowledge the legislation won’t get passed quickly, if at all.” The bit about governments being allowed to purchase teams could be dicey, given that leagues currently have the power to reject public ownership, or, for that matter, even private buyers they don’t like. And in terms of enforcement, a $30,000-a-day penalty only amounts to $11 million over an entire year, and no sports team owner is going to let a crappy $11 million stand in the way of moving wherever they damn well please, or at least threatening to in order to extract money from the public treasury. (Local governments could also seek “injunctive and monetary relief,” so presumably judges would have the power to impose harsher penalties, if they saw fit.)

Basically, once this has more than two co-sponsors, then we can start taking it more seriously. Until then, it goes next to David Minge’s Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act as proof of concept that our elected representatives could be doing more to stop the flow of tax dollars to extortionate billionaires, they just don’t want to.

Other pressing questions from the week that just was:

  • Could there be some speed bumps for the Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan and its $2.25 billion in public cash, land, and tax breaks after all? Hillsborough County Commissioner Josh Wostal is demanding that the county and the Tampa Sports Authority release “all draft documents and personal notes” about the deal before a hearing is held next Wednesday — and further says if no public hearings are held before a scheduled April 15 vote, he’ll move to postpone it. “People at a minimum deserve transparency,” said Wostal. “And we are playing hide the ball?“ No word yet on whether others on the commission will support such a wild-eyed radical position as wanting to talk about what’s being voted on before a vote, but people are arguing on the internet about the Rays deal, and in particular its potential use of infrastructure money that elected officials previously pledged wouldn’t go to stadiums, so that’s a start, perhaps.
  • Will the Ohio state legislature add $45 million in road and transit upgrades around the Cleveland Browns‘ new stadium to the $600 million in state money they’ve already promised owner Jimmy Haslam for construction costs? We won’t know until they revote on April 23 following a public comment period, but given the committee that can authorize such spending unanimously passed it the first time: probably.
  • What about Haslam’s demand for $50 million in city and county money for a stadium for a Columbus women’s soccer team, will he get that too? Five out of nine city councilmembers say they’re opposed, the other four say they need more information, more lobbying is clearly needed.
  • Will the new Oklahoma City Thunder arena end up costing taxpayers there more than the $850 million they approved back in 2023? Possibly, says assistant city manager Brent Bryant, who explained that given “economic uncertainty,” the city will “add a factor to that on top of the anticipated cost, to try to plan for that.” What does that mean? Sorry, only one question per bullet point!
  • Is prospective new Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon “a go-getter” with “enormous passion and spirit,” like NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he was on Wednesday, or a predatory lender who got rich by letting people take out high-interest car loans that they would inevitably default on, like Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica reported earlier that morning? Nothing saying it can’t be both!
  • As Anaheim officials push for the Los Angeles Angels to restore “Anaheim” to the team name, could team owner Arte Moreno or the 80-year-old’s eventual successors move the team to Los Angeles County? The L.A. Times’ Bill Shaikin writes that “the logical landing spot would be Inglewood,” only to have Inglewood Mayor James Butts tell him, “We’re maxed out when it comes to sports. We are not going to reduce the housing stock and move residents out to have a baseball team.” Welp, that’s unfortunate, but the column’s already written, too late to go back and choose a new topic!
  • Does the city of L.A. know what year the 2028 Olympics will be held? Possibly not!
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Sabres exec says team deserves up to $400m in state cash because of “all this going on at the arena”

access_time personNeil deMause

Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula, fresh off getting over a billion dollars in state and county money for a new stadium for his Bills NFL team, has already hired a lobbyist to seek public money for a $400 million renovation of the arena his hockey team plays in. And Pegula got some good omens today from the Buffalo News, which reported that all the foot traffic Sabres generate downtown is a huge boon to Buffalo, according to, oh come on, you knew it was coming:

“All this going on at the arena helps,” [Sabres head of business operations Pete] Guelli said. “The arena is the anchor for downtown, and the Sabres are the primary tenant, so those two properties have to operate at a high level and at some point, there needs to be a long-term solution.”

“Sabres exec says team deserves up to $400m in state cash because of ‘all this going on at the arena'” would have been a less sexy headline than “Downtown foot traffic from KeyBank Center a boon for Sabres in lease talks,” I guess? Google Analytics will tell me soon enough, but it does have the advantage of being true, if that still matters anymore.

Weirdly, Guelli actually makes a great case against the Sabres (and the Pegula-owned pro indoor lacrosse Bandits) being the key “anchor” to downtown, given that he notes the Buffalo arena went from hosting 140 events in 2024 to 178 in 2025, with close to 200 expected in 2026. The Sabres still only play the same 41 regular season home games a year (though a few more are added when they make the playoffs, which they should finally this year for the first time in human memory) and the Bandits nine, so the vast majority of events at the arena are taking place with or without the teams. The NHL Draft will be held there this year, and that wouldn’t happen without the Sabres, but also it’s not going to happen there more than once a decade or so regardless, so that’s small potatoes. Overall, the 30-year-old arena seems to be doing great, which undercuts the idea that it’s somehow decrepit and in desperate need of an overhaul.

There’s also the issue that most of these events draw mostly locals, so this is largely money that would be spent regardless, if not necessarily in downtown Buffalo, somewhere in Erie County or at least New York state. So at the very least it makes more sense for the city to put money into it than the state, which would only be moving spending around with no gain—

The county owns the arena building, while Buffalo owns the property it sits on. County officials would like to get out of the arena business and could do so during the new lease negotiations, which may bring the state increasingly into the fold.

Sigh. Gov. Kathy Hochul is a Buffalo native and has already shown herself to be inclined to shovel state money at Buffalo business interests — see the Bills, above. We’ll see if the state legislature feels the same way, if she even gives them a chance to discuss it this time.

None of which is to say that upgrading the arena is a bad idea, necessarily, or that its public owners — whichever level of government ends up getting stuck with the deed — shouldn’t be involved. If a renovation really would generate even more arena business, though, government should be able to negotiate a cut of that for taxpayers, whether it’s in terms of arena revenues or lease payments or what. The Sabres currently pay no rent or ticket taxes on the arena, or property taxes for that matter, so there’s lots of room for improvement in that regard. What say you on that, Mr. Sabres Head of Business Operations — whoops, he’s off already, guess we’ll have to wait and see if the Buffalo News asks him about it next time, LOL.

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