Search Results for: Feds: Soldier Field landmark no more

Cleveland mayor wants new taxes to fund Cavs, Guardians upgrades to avoid using old taxes to do so

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s candidate for weirdest headline, from yesterday at Cleveland.com:

Bibb to Cavs and Guardians: No more bailouts until there’s a new game plan to fund stadium repairs

So once the Cavaliers and Guardians owners agree to a new way to fund stadium repairs, then Mayor Justin Bibb will agree to bailouts? Wha? Let’s read further:

Bibb told reporters at a recent news conference that he wants to create a special financing district that could collect small fees on parking, dining and entertainment in the Gateway District. The mayor said it’s a “practical, pragmatic” way to generate revenue to help maintain Progressive Field and Rocket Arena.

“Fees” on parking, dining, and entertainment are more commonly known as “sales tax surcharges,” and applying these to the entirety of the Gateway District — which includes not just the Cavs arena and Guardians stadium, but a bunch of malls and restaurants and other attractions — would represent additional tax money that locals and tourists alike would have to pay toward maintaining and upgrading the teams’ venues. That’s in one way better than the city having to scrounge around every couple of years for more cash to spend on upkeep, but in another way worse in that the city would be implementing a new tax to funnel upgrade money to the team owners ad infinitum, presumably even after the expiration of the current leases (2034 for the Cavs, 2036 for the Guardians) during which the city took over major capital repairs for the teams in exchange for them agreeing to stay put a few more years.

If the Cavs and Guardians aren’t ready to pursue new revenue streams, Bibb said City Hall won’t approve another bailout.

“I made it clear to the teams,” Bibb said. “I’m not tapping the general revenue fund until we look at these other concepts.”

“Take my tax money or I won’t give you any more tax money” is a novel approach, I’ll grant you that. Bibb says using surcharges in a New Community Authority, or NCA, would “shift the cost of stadium repairs away from residents and toward visitors who attend games and dine nearby,” but 1) residents go to see Cavs and Guardians games, that’s exactly who Cavs and Guardians fans are, and 2) even if this were all tourist money, it’s still tax money that the city could choose to collect and keep, but would instead be turning over to the team owners. (Cleveland currently has a similar taxing district on the lakefront, but that’s designated for building public spaces, at least, not for upgrades to privately controlled sports venues.)

One weird twist about Ohio NCAs is that property owners have to opt in to them, so it’s entirely possible all the landholders whose restaurants and malls would get newly tax-surcharged could tell the city to pound sand and there would be no new revenue at all. (The stadium and arena are co-owned by the city and the county; it’s an interesting question if the Cavs and Guardians, as tenants, could opt out of being taxed to fund their own upgrades.) Cleveland.com theorizes that “business owners would support it because the Cavs and Guardians drive foot traffic that keeps the Gateway District lively,” but that presupposes that 1) business owners will assume the Cavs and Guardians will leave without new taxes, despite those leases being in place for another decade and 2) they think game-day foot traffic is valuable enough to be worth getting saddled with as much as a 5% tax hike.

All this is coming to a head because the cigarette and alcohol taxes that were originally used to pay for the Gateway venues and later extended to pay for upgrades are coming up short of what the teams want, and local voters are currently so steamed by the Browns moving to suburban Brook Park that they may not approve a renewal of those taxes anyway. Mayor Bibb is also famously steamed about the Browns moving, or at least was until Browns owner Jimmy Haslam agreed to make $80 million worth of payments to his city, but he’s stuck with those leases for the near future, and would rather raise taxes just in the sports district than on all of Cleveland.

Even if it’s public money either way, you can kind of see where Bibb is coming from. Or you could point out that the whole Gateway complex was pitched as economic development that would pay for itself but instead is requiring ever-higher levels of public subsidies, and there’s a time to stop throwing good money after bad. At this point it would probably require breaching the teams’ leases and letting them walk if they want, but since neither has any great immediate options for relocation (Brook Park isn’t going to build two stadiums) and they can walk in another 9-to-11 years anyway, there’s an argument to be made for calling their bluff now and seeing what their owners do once the subsidy faucet is shut off.

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Sportswriters alarmed as Bears again do not get $1B in tax money toward new stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Illinois legislature adjourned Friday without approving any Chicago Bears stadium bills, and people be reacting:

  • Phil Rogers, writing as a Forbes “contributor,” reports that “the wait goes on as the team tries to find the necessary funding for needed infrastructure upgrades and assurances on property taxes.” Inserting both “necessary” and “needed” is piling on the sports owner perspective a little thick, but probably on brand for a guy who once co-wrote a book with Bud Selig.
  • Gene Chamberlain, the Bears correspondent at Rogers’ old workplace, Sports Illustrated, complains that the the McCaskey family is only “looking for a frozen tax rate which has already been negotiated with surrounding taxing bodies, and about $855 million for infrastructure,” but Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “falsely depicted the Bears as attempting to get the stadium built by public funds,” because infrastructure isn’t a stadium and tax breaks on a stadium aren’t … wait, let me start over.
  • Bloomberg News calls it a Bears “fumble,” because you know how non-sports news outlets especially always love the sports puns. Bloomberg also describes the Bears as “stuck with an outdated stadium and fans longing for a new football coliseum,” which 1) Soldier Field may be unloved, but it was just completely rebuilt in 2002 which isn’t all that long ago and 2) fans don’t especially seem to be longing for what the Bears owners want to build.
  • The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “Bears sources” say the team could start looking at stadium sites outside Cook County, writing that “numerous suburbs have courted the team,” though notably not by offering any of the money that the McCaskeys want. Also said Chicago suburbs are all in Illinois, which is the state whose legislature just declined to approve that billion dollars or so in tax money, so this may not be as promising an option as you think, Sun-Times.

So anyhoo, the McCaskeys did not succeed in getting around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, will continue to seek ways to get around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, stop the presses. This is pretty much the exact same set of stories that ran back in June when the state legislature adjourned then without giving the Bears owners a wad of cash. At least this time around the Sun-Times didn’t describe the session as expiring “without the Chicago Bears breaking the line of scrimmage in Springfield” after the failure of legislation that “could’ve thrown the team a block in their rush to the former Arlington International Racecourse” and Bears lobbyists being “left on the Capitol sideline” — though the paper’s headline did say that the owners’ last-minute offer of $25 million “doesn’t move ball forward in Springfield for new stadium,” it’s a sickness, I tell you.

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Friday roundup: Bears offer Illinois dimes on the dollar toward stadium, Browns considering $150k-a-seat PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

Apologies for this week’s late roundup — I had to retrieve my now-repaired laptop from the shop and get settled back in before writing this. On the bright side (for you, the information-craving consumer of sports subsidy news, surely not for me, the lowly scribe of such reports), even more stuff happened while I was at the store, so you get to enjoy bonus material as a result!

  • The Chicago Bears owners responded to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s demand that before getting any state help with a new stadium, the team must pay off the state’s $350-500 million in remaining debt on Soldier Field: How about $25 million instead? The response from legislators has been mostly LOLBears: State Rep. Kam Buckner called the offer “inadequate” and “disrespectful,” while Pritzker deadpanned, “I’m not sure what it’s tied to, what they’re asking for in return for it. I think if they’re donating $25 million to support the people of Chicago or the people of Illinois, that’s always a good thing.”
  • Did the Cleveland Browns owners forget to mention that as part of their new stadium in Brook Park, they’re considering charging personal seat license fees of as much as $149,300? Must have slipped their mind, along with how much of those fees would apply to the Haslams’ share of stadium costs and how much to the public’s $600 million and up cost. (Pretty sure the answers are “all” and “none,” respectively, since that’s how it always works.)
  • Also on the Browns front, the Crain’s Cleveland Business editorial board writes that Mayor Justin Bibb’s proposed deal to get $80 million worth of payments in exchange for letting the team move to Brook Park “leaves a bit of a bitter taste” but may be the best Cleveland can get given that “team owners hold the leverage in an environment where cities are desperate to retain their teams.” Or, at least, they do when the state legislature hands out $600 million to the team to help it move from one part of the state to another. Fixed that for you!
  • The Seattle Sounders owners are seeking outside investors to buy a minority share of the team, with the proceeds possibly being used toward building a new soccer-only stadium, possibly at its Longacres training site in nearby Renton. That’s a lot of possiblys, for sure, but Sportico values the Sounders at $825 million and soccer-specific stadiums generally go for less than half that, so … possibly.
  • CT United F.C. will begin play in MLS NEXT Pro next year playing home games at venues scattered across Connecticut, while it waits for a new stadium to be built in Bridgeport — which is to say, while it waits for the state to decide to give it $127 million to build one. “On the merits of the actual math, the jobs, the housing, the economic impact and aligning with what the priorities have been stated for this administration, it aligns perfectly,” said CT United owner Andre Swanston, take his word for it, he’s just a disinterested hundred-millionaire.
  • “Will the College Football Playoff title game bring economic boost to the Tampa Bay area?” WTSP-TV actually looked at the results the last time it hosted the CFP championship in 2017, and nope: A promised $250-350 million economic impact turned out to be just $720,000 in added sales tax receipts, while hotel tax receipts actually went down. “If that were the case, why is every major city and community bidding on these major events?” asked Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan. Because you’re all idiots?
  • No, the “sky stadium” Saudi Arabia plans to build for the 2034 World Cup doesn’t look like this, it looks like this. The former is AI generated, the latter, honestly, is probably AI generated at well, but maybe AI generated on purpose by the people who actually plan to build it? With more than half of the internet now AI slop, it’s arguably bigger news when something isn’t a fake, no?
  • And finally, if you’ve worn out the entertainment value of the yule log, we now have the Athletics Las Vegas stadium construction camera. You’re welcome.
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Friday roundup: Pritzker endorses “infrastructure” spending for Bears, Royals could soon propose Kansas vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, which means I had to take valuable time away from reading about the Mafia luring rich people into playing in rigged poker games in order to hang out with NBA players who scored 6.6 points a game so that I could instead sum up the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, for you, because I care.

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Worcester stadium red ink shows dangers of hoping to cover taxpayer costs with housing magic beans

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s now been more than seven years since the Pawtucket Red Sox owners cut a deal to get $105 million in public cash to move to a new stadium in Worcester, sparking a throwdown between economists Andrew Zimbalist (a paid team consultant), who said it w0uld all work out great, and Victor Matheson and a whole bunch of others (not collecting any consulting checks), who warned that building a stadium in order to spark economic gains from new housing next door was a bad gamble. As of last year, city tax revenues were falling short because the promised new development was lagging — so how are things going now?

A report from the city auditor to the City Council states that the Polar Park Ballpark District Improvement Financing fund has an anticipated deficit of $390,000 for the current fiscal year, and that by the end of the year will owe the city’s general fund over $2 million.

Not great, especially after the Worcester city auditor promised specifically that this would never happen! Also not great: Though Worcester Chief Financial Officer Timothy J. McGourthy said he expected the tax fund would eventually have enough revenue to cover the city’s stadium costs (including $40 million in overruns), that’s just regular taxes that any development would pay — meaning if the ballpark-adjacent housing ends up cannibalizing construction that would have taken place anyway, it’s not really a net gain. That’s something that Matheson, who teaches at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, warned about seven years ago, along with the fact that planning on a housing windfall didn’t take into account the added city costs of supporting new residents: The price tag for providing schools for even a few dozen new kids would quickly eat up any new tax revenues. In that case, even if the ballpark district fund eventually shows a profit — CFO McGourthy swears it will, someday — it will be canceled out by new losses in the city schools budget.

The Worcester city council was all set to discuss the WooSox ballpark situation at its Tuesday meeting this week, but scrapped the agenda item at the last second. Residents still turned out to testify on the subject, though, including Nicole Apostola, who had previously petitioned the council to at the very least provide more transparency about what Worcester taxpayers would be on the hook for. Apostola made clear that she would still like some questions answered, namely:

“One, why has no one been held responsible for the horrible contracts this city has been saddled with? Two, why has there never been a reckoning for the misconstruction of the doors at the park that prevent certain events from being held there? Three, why has the city not been able to take advantage of any of the revenue-generating days we were supposed to have? And most importantly, number four, exactly which services are being cut so we can subsidize multimillionaires?”

Oh, yes, the doors, we should probably talk about the doors. Three years ago, after Worcester’s new stadium had been open for two years, people started noticing that the promised flood of concerts had turned out to be, actually zero concerts. It turned out that the reason was Worcester had copied Fenway Park’s feature where the only direct access to the field is a large roll-up door in center field — and that door was built 12 feet high, whereas concert production trucks are 13 feet high. If only there could have been some way of knowing!

So LOLWorcester, sure. But this also should serve as a warning to other cities where sports projects are promising to pay back their costs with tax revenue from new surrounding development (cough San Antonio cough) that, first, there’s no guarantee the new housing will get built on time, and second, taxes on new development aren’t a free windfall, they’re needed to pay off the new costs that come with new development. After all the cautionary tales so far (cough Brooklyn Nets cough), you’d think people would have caught on by now, but yeah, nope, editorial boards are still writing how special sports district taxing zones would “shield residents from bearing the cost of development.” Shout louder, not-on-team-payroll economists, it’s hard for newsmakers to hear you with their fingers wedged so deeply in their ears.

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Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Guys! The AI industry needs our help! Nobody wants AI, and AI has lots of AI, so AI is paying AI to make more AI and sell it to AI and making it up in stock price, and that can’t end well! Let’s help out by asking poor li’l ChatGPT to write this week’s Friday roundup, I’ll check in and see how it does:

Friday roundup: Bears still begging, Thunder still building, and Jaguars still staircasing

[Not terrible, not great. Really the headline should reference the top items, and also what the hell is “staircasing” supposed to mean?]

It’s Friday, which means it’s time once again to spin the roulette wheel of public cash and see which stadium and arena schemes landed on taxpayers this week:

[“Spin the roulette wheel of public cash” is a terrible turn of phrase. Also, to complete the metaphor, the wheel should be “landing on” various schemes, not the schemes landing on taxpayers.]

  • San Diego’s Midway Rising plan to replace Pechanga Arena with a new 16,000-seat venue and a pile of housing and retail is inching toward a December 5 planning commission deadline, with the city still wrangling over traffic impacts, affordable housing quotas, and who gets the upside from the $3.9 billion redevelopment. Because nothing says “revitalization” like betting on a 1970s arena site to turn into a housing solution via sports subsidies.

[I haven’t written much lately about Midway Rising, which would replace the former home of the San Diego Clippers, among others, with one of those mixed-use district that are all the rage now, including a new arena. The whole project would cost $3.9 billion, and if ChatGPT knew that it could look back at old articles to understand this week’s, it would have found Voice of San Diego’s explainer about how the project would get an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, which is basically a TIF that would kick back property taxes around the site to the developers. How much in taxes? Voice of San Diego didn’t say, and ChatGPT didn’t email property tax economist Geoff Propheter to ask, and Geoff hasn’t gotten to my email yet, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The last line, meanwhile, is a decent attempt at FoS-style snark, but points off for it not meaning anything.]

  • Oklahoma City’s new $900 million Thunder arena is still on track for a 2028 opening, after voters okayed a 1% sales tax to fund most of it. The latest renderings feature lots of glass and “urban integration,” which probably means the public will be paying for a very expensive window. Construction could start in 2026, with the city touting it as a 21st-century civic monument and critics calling it a half-billion-dollar bribe to keep the team happy through 2050.

[Oh come on, you link to fresh vaportecture and don’t even run the images, let alone clown on the woman in the short-shorts who is about to jog right into a stair railing? Also, how is it a half-billion-dollar bribe when the public is spending $850 million? Zero stars!]

  • The Chicago Bears are back trying to convince Illinois taxpayers to help fund their new domed stadium in Arlington Heights, which team execs insist is the “only viable” site. They already own the land, but are still pushing for $855 million in public infrastructure money, because no NFL owner can resist a good subsidy play before kickoff. If they can pull this off, they say they’ll even be nice enough to bid for a Super Bowl in 2031.

[This is not news. Or rather, it was news last week, which is when we covered it.]

  • Penn State’s $700 million Beaver Stadium renovation keeps creeping forward, promising better luxury seating and a closer-to-the-field fan experience, though the main takeaway seems to be that even college football programs are now acting like pro franchises when it comes to stadium arms races. There’s also an Adidas sponsorship wrinkle, just to make sure the project stays as corporate as possible.

[College football programs have been acting like pro franchises for a long time, but they’re outside the scope of this site because life is short. If all it cost to cover college stadiums was consuming every last drop of water on the planet, I guess I might consider it.]

  • The Albany Firebirds’ Arena Football League announced an expansion team in Saginaw, Michigan — the Michigan Arsenal — which will play at the Dow Events Center. It’s minor-league stuff, but still one more example of how arena football owners keep testing the limits of how many taxpayer-subsidized arenas are lying around waiting for someone to fill a few dates on the calendar.

[The — what? First off, the arena football league is now called Arena Football One, and the Firebirds are just one of its nine teams. The Arsenal will indeed play in Saginaw, in a stadium built in 1972. I don’t see anything to complain about here, or even to care about, unless you are an arena football fan in central Michigan, in which case today’s your lucky day, I guess?]

  • Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium is getting a new 4,400-seat indoor concert venue next door, courtesy of Panthers owner David Tepper’s entertainment arm. The new hall will slot nicely into his plan to turn every patch of Uptown into “TepperWorld,” assuming the city doesn’t mind another dose of infrastructure subsidies wrapped in the language of “music tourism.”

[Nobody is calling it “TepperWorld.” And most of the $650 million in public money Tepper got for his stadium development wouldn’t be for “infrastructure subsidies.” And “music tourism” is an actual term (people traveling to go see music, I’m doing it myself soon), though not one that’s particularly in play in Charlotte.]

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: one new dome, one giant glass box, one mega-housing-sports mashup, and a staircase in Jacksonville that somehow counts as “progress.” Same time next Friday — unless one of these cities goes broke before then.

[Giant glass box? Staircase? Either ChatGPT is drunk or I am.]

Okay, let’s shrug off the italics and see what other actual news the robots chose to ignore:

  • The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency has reassigned the Cleveland Browns‘ proposed road upgrade plan back to committee, with one county commissioner saying, “So many questions out there in my mind that I don’t know how we move forward at this point.” But Jimmy Haslam is hungry for his $70 million in road money nowwwww.
  • North Kansas City Mayor Jesse Smith said in a press statement yesterday that he’s engaged in “substantial” talks with the Kansas City Royals owners over a new stadium and remains “committed to transparency throughout this process” but also that talks will be confidential for now, which is a lot of mixed messages, frankly. North Kansas City has a population of 4,467, so it’s probably a fair bet that most of the talks are around how to get the county and state to foot the bill for this thing, even more than they already are.
  • The New England Revolution‘s attempts to build a stadium in Everett already drew complaints from Boston officials that they’d need to be consulted on traffic and other impacts, and now four other cities — Malden, Medford, Chelsea and Revere — want in on those talks too. This is maybe going to be a while.
  • Port St. Lucie is spending $27.5 million on a minor league soccer stadium, and WPTV asked two local barbers how it would it affect the economy.
  • Not to be left out, Denver7 examined how a new Broncos stadium would affect the local economy by talking to a coffee company owner and a personal trainer.

And that’s the week in stadium boondoggles: Some stochastic parrots, hallucinated staircases, and terrible journalism. The future, in other words! Same time next Friday — unless the robots have taken over and are talking to themselves by then, and we can go spend all our time on music tourism until the economy collapses.

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New Rays owners vow to get taxpayer-subsidized stadium district by 2029

access_time personNeil deMause

New Tampa Bay Rays owners Patrick Zalupski, Ken Babby, and Bill Cosgrove held their first press conference yesterday since buying the team, and a lot of it was focused on plans for a new stadium in the wake of the collapse of former owner Stu Sternberg’s stadium plans, in the wake of the more literal collapse of the Tropicana Field roof. Zalupski said he and his fellow owners intend to have a “new forever home” open by March 2029 — a timeline he described as “aggressive, and perhaps audacious” — at a site yet to be determined. “We’re looking at everywhere,” added Babby. “We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves to one location or site.”

So far that’s just the expected rhetoric, complete with an arbitrary, unreasonable target date: Getting a stadium funded and built within three and a half years is crazy talk when you haven’t even figured out yet where you want to build it. Though for a site that’s as yet unidentified, Zalupski had a lot to say about it:

The new site will be a roughly 100-acre development with hotels, office and retail spaces, restaurants, bars and more, Zalupski said, adding that the stadium will be fully enclosed. The site will host 150 to 180 events per year, including concerts. Zalupski said he views the Atlanta Braves stadium, Truist Park, as a model.

A reference to the Atlanta Braves stadium district is expected as well, as that’s become a common demand of sports team owners since The Battery opened in Cobb County in 2017. The Braves owners are raking in profits from the new real estate development — money that isn’t subject to MLB revenue sharing — with the help of subsidies that are costing county taxpayers $15 million a year, and who wouldn’t want that? In fact, the new Rays owners seem intent on outdoing The Battery: A hundred acres would be even bigger than the Braves’ 75 acres, and Zalupski may not stop there, saying, “We want a great location and as much land as we can get.”

So the new Rays owners want access to a huge plot of land — bigger than the entire Gas Plant District site in St. Petersburg that Sternberg had previously targeted for a stadium and a whole lot of other stuff — and haven’t said what if anything they propose to pay for it. But what about straight-up government cash payments, will they be asking for any of those?

Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal said he has not yet spoken to anyone from the new ownership group but has heard from others that the Rays are seeking $1.1 billion in public subsidies.

That $1.1 billion figure is extreme hearsay, obviously, and should be taken with appropriate grains of salt at least until such time as Wostal gives some idea who these mysterious “others” are. But Zalupski did say that it was “critical to have a public/private partnership,” which is generally code for “we want the public to cover a lot of our costs” — and $1.1 billion wouldn’t be much more than Sternberg was seeking, if you count the public land he was set to get at a steep discount.

Tl;dr: The new Rays owners want a lot of land, and a lot of money for building stuff on it, and are looking for a government entity willing to hand it over to them — and in time to open a stadium by spring 2029. “Audacious” seems like a good word for that, yes, but never underestimate the power of mediocre white billionaires to get their way.

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Chiefs owner still mulling all stadium options, seeking to increase $750m public price tag

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Chiefs executives have been pretty quiet about their stadium plans since June, when they asked for and got a one-year extension on Kansas’s offer of sales tax subsidies. Yesterday, though, team president Mark Donovan broke the silence to reveal a bit about the Chiefs’ plans, which are not to decide on any plans just yet:

Donovan said his team met again last week with Populous, the Kansas City-based international architectural firm tasked with designing the option of a renovated GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. They provided another set of renderings for that possible project.

The other possibility: The Chiefs this week will enact a six-week process seeking applicants to design a possible new closed-roof stadium in Kansas….

“That’s one of the things this opportunity creates — we can look at the best in the world, not just the NFL, in terms of venues,” Donovan said. “That’s one of the reasons to go to a competitive bid — to see what we can do.”

So the Chiefs could renovate their current stadium, or could build a new one somewhere in Kansas, the design of which will be chosen over the next six weeks, even if the location will remain TBD. They’ll only consider renovating, though, if next April Jackson County voters approve the same sales tax hike that they rejected for funding Chiefs and Royals stadiums in April 2024. Meanwhile, while the Kansas subsidy offer is good through next June, Kansas legislators have said they won’t consider any stadium proposal that doesn’t arrive by the end of this December — though they also said that about this June, and then granted an extension anyway, so we’ll see.

The Chiefs, at this point, are the dog that’s caught half the car: They have that Kansas STAR bond offer in hand — which is projected to be worth $700 million or more, if the stadium project can generate enough sales tax revenues to kick back that much to the team — plus a $750 million approved in June by the state of Missouri. But with a potential stadium price tag of $3 billion, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt is continuing to shop around for county and possibly city subsidies as well, because why not? It does make one wonder if the Chiefs really need a new or renovated stadium if the only way to make one profitable is to get taxpayers to cover more than $1 billion of the costs, but that’s apparently not the kind of thing asked in polite newspaper articles these days.

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Dallas Stars owners start shopping for new arena, that’s officially everybody now

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s rare for a major pro sports team to have no entries in the Field of Schemes “posts by topic” list, given that pretty much every team owner out there has at least hinted at demanding some kind of public money for something at some time. That’s the situation for the Dallas Stars, though — or was until this post, because we just can’t have nice things:

The Stars’ 21-person ownership advisory group met on Wednesday night and zeroed in on Plano as one of the likeliest destinations, Front Office Sports has learned.

The team is eyeing a purchase of land in Plano, but has not signed anything yet. It operates a youth hockey facility there, and has a practice facility in Frisco. Arlington is also in the mix, and has appeal as it’s already home to an MLB and NFL team. Each of those cities is roughly 20 miles from the team’s current home.

Team ownership also hasn’t ruled out staying in Dallas, either in the American Airlines Center or in a new arena.

So, the Stars are moving to Plano, unless they’re moving to Arlington, unless they’re moving to The Colony or Fort Worth, unless they’re building an arena in Dallas or staying in their old Dallas arena while the Mavericks build their own arena maybe. That’s pretty much all the options other than Greensboro, so maybe not really rising to the level of “news,” but you do you, Front Office Sports.

The news, such as it is, is that Stars owner Tom Gaglardi is clearly entering the kicking-tires-to-gin-up-a-bidding-war phase of his arena dreams, especially given that the team CEO followed up with some decidedly on-the-record comments:

“I don’t deny we are in discussions with Plano,” team president and CEO Brad Alberts told FOS when reached by phone Friday. “Have we decided on where our future is? No. We’ve gotta decide, are we staying or are we going to build somewhere. Certainly Plano is part of that, but we haven’t decided. We are going through due diligence to make sure that if we are going to leave, we have the right spot.”

And to the Dallas Morning News:

“We do not have a deal with Plano,” Alberts said. “We don’t have any of that. We are in discussions with them. We’re also in discussions with other cities. Arlington would love us to come to Arlington. They’ve got two of the four already. We’ve got a really good relationship with those two franchises there and the city.

“There’s no favorites at this point. We’re all just doing our work.”

The Stars’ lease expires in 2031, but there’s nothing stopping them from extending it, and in fact team officials have previously suggested that as one option. So beyond vague “discussions,” there’s not much going on here, so hopefully Dallas officials won’t be suckered into bidding against themsel—

Said council member Chad West, chairman of the ad hoc committee on professional sports recruitment and retention: “Dallas needs to [do its] part to ensure we keep our teams in the city.”

Hope you enjoyed that blank space on the topic list while it lasted, because https://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/nhl/dallas-stars/ is almost certainly about to start growing like crazy.

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Friday roundup: D.C.NFL stadium comes with nine-figure Metro cost, Mets owner likely to win casino on city parking lots

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a nice talk yesterday with Chris Francis of Straight Arrow News (owned by the union-busting Joe Ricketts, sigh) about ballooning hidden public costs of sports stadiums and arenas, and the resulting article is up this morning. Key quote: “I think the team owners and the officials who work with them have realized that it sounds worse to give a check, a taxpayer check, to the team for the stadium than to say, okay, we’re not going to give you that, but we will give you money for infrastructure. We will give you tax breaks. We will give you a break on land costs.” We were talking about the Denver Broncos at the time, but really it goes for all modern sports subsidy deals: All the real costs come in the fine print.

Speaking of the fine print, let’s see what it holds this week:

  • When Washington, D.C. agreed to pay $1 billion in cash and $6 billion or so in future rent breaks to Commanders owner Josh Harris for a new stadium, did everyone forget to mention it would come with a major expansion of the Metro station near the stadium site and perhaps a new station nearby as well? That could cost “in the ballpark of hundreds of millions of dollars,” says councilmember Charles Allen, but “we cannot afford not to do it.” Remember when Allen was saying “D.C. has a responsibility to scrutinize the proposal & demand a better & fair deal” with a “billion-dollar industry”? Yeah, neither does he.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is set to be awarded a casino license for the city-owned Citi Field parking lots he controls, after it turned out the state senator opposing it was the most disliked woman in Albany. There’s no public money involved, only public land, and that was effectively given away when then-mayor Mike Bloomberg gave Cohen a 99-year lease on the property as part of his stadium deal, but if you want to be annoyed at a multibillionaire sports team owner getting his way over community opposition, don’t let me stop you.
  • The main opposition group to next month’s referendum on giving the San Antonio Spurs around $150 million worth of future tax money toward a new arena is splitting its recommendations, urging a no vote on Prop B (which would provide the arena money) but remaining neutral on Prop A, which would devote tax money to redoing the area around the old arena to attract more rodeo events. COPS/Metro wants to see the county’s money from hotel and rental car taxes spent on “a range of community projects” guided by a citizen committee; it’s not entirely clear what happens to the arena plans if Prop A passes and Prop B does not, but that’s looking like a possibility.
  • The Cleveland Browns owners have started moving dirt at their new stadium site even before figuring out how it will all be paid for. All the kids are doing it!
  • The Athletics have filed for $523 million worth of construction permits in Las Vegas; getting those still won’t guarantee that the vaporarmadillo comes to pass, but it’s edging closer to decision time.
  • Heywood Sanders has elaborated on why the $2.6 billion plan to expand the Los Angeles Convention Center in advance of the 2028 Olympics is a terrible idea, saying in a Q&A with Torched’s Alissa Walker that other similar centers are seeing attendance drop even when they expand, and are having to offer discounted rates to lure a dwindling number of events. Key quote from Walker: “[Bangs head on desk].”
  • The organizers of the New York Marathon claim that it and other running events add almost a billion dollars a year to the city economy; it doesn’t look like they even bothered to hired a consultant to write a report justifying the number, but Crain’s New York Business published it anyway, this is fine.
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