Search Results for: Mets

Friday roundup: Rays promise “intimate” stadium with ginormous upper deck, Cleveland running out of tax money to pay for Cavs and Guardians upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)

  • Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
  • Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
  • Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
  • I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
  • A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
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Friday roundup: NYC approves $780m NYCFC stadium in Queens, still doesn’t know what it’ll cost the public

access_time personNeil deMause

I keep meaning to find a place to mention it, and here is as good as any: sports economists J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys have taken up the task of updating Judith Grant Long’s epic database of stadium and arena deals, and the results are online as a CSV file. There are likely still going to be some debates about specific figures — the Buffalo Bills stadium is listed with an $850 million public cost, for example, because that’s what the New York Times said, but that leaves out state and county money set aside for future maintenance and upgrades — but it’s still a hugely useful resource for getting ballpark estimates (sorry) of both total and taxpayer costs. Bookmark it now, or just click the “Data” tab here anytime to find it!

That’s enough about that, let’s get to the news, oh the news, so very much the news:

  • The New York city council approved NYC F.C.‘s plan to build a Queens stadium across the street from the Mets‘ stadium, which is expected to cost $780 million and open in 2027. While construction costs are being covered by the team’s owners, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner and Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, it’s still unknown exactly how much the city will be giving up in property-tax breaks and discounted rent (the city Independent Budget Office estimated $516 million) or how much the city will be spending on infrastructure for the project (which includes housing and other stuff too, so it’d be tricky to determine exactly how much of infrastructure costs should be charged to the stadium). Ah well, plenty of time to figure that out after the agreements are all signed! Queens councilmember Shekar Krishnan cast the only dissenting vote, declaring, “We are not facing a stadium crisis in this city. We are facing a housing crisis, an inequality crisis and a climate crisis. Now we’re looking at a proposal that gives away public land worth hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing for a commercial soccer stadium. What is the benefit for the people of New York City?” You mean the joy of visiting Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium isn’t enough?
  • Patrick Tuohey of the Show-Me Institute wants to know what happened to the 2022 Populous study of the Kansas City Royals‘ stadium that projected it would cost more to repair than replace, thanks to “concrete cancer,” since it’s been taken down from the KC Ballpark District website. Good news and bad news, Patrick: The report is still there on the Wayback Machine, but it provides no sourcing at all for its figures. It does print them in very large type, though, and how could anything in a 48-point font be wrong?
  • Jackson County legislator Sean Smith polled his constituents about why they voted how they did on the Royals and Chiefs stadium tax surcharge referendum last week, and determined it’s because nobody listened to their concerns and engaged in too much “fear-based campaigning” by threatening the teams would leave. Smith didn’t release any detailed results of his survey, though, so it’s left as an exercise for the reader to imagine what the public’s concerns were, exactly.
  • Adding insult to injury department: Workers for the Oakland A’s weren’t told by team management that the franchise was relocating to Sacramento next year and that they would all be laid off as a result, they saw it on the TV news. “Thank you for ruining our lives,” said one A’s bartender only identified by CBS Sports as Tony. (Also, the layoffs have reportedly already begun, because John Fisher has clearly determined you don’t need concessions workers when you’ve so effectively alienated your fans that no one will come to your games.)
  • The Atlanta Braves claim that a new survey found their stadium-in-the-middle-of-suburban-nowhere ranks 13th out of 30 teams in “walkability,” and we don’t even need to debate whether it’s a dumb survey because it turns out 13th actually means 21st because it turns out the dumb survey people don’t know how to break ties.
  • “Can Minor League Baseball Survive Its Real Estate Problems?” asks the New York Times, but those problems were created by MLB when it bought and contracted the minor leagues and then forced cities to scramble to upgrade stadiums to avoid being left without a chair when the music stopped. Try to keep up, New York Times! Even without a sports department!
  • D.C. United wants to build a stadium for a minor-league affiliate in Baltimore, and the Baltimore Banner article on how “there hasn’t been enough information shared about the project” doesn’t even try to ask how much it would cost or who would pay for it, this has not been a great week for journalism. Here are some tips, guys, start with those!
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Friday roundup: NYCFC unveils images of Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, A’s reveal plans to blow a/c at fans’ feet

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we have reached the end of another programming week, one mercifully without Jerry Reinsdorf’s stadium subsidy demands going up yet again. That’s just about the only thing that didn’t happen this week, though, so let’s hit the news recap:

  • NYC F.C.‘s $780 million soccer stadium plan cleared another hurdle this week, getting the okay of the City Planning Commission, the last stop before a final city council vote. It also got some fresh renderings depicting how fans would enter the stadium through a giant cube-shaped entryway (dubbed The Cube, this team has a way with words) that would be covered in a giant video board that display the names of all five New York boroughs, in case you forget where you live. (The stadium is depicted bearing the name Naming Rights Sponsor Stadium, while the entryway in one image says “New York City FC” while in another it’s “Cube Entrance Sponsor,” pick a lane, guys.) Still up in the air: how the affordable housing component would work, where fans will park if Mets owner Steve Cohen refuses to let the soccer team use his parking lots across the street unless he gets a state casino license, and, oh yeah, how the whole thing would be paid for, someone should really look into that.
  • The Oakland A’s “spherical armadillo” stadium in Las Vegas would have “the highest number of suites, clubs and other high-end seating products” relative to size of any MLB stadium, according to Venues Now, which spoke to A’s president Dave Kaval on the subject. In addition to hardly any affordable tickets, Kaval promised that the air-conditioning would blow out from under people’s seats, something that’s used at the Sacramento Kings arena and in some Middle East soccer stadiums, and which the site reported Kaval said he’s “working with Henderson Engineers to find a way to make it work in MLB.” Also a work in progress: The A’s are playing an exhibition game in Las Vegas tonight, and plenty of good seats are still available.
  • The Virginia legislature has officially passed a budget without money for an Alexandria arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals, though Gov. Glenn Youngkin could still try for an amendment or a special session. State senate finance chair Louise Lucas, who has the power to kill budget bills by denying them hearings in her committee, doesn’t seem real amenable to that, though. One Alexandria restaurant owner tells D.C. News Now that he’s upset not because he wants arena traffic for his businesses, but because spending over $1 billion in public money on an arena would “alleviate some of the tax burden from the residents,” somebody’s been reading too many clown documents!
  • Two members of the Jackson County legislature will be holding a public hearing this Monday at 3 pm on the Kansas City Royals‘ $2 billion stadium plan and $1 billion public subsidy plan. While attendance at these things is never representative of the public as a whole — it’s almost guaranteed there will be a throng of construction workers bussed in to cheer the project on, for example — it will at least give us some hint of the public mood as we approach the April 2 deadline for voting on the 0.375% sales-tax surcharge extension that would fund the first chunk of the project. (The Kansas City Star editorial board is a no, at least until Royals owner John Sherman explains more about how the money, lease, and provisions for relocating businesses would work.)
  • The Chicago Bears owners are reportedly “close to” announcing a lakefront stadium in Chicago and are also still haggling with suburban cities over property tax breaks for a stadium there, never take seriously rumors that are spread by team execs themselves, just don’t.
  • Maricopa County and the city of Phoenix are considering a “partnership” to address the Arizona Diamondbacks owners’ stadium demands, which would … do something? Also this was just a letter that the county sent to the city council last August, and the council never replied, guess the Arizona Republic was having a real slow news day.
  • Would a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium increase the team’s attendance? Yes at first, then no after the honeymoon wears off in a few years. This report is not remotely new news, but it comes with lots of stats and charts! Guess the Tampa Bay Times opinion section was having a slow news day.
  • Sure, New York taxpayers are spending over $1 billion on a new Buffalo Bills stadium, but who can put a price on 16-foot-tall bison statues? ESPN reports that “there was some disappointment on social media among fans” that the statues aren’t bigger, since the “World’s Largest Buffalo Monument” in North Dakota is 26 feet tall, that does it, time to tear down the new stadium and build one with state-of-the-art bison.
  • New Mexico United‘s new stadium “costs the city nothing,” according to team president Ron Patel; KOAT-TV checked, and it’s actually nearly $29 million in public money, about half the total cost. Never take seriously cost estimates that are put forward by team execs, just don’t.
  • The Hawaii legislature is set to consider a bill to scrap a $350 million plan to rebuild Aloha Stadium so that the money can be used for wildfire recovery and housing instead. Rep. Gene Ward said he opposes the bill because “it’s not going to get anybody to come to the football games, regardless of how bad you are as a football player,” no, I don’t know what he meant by that either.
  • Finally, back on the A’s front, I was on this week’s Rickeyblog podcast, where we talked about all aspects of the team’s stadium situation, not least why fans in the Vegas stadium renderings are waving the flag of Gaddafi’s Libya and what that could mean for tourism. Give it a listen, you’ve got all weekend!
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White Sox, Bears working on united front for stadium demands, this usually doesn’t end well

access_time personNeil deMause

Last week, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state senate president Don Harmon both told the Chicago White Sox and Bears owners they should get together to plan a joint stadium deal, after news that the two teams would be targeting the same hotel tax money to help pay construction costs. This week, developer Related Midwest says it is working on getting the two teams to form just such a united front:

“We’re working with them … to have a financing partnership that makes sense for us and for them and for the city and the state,” President of Related Midwest Curt Bailey told the [Chicago] Sun-Times.

While only having to manage one piece of proposed subsidy legislation would certainly make things easier logistically for Illinois officials, it’s hard to see how it’s in the public’s advantage to have the people on the other side of the bargaining table collaborating against you instead of competing with each other. Certainly in other cities where teams have teamed up — the New York Yankees and Mets come to mind, and more recently the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles — it’s been more a case of whichever team seems better positioned politically taking the lead, while the other is content to sit back and say, “We’ll have what they’re having.” And the resulting subsidies, in such cases, can be record-breaking.

So far, Pritzker has made noises about wanting to ensure that state taxpayers would get a return on any public stadium spending, but it’s impossible to say whether he means real ROI or just clown job projections.

In the midst of all this, the Chicago Reader interviewed Sean Dinces, author of the book Bulls Market, which is about the city’s NBA team’s profiteering juggernaut, and he had a relevant tidbit to share about the last time owner Jerry Reinsdorf extracted stadium money for the White Sox:

I remember reading [Commissioner of Economic Development Robert] Mier and [Mayor Harold] Washington’s memos about the White Sox stadium in the Chicago History Museum’s archives. They viewed the situation as we have to do this because we’re expending so much political capital on other reform initiatives that we can shoot ourselves in the foot by being the administration that lost the White Sox. I don’t think the Washington administration was under the illusion that the White Sox stadium was going to be a major economic development for the city; they were clear-eyed that it was largely theater.

Saying “We’re not going to come out ahead in this deal, we’re just doing it to keep the team from moving” is a certain kind of clear-eyed, certainly — though given that Reinsdorf later admitted that his move threats were fake, maybe it’s better described as a certain kind of being under an illusion. And Dinces himself suggests that Chicagoans could do worse than to urge Mayor Brandon Johnson to hold a strong line and tell the team owners if they don’t like it they can go pound sand:

Honestly, I don’t think that people are realistic when they catastrophize over calling the team’s bluff. The chances are overwhelming that the team’s not going to go anywhere. Usually, this is just a bluff to see how much you can take advantage of gullible politicians and the public.

So far, calling team owners’ bluffs doesn’t seem to be how Johnson is thinking, if his asking White Sox management to collaborate on press statements around their stadium proposal is any indication. So far we’re very much in the initial jockeying stage of the White Sox and Bears’ stadium demands, but the tea leaves do not say promising things about how it’s likely to turn out for Illinois taxpayers.

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Queens residents face off over Mets owner’s parkland casino, but the real fight is yet to come

access_time personNeil deMause

On Monday night I dropped in on a gym in Corona, Queens to check out the second of three community town halls scheduled by New York state senator Jessica Ramos on New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plans to build an $8 billion casino project atop the city parkland currently in use as his team’s parking lots. After the first event back in May, Ramos had definitively pumped the brakes on state legislation that would be required to convert the parkland to another use, saying “a community discussion has been sorely lacking”; local opinion had been decidedly anti-casino at the initial meeting, so anticipation was high for the much-delayed followup.

As you can probably guess if you’ve ever been to one of these things — and don’t have to if you’re already read my article on the town hall that ran yesterday in Hell Gate — the vibes were intense from the start, especially once Ramos laid out the ground rules for what she hoped would be more workshop than shouting match:

After some brief crowd work from Ramos (“I know all the carpenters want to sit together, but that may not be possible…How was everybody’s Thanksgiving? I made waffles out of stuffing the next day!”) she laid out the ground rules for the night’s event. “We are going to roll up our sleeves today,” said the senator, and make sure “everybody understands what it would mean to build this or what it would mean for us not to build this.” To that end, two balloons had been set up at opposite ends of the gym. Those who wanted to craft a potential community benefits agreement to attach to Cohen’s plan were directed to sit by the pineapple balloon; those who wanted to work on an alternative plan, perhaps achieved by creating a community land trust, would sit by the flamingo balloon.

The crowd immediately split along ideological lines. Pineapples — many of whom wore union jackets or t-shirts from a newly formed group called the Coalition for Queens Advancement that featured Cohen’s metropolitanpark.com website printed prominently on the back — were pro-casino, hoping for new jobs and wanting mostly to ensure that they would be union ones. They outnumbered by about 2-to-1 the flamingos, who brought anti-casino signs and clutched handouts from a local anti-gentrification group called the Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance with a sketch of an alternative plan dubbed Phoenix Meadows that featured all green space and none of Cohen’s desired casinos, convention space, or even the ginormous parking garages (with solar panels on top) that the Mets owner planned to hold all the cars that would be displaced from the open-air parking lots. (The numerical disparity was possibly partly explained by the fact that FADA had decided to boycott the town hall as a casino-enabling sham and instead rally outside, with organizer Joseph Jung calling it an attempt to “socialize the community into accepting a casino just by trying to pass a community benefits agreement that can’t be enforced anyway.”)

Nobody on either side, it quickly became clear, had any intention of discussing their opposing stances with each other, or even writing down suggestions on the index cards that Ramos’s staff had dutifully provided for every folding table. The end of the meeting featured the senator grabbing a wireless mic and stalking the dwindling crowd like Phil Donahue, as flamingos argued that city parkland should be used for parks, while pineapples countered that since Cohen was granted a 99-year lease on the parking lots as part of his 2006 stadium deal, might as well try to extract some concessions like bike lanes or, as one of the younger participants requested, “solar panels so it doesn’t use oil or stuff that is bad.”

(If you’ve read this far and are wondering when I’m going to get to the potential public costs of all this: That part didn’t come up at all. As I noted the last time I wrote about this for Hell Gate, if the developers are able to build on city parkland without paying property taxes or rent or PILOTs or anything, that could amount to a huge public subsidy — but beyond the $8 billion construction price tag and the required $500 million tithe to the state for a casino license if one is approved, Cohen has steadfastly refused to discuss the finances of his plan, and nobody from his team showed up at the gym to take questions or even play with the pencils.)

All of which was fine enough, because aside from giving Ramos some talking points for her eventual faceoff with Cohen, nothing that was said on the evening is likely to matter much. FADA’s intimations that she’s a casino quisling aside, Ramos clearly seems intent on finding a third way that will transform the parking lots without simply swallowing the Mets owner’s plan whole: She at one point warned of “a casino that often extracts wealth and that could become obsolete now that all the gambling is happening on people’s phones,” but in the next breath declared that “we do not have the option of keeping the asphalt.” Cohen, meanwhile, has dismissed any talk of a casino-free development as “economically not feasible.” And each side has only one hammer, and that’s the power to block the other’s plans — Ramos by refusing to pass enabling legislation for development, Cohen by calmly tapping that 99-year lease and saying “casino or bust” — meaning the whole thing is likely to come down to a giant game of chicken, with both parties waiting to see who’ll blink first.

During a brief press scrum while everyone scrambled to pick their balloon affiliations, I asked Ramos how she thought those talks would go down, or even when they would happen. “I’m going to continue to meet with everybody who asks for a meeting,” she demurred. “This is going to be an ongoing conversation.” The next town hall is currently slated for sometime in 2024, after which the real haggling will no doubt commence.

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Mets owner finally says out loud he wants to build an $8B casino complex on city-owned parking lots

access_time personNeil deMause

New York Mets owner Steve Cohen yesterday revealed more details of his plans to build an $8 billion casino complex in the Citi Field parking lot, and, yep, that looks pretty much like it sounded when he first talked about it last winter:

Sorry, no vaportecture images with smiling gamblers raising their fists in the air while fireworks go off overhead. Gotta save something for the encore!

Cohen has said he — and/or his business partners Hard Rock, who would run the casino — will put up the $8 billion, but there are still a few question marks about the plan. First off, Cohen does not actually own a casino license: He’s hoping to be granted one of three expected to be given out by the state for the NYC area in the next year or three. This, in fact, is a large part of why he’s had this “Metropolitan Park” plan sketched out now, as the state is expected to prioritize projects that seem shovel-ready — to avoid going through the lengthy vetting process and then ending up with a project that can’t actually happen.

“Can actually happen” is up in the air as well, though, as Cohen doesn’t actually own the land he wants to build on, which is city-owned parking lots that are technically public parkland. Courts have consistently ruled that “fun stuff” does not qualify as a legally recognized park activity, so that means the state legislature would have to pass a bill demapping the parking lots as parkland. Jeff Aubrey, the state assemblymember who represents the district, has already introduced a bill to do so; Jessica Ramos, the state senator who represents the district and who also may challenge Mayor Eric Adams for City Hall in two years, has so far declined to introduce a parallel bill, saying she wants to hear more from her constituents and consider other alternatives for the site. “If you look at everybody who spoke, about two-thirds expressed not wanting a casino,” Ramos told me after holding a town hall on the project in May; she has annoucned another one for Monday, November 27.

Of course, Cohen has a hammer, too, which is that as the leaseholder for the parking lots, nothing can really happen on the site without his say-so. There is likely lots of gamesmanship still to come, in other words, not to mention financial details of who will pay what rent and property taxes — if an $8 billion casino development gets deemed tax-exempt because it’s on public land, that’d be a ton of tax breaks. Right now this is just about Cohen getting the ball rolling on building public support (or at least legislative support) for his casino dreams, and trying to make his plan seem less vapory than the ones across town.

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As NYCFC’s $780m stadium enters approval process, no one sure how much it’ll cost city or where fans will park

access_time personNeil deMause

New York City F.C.‘s long-awaited $780 million entered the city ULURP land use process last week, setting off a clock that is supposed to lead to votes by the local community board (that one’s only advisory), borough president, city planning commission, and city council by next April. And one potential hurdle seems to have been cleared: Queens borough president Donovan Richards, who had previously said he might hold up the plan until the city reinstates a local street food market, now says he’s reached a tentative agreement on the market.

If that removes one unknown, there are still a passel of others, even as final votes to rezone the land and approve the stadium project could start as soon as December. I’ve finally finished going through the draft environmental impact statement that is required for projects going through ULURP, and there are still a bunch of outstanding questions:

  • It’s “expected” that NYC F.C. fans will park at the Mets stadium across the street, but Mets owner Steve Cohen hasn’t agreed to that yet, presumably because he’s still hoping to use it as leverage to extract approval of the casino he wants to build next door. The DEIS includes an “alternative transportation scenario” in which NYCFC would run shuttle buses from parking lots in College Point on the other side of Flushing Bay, which is, yes, an alternative, but not a good one.
  • Also TBD, according to the DEIS, is “approval of City capital funding of infrastructure improvements,” which Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer last year guesstimated as being “typically in the $200 to 300 million range,” though Mayor Eric Adams’ administration wouldn’t provide further details. There’s no date for the city council to vote on that, but it’s certainly possible that the rezoning votes will all take place first, making the project a bit of a fait accompli by the time the city money goes up for formal approval.
  • The stadium will sit on city land, but will pay no property taxes and only a nominal rent of $30 million worth (present value) of future payments over 50 years. (This assumes that the Willets Point land will still be usable in 50 years, which, uh, might want to check the latest headlines, guys.) The city Independent Budget Office earlier this year estimated that the cost of those tax breaks could end up being worth a whopping $516 million (totaling $1.7 billion in individual lost taxes over half a century). That would bring the potential city subsidy to an even more whopping $800 million or more.

The particulars of ULURP mean that very little of the massive amounts of paperwork needed end up being about money, with far more attention being paid to things like potential adverse impacts on local activities. (The additional housing to be built alongside the stadium is “not expected to result in a significant adverse impact on public libraries,” you’ll be pleased to learn.) This doesn’t mean that the stadium’s potential $800 million public subsidy can’t be raised at the public hearings to come — people can, and will, raise pretty much anything and everything — but it’s not technically part of the scope of the ULURP oversight. Once hearing dates are set I’ll post them here, so we can all follow along together the process of sausages being made.

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Friday roundup: Vegas A’s stadium in limbo; so are Coyotes’ future, maybe Mets’ casino?

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: The Nevada legislature never got around to holding its second day of Oakland A’s stadium hearings yesterday, and while there was no announcement of why, the obvious conclusion is that it’s because they don’t have the votes to pass anything. The current plan is to reconvene on Monday, with the time until then used to see if amending the bill will turn any legislators’ heads: Rumored changes include removing the A’s exemption from the state’s live entertainment tax (which could save the state about $100 million in tax breaks, though that’s a subsidy I didn’t include in my latest estimate, so it would still leave the total public cost at around $500 million) and improving the team’s community benefits agreement to include things like donations to a local food bank (which wouldn’t amount to much at all), so my question stands.

At least A’s owner John Fisher has one friend in the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board, which helpfully asserted yesterday that though the economic benefits of a stadium are questionable, this is about “making the region a more attractive place to work, live, invest in and visit,” which Las Vegas desperately needs because nobody visits there, it’s too crowded, or something? Maybe Fisher could actually use some more persuasive friends, though presumably that’s who he has in behind-closed-doors meetings with state legislators between now and Monday.

But that’s not all that’s happening, not by a long shot:

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Friday roundup: Nevada wants county to share A’s stadium cost, Commanders execs think Virginia will give them $1.5B to move there

access_time personNeil deMause

Yesterday was a rare off day in the Oakland A’s saga as we all looked for the long-awaited Las Vegas stadium legislation to drop — and it still hasn’t, and according to the Nevada Independent, there are reasons:

  • According to the ever-popular “sources close to negotiations,” the reason there’s no A’s stadium legislation yet in the Nevada legislature, just five business days before the deadline for the session, is that state legislators are only willing to put up $150-195 million in transferable tax credits, with another $200-million-plus coming from Clark County super-TIF tax kickbacks. Whether the county can decide on how much it’s willing to kick in before next Friday is unclear, as is whether the Nevada legislature would vote on its share before the county does, as is whether the state would call a special session if needed — but at least we sort of know how much the total subsidy would be? Sort of? It sure would be nice to see the fine print, but it sounds like that won’t happen until the backroom dealing is complete, which is not how democracy is supposed to work but is 100% the way it often does.
  • A’s officials also released the results of a poll that showed that Clark County registered voters mostly supported building a stadium for the A’s, so long as you didn’t tell them who would be paying for it.
  • Finally from Vegas, the Bally’s Corporation has sent a memo to its employees saying it would build a new hotel next to an A’s stadium, which KNTV says would be “unique” but the stadium I’m going to tonight says otherwise.
  • Washington Commanders execs believe Virginia “will offer the best incentive package — potentially up to $1.5 billion” to build a new stadium there once Josh Harris completes his purchase of the team, according to a prospectus prepared by Harris’s company and obtained by ESPN. The prospectus also projects the Commanders bringing in $959 million a year by 2032-33, or $1.05 billion with a new stadium, which raises questions of 1) why Harris can’t build a stadium with his own money if he wants to so bad and 2) why Harris really wants a new stadium if it’s only a matter of $100 million a year in revenue, but the headlines are all about which state will win the right to throw money at the team, go horsies!
  • A bill to freeze property taxes on the Arlington Park racetrack site if the Chicago Bears owners build a stadium on it is on hold for now, and isn’t expected to be voted on this session. It could be brought up next session, though, by which time hopefully the Chicago media will actually report on how much of a tax expenditure that would amount to, no rush.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is reportedly stalling on allowing NYC F.C. fans to park in his stadium parking lots (really the city’s parking lots, but Cohen controls them and gets all the revenue from them) in hopes of using it as leverage to get permission to build a casino there, according to “multiple people familiar with the negotiations,” which almost has to mean NYC F.C. or its political allies who are steamed at Cohen. There’s a town hall being held tonight to discuss the casino plans — it’ll be interesting to see if any NYC F.C. advocates turn out in force to either support Cohen or yell at him.
  • Andy Zimbalist really wants you to know that whether the Worcester Red Sox deal was good like he originally reported or bad like a new paper he hasn’t read concluded, it was better than if he hadn’t been paid $225/hour for his services.

Okay, gotta get going to that baseball game. See you back here on Monday!

 

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A’s deal isn’t first stadium Reggie Jackson has stumped for on a team payroll

access_time personNeil deMause

The New York Mets visited Oakland this weekend to play the A’s, and yesterday the teams marked the 50th anniversary of the 1973 World Series, in which the A’s beat the Mets in seven games for their second of three consecutive titles. Reggie Jackson was among the A’s alums on hand, and he had a lot to say about the team’s need for a new stadium, which owner John Fisher has promised to build as soon as he gets a billion dollars or so in government infrastructure money:

“No, they’re not going to have a team here. You can’t play with three, four, five six thousand people in the stands,” Jackson said Sunday at the Coliseum before the A’s held a celebration for the 1973 World Series championship team. “You have no suites sold, you have no revenues here. What’s the signage look like? You’ve got to have revenue.”…

I’m very disappointed. I’d love to see the team stay here,” Jackson said. “But I don’t care who you are. You can’t lose $100 million a year. Can’t lose $50 (million). You can’t do that. You can do it once in a while, do it for two to three years.

“You’re not going to be a billionaire long as you keep losing $100 (million) a year.”

Harsh words! And important to hear them from a beloved baseball legend who doesn’t work for Major League Baseball in any — oh, hmmm. But still, he’s just a team employee, not an owner or anyone who hopes one day to become — oh, hmmmmmm.

(The San Jose Mercury News didn’t mention Jackson being an executive assistant to Houston Astros management, but it did mention that according to Forbes’ estimates, Fisher isn’t losing $100 million a year on the A’s, he’s turning a profit of about $30 million a year. Details!)

For the record, this isn’t even Mr. October’s first go-around at publicly stumping for stadium funding. Back in 2006, as the New York Yankees‘ stadium project neared its final approval, it was Jackson who went before the city council as an executive assistant to George Steinbrenner to explain why spending over a billion dollars in public money on tearing down Yankee Stadium and building a new one would be, in fact, a gift from Steinbrenner to the people of New York:

“The Yankees weren’t always a good partner in the Bronx,” admitted Jackson, who said community members now had a chance to “create a new template” to “get what you want” and “share in the revenue.”

Jackson claimed George Steinbrenner was now trying to make amends. “There is some embarrassment in the Yankees,” he said. “The Steinbrenner family has financial wherewithal to make things happen. I see an opportunity now to get engaged, and to ask the Yankees to help you.”

This did not work out at all for the Bronx community, either in terms of direct community benefits spending or in getting new parks built promptly to replace the ones Steinbrenner bulldozed, or the city getting paid for fan parking on public land or, really, anything. But Reggie was never about strict factual accuracy so much as getting in the papers — “they made the tabloids just for me,” as the song goes — which may help explain his 29-years-and-counting career as an executive assistant.

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