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Sternberg says Rays “cannot move forward” with St. Pete stadium plan, all bets are off for what happens next

access_time personNeil deMause

And to think today looked like a slow day at first:

“After careful deliberation, we have concluded we cannot move forward with the new ballpark and development project at this moment. A series of events beginning in October that no one could have anticipated led to this difficult decision. … We continue to focus on finding a ballpark solution that serves the best interests of our region, Major League Baseball and our organization.”

That’s Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg, in an official statement released at noon today, sticking a fork in the St. Petersburg stadium plan that he himself negotiated last year. Sternberg faced a March 31 deadline to file paperwork to accept the deal — which came with approximately $1 billion in cash, tax breaks, and free land — but apparently decided he was ready to bail now.

As for why he’s bailing, that remains anybody’s guess. Some leading theories:

  • It’s the delays. This is the official company line from the Rays: Things just got so much more expensive in the two months it took the city council and county commission decided whether to approve stadium funding following last October’s Hurricane Milton that the St. Pete deal no longer made financial sense. Except of course that the original deal never required the city and county to approve stadium bonds before this April, so if Sternberg only wanted to build this stadium if he could get started in fall 2024, why didn’t he put that in the term sheet?
  • The St. Petersburg location sucks. Ever since the St. Petersburg stadium plan was announced, people have been asking, “Wait, the Rays are really going to build a stadium right next door to the one everybody hates because it’s impossible for people from much of the region to get to?” Initially, it looked like Sternberg was willing to overlook the accessibility problems in order to get his $1 billion — Tampa, on the more populous, well-off side of the bay, doesn’t have nearly that kind of ability to raise public funds — but maybe he is using the delays to back out of a deal he didn’t realize was dumb at the time but does now?
  • Trump tariffs and construction costs. New U.S. tariffs on foreign steel are set to drive construction costs higher, so maybe Sternberg is getting cold feet for that reason.
  • MLB has pressured Sternberg into selling the team and stepping aside. MLB owners made clear earlier this week that they wanted Sternberg to take the damn St. Pete stadium deal or else sell the team to someone who’d consider it, so that they can check off the Rays situation and resolved and move ahead with expansion plans without worrying that Sternberg would want to use a prospective expansion city as leverage with Tampa Bay. There’s no way a team sale could have taken place by the end of this month, so maybe Sternberg agreed to back out of the stadium deal now in anticipation of a sale process. Or maybe Sternberg decided to give his fellow owners the finger and say if he wants to play footsie with, say, Charlotte or Nashville, he’s damn well gonna! So hard to say unless you’re Evan Dreilich. (If you are Evan Dreilich, feel free to remark on this in the comments, or on Bluesky, or wherever.)

Is everyone now freaking out? Here’s what we have so far from local officials:

  • In a statement, St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch called Sternberg’s decision “a major disappointment” and said “if in the coming months a new owner, who demonstrates a commitment to honoring their agreements and our community priorities, emerges — we will consider a partnership to keep baseball in St. Pete.”
  • In another statement, MLB said, “Commissioner Manfred understands the disappointment of the St. Petersburg community from today’s announcement, but he will continue to work with elected officials, community leaders, and Rays officials to secure the club’s future in the Tampa Bay region.”
  • City council chair Copley Gerdes said, “I continue to believe St. Petersburg is a major league city and both with baseball and hopefully continued with baseball, but no matter what, I think it’s a major league city,” and “I’m hopeful that the relationship with MLB and the Rays continues to move forward.”
  • City council member Richie Floyd said,  “It’s frustrating that we’ve had so much time wasted by unwilling partners, clearly. I think we’re in a good position as a city to still redevelop the area around Tropicana Field and come out ahead of where we would have been.”

If nothing else, since it was Sternberg who called a halt to the deal and not St. Pete, the city gets back full development rights to the Tropicana Field property whenever the Rays’ lease expires. (I think that’s now following the 2028 season, assuming the Trop is back in game shape by 2026, but at this point that may be up to the lawyers to hash out for sure.) And if nothing else, the city and county now have back that $1 billion to spend however they want, and none of it has to be on a $1.3 billion baseball stadium for a team whose owner doesn’t really want to play in it anyway.

As for the Rays’ future, here’s a CBS Sports story running down all the possible scenarios, though it does leave out “Elon Musk buys Rays, makes them first team on Mars.” Plus it includes the possibility of the Rays moving across the bay to Tampa, and as Marc Normandin noted yesterday at Baseball Prospectus, “If Sternberg truly doesn’t have the resources to handle a more expensive version of a new St. Pete stadium, then one in Tampa is right out.”

This is a breaking news story, which is journalese for “I need to hit ‘publish’ now, but there are more things I’d still like to research.” Watch this space for further updates, either in this news item or in tomorrow’s Friday roundup. In the meantime, stock up on popcorn, it looks like Rays Stadium Survivor has been renewed for an umpteenth season.

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Browns owners pull out all the LOLarguments in demanding $600m in stadium cash from Ohio

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland Browns owners the Haslam Sports Group sent their chief administrative officer and general counsel Ted Tywang to testify before the Ohio arts, athletics and tourism committee yesterday in favor of their $1.2 billion stadium subsidy demand ($600 million of it from the state, the rest from the city of Brook Park and Cuyahoga County), and it was everything you would expect it to be, and more. Tywang delivered all the greatest hits of the stadium playbook; let’s take them one at a time:

“This would be one of the largest economic development projects in Northeast Ohio History, and even in the state of Ohio.”

This is the glass-half-full way of saying our stadium will be very expensive. I can’t wait to hear Tywang explain why it would be a good idea for Ohio to build a space elevator.

“This idea of cash collateral doesn’t really exist in sports facility funding. This would be kind of the first time, as far as we know, that an upfront payment has been done,” Tywang said. “It is $38 million, which is the present value of $150 million at the back end of the lease.”

The $38 million figure refers to a “refundable deposit” that the Haslams would put in up front, which 1) isn’t really much of a sign of a firm commitment if it’s refundable, and 2) isn’t by any stretch of the imagination “the first time” that a team owner would put up the first chunk of cash for a stadium. As for “the present value of $150 million at the back end of the lease,” that seems to just be a way of making the number sound larger for anchoring purposes — sure, $38 million today would be worth $150 million after 30 years of 5% interest, but that doesn’t make it anything other than $38 million today.

“I would think about it not as, this $600 million could go somewhere else, because there’s going to be a return for the state, that $1.3 billion. Yes, it’s over time, but those can be used for other needs that the state deems appropriate.”

Here we have the argument that state taxpayers spending $600 million to move the Browns from one Ohio city to a neighboring one would somehow create a humongous increase in state tax revenues, which has already been shown to be the work of one LOLconsultant with a B.A. in architecture, asked and answered, moving on.

“There are no existing revenues that we’re taking. It’s not like we’re taking from a health and human services budget at the state or at the local level for our ask. It is only revenues that are generated by the project that wouldn’t exist but for this private investment.”

Casino Night Fallacy, everybody drink!

“We think in a market like Cleveland and Northeast Ohio that the project is only viable through a public-private partnership. So the $600 million is really critical.”

Translation: Either “this is a money-losing project without subsidies, the only reason we’re doing it is to get our hands on the state cash” or “we’re going to make money on this either way, but with an extra $600 million in subsidies we would turn $600 million more in profit,” further research needed.

Ranking member Dontavius Jarrells (D-Columbus), who described himself as “a recovering Browns fan”, asked if the project would just shift economic development from downtown Cleveland, not generate new activity. Tywang said the stadium is a game-changer.

“There’s so much else great that’s happening downtown that I think it’s frankly disrespectful when people imply that we’re going to cripple downtown when we leave,” Tywang said. “We want this to be complementary, not competitive.”

“It’s disrespectful to suggest that people can’t spend money in two places at the same time” is some next-level BS, props to Tywang for this one, give that guy a raise.

And what did Ohio legislators think of all this? News5 Cleveland asked some, and:

“It’s essentially escrowing money that would grow over time so that the Browns can kind of put their money where their mouth is,” [House Finance Chair Brian] Stewart told me.

Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) said the tax changes are the much better option.

“It would solve these kinds of issues so every couple of years we don’t have some sports franchise, entity coming to the legislature with their hand out saying ‘you have to give us some money so that we can stay in the community,'” she said.

Yes, funneling all the taxes paid in and around stadiums to the sports franchise owners would “solve” the problem of how to pay for an endless stream of new stadiums, but much in the same way that bank robberies could be solved by leaving the bank door unlocked. There are still a lot of hurdles before the Haslams’ plan can become reality — it will have to clear both houses of the legislature plus the city and county, and Cuyahoga County reps are in particular hopping mad at being asked to help fund moving the Browns out of Cleveland proper — but going just by vibes from yesterday’s hearing, the level of debate is not going to be pretty.

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MLB to Sternberg: If you won’t take St. Pete’s $1B Rays stadium subsidy, we’ll find someone who will

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t usually like to do posts that are just stacks of social media posts, but the Bluesky commentariat did such a good job with the latest twist in the Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation that I should at least let them start things off. Here’s what my feed looked like this morning:

Ooo boy. Sternberg is being sandbagged by the owners.

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T01:41:49.123Z

Long story short: Joe Molloy, a Tampa-born former middle school gym teacher whose main claim to fame is having been married for a decade to George Steinbrenner’s daughter and running the New York Yankees during Steinbrenner’s suspension for hiring a known gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield (the ’90s were quite the time), told the Tampa Bay Times that he is “leading a group of prominent Tampa Bay-based investors who are interested in acquiring the Tampa Bay Rays,” though he won’t name who any of them are. And if he buys the team, he wants to go ahead with the proposed stadium plan in St. Petersburg that current owner Stu Sternberg is getting cold feet about.

And it gets better, according to @evandrellich.bsky.social MLB isn't simply watching this all play out, there is pressure on Sternberg to sell to investors committed to the TB area. Interesting that MLB is going to great lengths to keep a team here while showing no such loyalty to Oakland.

— DRaysBay (@draysbay.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T13:23:35.745Z

If true — and Dreilich is a consummate baseball insider, so if owners are leaking stuff to him, it’s because they damn well want it leaked — this is huge news, especially the threat to twist Sternberg’s arm by threatening to yank his revenue-sharing checks. This is the kind of offer-you-can’t-refuse that MLB resorts to when it really wants somebody out of the cabal, so it would seem to indicate that the other owners think the Rays should grab their billion-dollar subsidy offer while they can, and if this Rays owner won’t do it, it’s time to find someone who will.

It seems that MLB plans to go with the current deal in St. Pete's. The message being sent to Sternberg is that this can be done the easy way, or the hard way.

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T14:00:47.057Z

And FYI here's reporting from 2023 about a group considering a purchase of the team; one of the people involved in that effort is also the subject of today's rumors: www.forbes.com/sites/mikeoz…

— DRaysBay (@draysbay.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T13:58:33.649Z

(San Francisco 49ers owners the DeBartolo family are reportedly involved as well.)

The obvious tea-leaf reading here is that the rest of MLB is antsy to move forward with expansion and doesn’t want one owner’s indecisiveness about stadium plans hold things up. Why MLB didn’t do all this with John Fisher and the Oakland A’s is indeed a great question — instead, they put him on their executive committee! There’s no accounting for taste among billionaires, apparently, or maybe Fisher just brings better chocolate upside-down cakes to the owners meetings.

The ball, it would seem, is now in Sternberg’s court, and the, uh, serve clock is ticking: Either he or new owners needs to accept St. Pete’s offer by the end of March, or else the new stadium plans turn back into a pumpkin. (It’s possible St. Pete officials can extend that deadline, but we’ll cross that hypothetical when we come to it.) This is a breaking news story — further updates as Bluesky provides.

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Friday roundup: A’s hire ex-Raiders stadium czar, Texans want renovations paid for by somebody

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another week, and, yeah, it sure has. Feeling this very strongly this morning, you all go on ahead and read this week’s bullet points while I get my second wind.

  • The Athletics have new Las Vegas stadium renderings (pretty similar to the last batch, only with more entourage) and a new president, Marc Badain, who formerly worked in the same role for the Las Vegas Raiders before abruptly quitting. Badain’s role in getting the Raiders’ stadium built (with $750 million in public money) and the fact that the Nevada legislature is coming back into session this year have people speculating that Badain could be on board to go back to the state for more cash to fill owner John Fisher’s budget hole; there’s no actual evidence that’s in the works that I can tell, but this entire project has been little more than tea-leaf reading for close to two years, why stop now?
  • New Houston Texans president Mike Tomon says he doesn’t want a new stadium, just renovations to the old one. The Houston Business Journal reports: “As far as funding potential renovations to NRG Stadium — which, coupled with projects around NRG Park and maintenance, could cost billions of dollars — Tomon said it’s too early in the process to determine what that would look like.” Lobbying strategy still hazy, ask again later.
  • The A’s and Tampa Bay Rays playing in minor-league stadiums this year are “cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who apparently missed the parts about how the A’s are in Sacramento because they alienated Oakland officials enough to torpedo talks of a lease extension there and the Rays are in Tampa because a hurricane blew their roof off, and neither of those things would be changed even if local officials hadn’t engaged in “inaction,” which they actually didn’t. Friends don’t let friends read Jeff Passan think pieces, is the lesson here.
  • San Antonio’s “Project Marvel” that would include a new Spurs arena, convention center expansion, and other crap has “tepid” 41-36% support, according to a new poll. The plan could be up for a public referendum as soon as this November, so that undecided 23% should start reading up on the details ASAP.
  • The San Jose Giants have agreed to extend their lease from 2027 through 2050 in exchange for $5 million in public stadium upgrades, and I’m going to go out on a limb and call this not that bad — the Single-A team has even agreed to double its rent payments from $20,000 a year to $40,000, which is next to nothing but not completely nothing. It’ll probably come out next week that San Jose has to turn over development rights to 10,000 acres of land or something in addition, but until then I’m filing this under “could have been so much worse.”
  • Someone wrote in to Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist Jason Williams to ask if Hamilton County residents could have a re-vote on the tax hike that is paying off the Bengals stadium, and Williams replied, not a bad idea, it could be expanded to help fund a new arena, too. Pretty sure that’s not what the letter writer meant, Jason.
  • There’s actual video of actual cranes doing actual work to build Inter Miami‘s new stadium, maybe this thing will actually open eventually, even if the 2026 target date still seems ambitious. Or it could be the latest fake video, for all we know, hard to trust anything coming out of south Florida these days.
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A’s sell fans right to get on line for tickets at Vegas vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

“A’s Tell Las Vegas Baseball Fans They Can Spend $19.01 To Secure Priority Access To Buy Season Tickets At Planned Stadium On Strip” is a perfectly cromulent headline; so is “A’s Open Ticket Deposits for Las Vegas Stadium That Doesn’t Exist Yet.” Choices! It’s all about choices.

For A’s fans, or Las Vegas baseball fans, or just fans of baseball who want to visit Las Vegas a whole lot, the choice is whether to spend $19.01 (because the A’s were created in 1901?) to get on a “priority list” for tickets at the team’s new Las Vegas stadium, if there are ever tickets, if there ever is a stadium. Front Office Sports describes this as a “deposit,” but there’s no indication on the team website that you can apply the $19.01 toward the price of tickets if you buy them or get it back if you don’t, so this appears to actually be one of those “fan club membership” type deals that let you get in on the presale before the general public.

And, you know, John Fisher needs all the money he can get, so another, say, 30,000 payments of $19.01 each would raise … okay, $570,300 isn’t all that much, but every dollar counts! Plus there’s nothing stopping Fisher from accepting more season ticket “priority list” members than seats exist, maybe this is the new market inefficiency! Gotta be lots of people who want to see Aaron Judge or whoever hit home runs!

In other pretending-the-A’s-are-moving-t0-Vegas news, the team has announced its games will be broadcast on a Las Vegas radio station this year, in addition to in Sacramento and the Bay Area, and also recently filed a permit to clear and grade the proposed stadium site. Whether all this is in actual preparation for a Nevada move or just an elaborate shadow play intended to entice some “investors” to come out of the woodwork and give Fisher a pile of money for no good reason remains unknowable, maybe even to Fisher himself — groundbreaking or it didn’t happen at this point, so might want to save yourself $19.01 for now.

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Portland baseball booster releases fresh stadium renderings in hopes it’ll get him more tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

Portland Diamond Project, the people who want to bring an MLB team to Oregon, released new renderings yesterday of a 32,000-seat stadium along the Portland waterfront. We’ll get to the pretty pictures in a minute, but first, this:

[Portland Diamond Project CEO] Craig Cheek told a legislative committee Monday morning that Portland could break ground on a Major League Baseball stadium on the south Waterfront as early as 2027 if Portland is awarded a team.

Uh, sure? MLB isn’t likely to pick its expansion cities before 2027 — it still needs to settle the Tampa Bay Rays and Sacramento A’s stadium situations, and then hold a bidding war for both prospective owners and prospective cities. And “breaking ground” is typically just a matter of a bunch of elected officials showing up with hardhats and shovels, so it’s not really a sign of major construction activity. So this is mostly Cheek, an ex-Nike VP who runs the hey-Portland-let’s-put-on-a-baseball-team show, trying to get headlines by issuing checks his butt is never going to have to cover.

As for why Cheek was before a legislative committee, that’s because:

The group appeared in front of the committee to make an appeal to “modernize” Senate Bill 5, the 2003 bill lawmakers passed that would carve out $150 million for a stadium in income taxes paid by a team’s players and executives.

“Modernize,” eh? What’s that mean, exactly?

“We asked legislators to revisit SB5, originally passed in 2003, and update the law to better reflect the current revenue generated by players’ salaries and the rising costs to build a world-class stadium in downtown Portland,” Cheek said. “This would not be a new tax on Oregonians. We look forward to working with the legislature to make Oregon Better with Baseball.”

So, the modernized bill would presumably increase the amount of borrowing Oregon would take on, in anticipation of more state income taxes players would pay given that salaries are higher now than in 2003. Cheek doesn’t appear to have revealed details of how much tax money the project would require, other than saying that the stadium would cost around $2 billion total — and that this wouldn’t really be taxes that would cost Oregonians anything, because player income taxes would be free money the state treasury wouldn’t get otherwise, which is not exactly true.

Anyway, on to the vaportecture, I know you’re all excited to see that:

Daytime fireworks, gotta respect the classics! Also, that indeed appears to be some kind of sliding translucent roof, though whether it’s overlapping panels or some kind of accordion-like structure is hard to tell. Either way, when extended it would still leave large openings on the ends, which should be good to protect fans and players from most rainy weather, but not necessarily be the “365 days a year” experience that Cheek is promising.

Aside from fans displaying a weird affinity for waving flags in the middle of an inning and the only scoreboard being unseeable for fans in the left field corner, not much more to say about this one, so let’s move on to:

More flags! And a whole bunch of extremely het couples of various kinds and bicycle models. Are those people planning to bring their bikes into the stadium? I sure don’t see any bike parking before you have to ascend the steps to the turnstiles. Speaking of which, all those fans in wheelchairs are going to have a heck of a time with those steps, though there does seem to be some sort of ramp (with no railings) that they can use to wind their way up to the entry level, if they dare.

And while I get that showing rendered people mostly from behind avoids the problem of having to show particular faces, having all those fans wear t-shirts with giant Old English P’s on the back does imply some weird things about fashion trends in the year LOL2027.

This is a nice enough view showing the proposed stadium’s setting along the Willamette River, but I mostly appreciate it for its new innovation: daytime spotlights! Those are going to be really impressive, so long as you outfit them with 3.86 x 1026-watt bulbs.

So to recap: An ex-Nike executive wants to build a $2 billion stadium in Portland, Oregon for a team that doesn’t exist with owners that haven’t been identified using money that hasn’t been quantified, but in any case he wants the state legislature to allocate more of it than the last time someone made these promises 22 years ago. The daytime spotlights are probably still the most implausible part of this whole deal, but it’s close.

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Trump’s tariffs and budget cuts will make stadiums more unaffordable — but will cities stop funding them?

access_time personNeil deMause

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser still really wants to build a Commanders stadium using an as-yet-undisclosed pile of public money, but she has a little problem: The district is facing a potential $1 billion budget deficit over the next three years. Not that that usually stops cities from pouring money into sports venues — when times are good it’s usually “we can afford this” and when times are bad it’s “we can’t afford not to do this” — but the, uh, disconnect is great enough that even local TV stations are asking questions, literally:

7News On Your side reached out to Bowser and asked her the following questions:

  1. How will this forecast affect talks with the Commanders about a new stadium?
  2. Will Mayor Bowser push the team to take on a larger share of the bill for a new stadium?
  3. Will this forecast lead to more spending cuts or higher taxes for residents?
  4. Will this forecast push the mayor to back away from any new stadium deal requiring the use of taxpayer dollars?

So far the response from Bowser — as well as the D.C. council, which was presented with similar questions — has been crickets.

Anyway, this does complicate Bowser’s plans to lure Josh Harris’s Commanders back to the city with gobs of taxpayer money. And how did D.C. end up in such a huge budget hole, anyway? Funny story:

D.C.’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer, in its new revenue forecast released Friday, estimates the city will bring in $21.6M less this year and an average of $342.1M less over the following three years than its December forecast predicted. The total decline adds up to just over $1B in reduced revenue between now and the end of fiscal year 2028.

The report cites the Trump administration’s recent moves to slash the federal workforce as the primary reason for the declining projections, along with the domino effect that is expected to have on the local economy.

This raises a larger question: What impact will the mayhem that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are committing across the federal government have on stadium and arena construction? We’ve already seen predictions that Trump’s tariffs on both Canada in particular and imported steel and aluminum in general will cause construction prices to soar. Throwing local government budgets into the wood chipper would only compound the problem, as cities and states would be chasing ever-more-expensive stadiums with ever-shrinking treasuries.

And yet! It’s important to remember that one of the things that kicked off the entire stadium-subsidy racket — and, before it, the auto-plant and computer-chip-factory rackets — in the 1980s was Ronald Reagan slashing federal funding to local governments. With no way of creating jobs by spreading around federal dollars, city mayors increasingly turned instead to offering their dwindling supplies of cash to corporations as a way to try to steal jobs from the city down the road, launching the economic war among the states. It didn’t work — raiding your neighbor while they raid you is a zero-sum game — but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming ingrained as the business of local government, and it was all set off by local government having too little cash, not so much that it didn’t know what to do with it.

So, will a Trumpcession tank team owners’ stadium plans? It’s way, way too soon to tell. It’s going to change the entire climate around construction of more or less everything, though, as well as state and local governments’ fiscal plans, so things will be different, if not necessarily better. At the same time, Trump’s tax cuts are making the rich much richer, so you would think that team owners could better afford to pay for stadiums themselves — but, again, this whole scheme isn’t about who can afford them, it’s about how to get someone else to pay for them so owners can keep more money for themselves. Kleptocracies work in mysterious ways.

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Friday roundup: D-Backs tax kickback plan rushes ahead despite questions, Utah bill would let a hundred stadiums bloom

access_time personNeil deMause

Springtime is always a busy time for stadium and arena shenanigans, if only because it’s budget season for most states and cities. But still! Buncha bullet points today, is what I’m saying, and expect a lot more next week, and so on and so on until legislators break for the summer or come to their senses, whichever comes first (you know damn well which will come first):

  • An Arizona state legislative analysis says because Diamondbacks players pay $3.5 million a year in state income tax, that would over more than a quarter of the tax kickbacks team execs want for stadium renovations — asked and answered, move to strike. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, meanwhile, says the state analysis doesn’t look at actual economic data but rather projections like calculating every fan buys two beers (first, assume a spherical fan). No worries, though, the bill still has to go through — oh, welp, looks like it already passed the state house and just needs to clear the senate, and House Democratic Leader Rep. Oscar De Los Santos has expressed “alarm” and said “we should not be rushing through this legislative process,” guess there’s no time to worry like the present.
  • Utah state senator Scott Sandall, figuring one MLB stadium with no team to play in it and no way to pay for it isn’t enough for a growing state, introduced a bill to let Salt Lake City’s stadium district build multiple stadiums as small as 18,000 seats for any sport, “to be proactive, just for the future,” not because he has any particular sports teams in mind that could use an 18,000-seat stadium or anything.
  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is supporting a new Missouri state bill to raise money for Royals and/or Chiefs stadiums by providing … okay, Lucas didn’t say exactly how much money or from where, and the bill itself isn’t posted on the Missouri senate website yet, but Lucas says it’ll help Kansas City “host FIFA World Cup games,” please nobody tell him that it’s going to be decades before the U.S. gets another World Cup after 2026, I don’t want to spoil his day.
  • The proposed Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park is set to lead to the creation of a new Circle K gas station, maybe, if government bureaucrats don’t get in the way with their red tape about “residents” being “concerned,” can you believe those guys?
  • Phoenix Suns co-owner Justin Ishbia has pulled out of bidding for the Minnesota Twins and is instead upping his minority stake in the Chicago White Sox, which certainly can be read as positioning himself to become majority owner once 89-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf gives up either control or this mortal coil. Whether he would go ahead with with Reinsdorf’s current stadium plans, let alone rebranding the team as the Chicacago White Sox, remains to be seen.
  • The MLB cable empire keeps on crumbling, and at least one small-market owner, the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Mark Attanasio, says he wants a TV revenue sharing model more like the NFL’s where all the money is shared equally. This is worth watching since it would have a major impact on where teams could relocate to (Green Bay would suddenly be a viable MLB market), plus all sort of other things like how long the 2027 baseball lockout is likely to last.
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KC area officials compete to bid for Chiefs/Royals stadiums, team owners sit and twirl mustaches

access_time personNeil deMause

Shit’s gettin’ real-ish in Kansas City:

  • Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe met with city and Jackson County leaders yesterday for 30 minutes to discuss plans for Chiefs and Royals stadiums. County legislator Sean Smith, who was a swing vote in approving a referendum on the last stadium-funding proposal for the teams, came away saying “it went really well” and “the governor indicated that there’s clearly some state-level tools they can bring to bear,” which is unspecific but sounds like state funding of some kind is in play.
  • State officials said they’ll work on property tax reform, which #1 stadium backer county legislator Manny Abarca said could help get county voters on board with raising taxes for stadiums.
  • KFVS-TV opined that “The Kansas City Chiefs bring more than just championships to Missouri. The Chiefs estimate Missouri receives $28.8 million in tax revenue each year from their games.” (That sound you just heard was millions of economists suddenly crying out in terror and being suddenly silenced.)
  • In neighboring Clay County, meanwhile, two state senators introduced legislation to create a county sports complex authority to spend money it would get from somewhere, somehow.
  • In neighboring Kansas, House Rep. Sean Tarwater recommended against using money from a fund to lure sports teams to spend on education instead, on the grounds that the state is currently negotiating with the Chiefs and Royals owners and if officials offered money and then had to reveal they blew it all on schools, “we’d look like jackasses.”
  • The video from the same KMBC story that reported on Tarwater opined that Missouri house speaker Jon Patterson said last spring’s stadium funding referendum “likely failed because there wasn’t a sense that Kansas City Jackson County were on the same page,” which, okay, Jon.

Nothing concrete, in other words, but the bidding war is clearly very much on. Presumably legislators are currently putting their heads together to figure out how to approve money in a way that doesn’t require going before voters, or at least going before voters with a “but we’re cutting your property taxes at the same time!” carrot. The Chiefs and Royals owners, meanwhile, have not publicly commented, which has been working pretty well so far as they’ve let competing elected officials do their work for them, bwahahaha.

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Deal to spend $500m+ in taxpayer money on new Spurs arena moves ahead, judge promises it won’t cost taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

Bexar County commissioners took another step toward approving at least half a billion dollars in tax money for a new San Antonio Spurs arena yesterday, voting 4-1 to approve a memorandum of understanding with San Antonio and team owner Peter Holt to start negotiating terms of an arena deal. Or perhaps that should be continue negotiating terms of an arena deal, because the initial framework of a deal is already in place:

The county’s so-called venue tax is made up of two taxes: one on hotel rooms and another on car rentals. It could yield up to $397 million in revenue if the hotel occupancy tax remains at 1.75%, or as much as $449 million if the county asks voters to raise that tax to the maximum of 2%, County Manager David Smith told commissioners early this month….

Aside from the venue tax, the new Spurs arena could be financed with other pots of public dollars, such as revenue from the city’s project financing zone and increases in property taxes within a tax increment reinvestment zone.

The hotel and car rental taxes appear to be headed for a public referendum, possibly in November, otherwise next May. The TIF district and project financing zone (basically a TIF for business and hotel taxes) wouldn’t have to go through a public vote, but would require the approval of the city council or county commission.

The total public outlay from all this is as yet undetermined. (The city is also considering gifting Holt a publicly owned golf course, market value likewise undetermined.) But it’s not stopping proponents of the arena project from saying it’s clearly better than the current situation, where the Spurs are forced to play in an ancient 23-year-old arena that is practically falling to bits, probably:

The county would need to pour about $78 million into improving the Frost Bank Center through 2029, Mike Wooley, co-founder of Venue Solutions Group, told commissioners Tuesday. The venue would require about $245 million worth of improvements over the next 20 years — if it continued hosting an NBA team.

The San Antonio Express-News doesn’t bother to ID Venue Solutions group, so let’s look them up: They were “launched in 2011 by three industry professionals with over 65 years of collective experience in the public assembly facility industry” (names of said professionals not included on the company website) and have done “facility condition analyses” for a bunch of different arenas, though when you click on “view case study” no actual studies are available. So while county judge Peter Sakai and county manager David Smith both said that’s $245 million the public wouldn’t have to spend on arena improvements if they built a new arena, there’s no way to tell how much the public would have to spend on improvements for a new arena, which in 20 years would be almost as old as the one the Spurs owner is desperate to get out of now.

But anyway, spending [insert large number here] dollars of tax money on a new Spurs arena to replace the one that was opened during Season 14 of The Simpsons won’t cost taxpayers anything, promises Sakai, because reasons:

Sakai made clear numerous times that putting this on the backs of County taxpayers is a non starter for him.

“For me to continue to have the county be invested, no homeowner property tax,” he said. “It cannot fall on the seniors. It cannot fall under disabled. It cannot fall on the veterans who are on fixed income. That’s that’s a deal breaker for me.”

Well, that’s okay then! Wherever the money comes from, it won’t take away from money for seniors or the disabled or veterans or adorable puppies, because they’ll have just as much public money at their disposal, from all the magic beans that will come with this deal, once it’s negotiated, for sure. Also, Sakai promises, the current Spurs arena will remain “sustainable and viable for the long term” and won’t “turn into the next Astrodome” — because that always works out well.

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