Before we get to this week’s news roundup, some old business from last week: I shamefully forgot to give a shoutout to John Mozena for his outstanding liveblog of the stadium-related papers at University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s annual sports economics conference after I was unable to attend. Please check out John’s work at the Center for Economic Accountability and throw some coin his way if you like, or at the very least get some of his free “Pay For Your Own Damn Stadium” stickers.
Back in the present, you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with this week’s avalanche of news items:
The North Carolina legislature is debating whether to set aside unspecified hundreds of millions of dollars in its final budget for a stadium for a potential future MLB expansion team “in or near Wake County,” which would mean the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Triangle” area, as distinct from the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point “Triad” area that voted down paying for a stadium to lure the Minnesota Twins back in 1998. The state has a $700 million Economic Development Project Reserve that it can designate for “high-yield” development projects, and while sports stadiums are nobody’s idea of high-yield in terms of actual measurable impact, there’s got to be somebody somewhere willing to write a consulting report claiming otherwise.
Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch says team ownership is ready to get back on line for a new or renovated stadium now that their current home is 25 whole years old: “Thirty years is the expiration date. Guess what Acrisure Stadium is? Twenty-five years. So I promise you, conversations are happening behind the scenes to figure out kind of what the next move is as the Rooneys are looking for an upgrade in their stadium.” The next move, apparently, is to send your former-players-turned-YouTube-creators out to talk up how stadiums just straight-up become obsolete after 30 years and somebody has to build you a new one and see if that flies.
Illinois’ efforts to retain the Chicago Bears in the wake of team execs’ announcement that they’re absolutely, definitely (maybe) moving to Indiana remain very much undead, with Gov. JB Pritzker saying his state is ready to act but first needs “the Bears to focus on what they want,” adding, “they have not been clear about what is the bill that they need, and how do they need to look, and then, can they get the votes necessary to get it done in the House and the Senate.” State house stadium bill sponsor Kam Buckner noted that both that body and the state senate have passed competing bills — there’s also now a third one, filed by State Rep. Martin McLaughlin despite the legislature not even being in session, that would raise the size thresholds on a “megaprojects” bill to where it would only apply to an Arlington Heights stadium — and “the Bears have to decide what makes most sense for them, which one of those bills is the bill they can get behind and wrap their arms around that can help them remain here in the state of Illinois,” adding, “We cannot have a special session until we have a deal. You don’t call a special session to draw up a flight plan. You call a special session to land the plane.” The hope here seems to be that if Bears officials pick a favorite tax break bill and declare that it’ll be enough to get them to stay in Illinois, that’ll get legislators in both houses to vote for it, which is absolutely the kind of bootstrapping your own momentum thing that you try to do when you’re pushing legislation that just got nowhere.
Building a stadium district in Denver’s Burnham Yard railyards may be easier said than done for Broncos ownership, given little details like the land is mostly zoned only for industrial use. This is Broncos owner Greg Penner’s problem, of course, except that, as the lengthy Denver Post article on this only reveals down in its 28th paragraph, Penner could end up asking for TIF property tax breaks to pay for his larger development. “The track record for delivering on these promises by teams in development,” noted University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, “is shaky. And that’s being super generous.” (Credit where credit is due to the Post: “The naked man, in retrospect, was the least of Sean Herman’s worries” is an excellent teaser lede, though still not quite up there with “The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming.”)
Athletics owner John Fisher now says his mistake in announcing a stadium plan in Las Vegas was not talking to the media himself enough about it: “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?” He then went on to tell The Athletic absolutely nothing about how he plans to make a $2 billion stadium (with $600 million in public subsidies) in what would be MLB’s smallest market work out, especially when his development partner Bally’s may bail on its part and leave Fisher to fund such additional amenities as a $100 million parking structure. Hearing from John Fisher, it turns out, also leads to frustration, who’da thunk it?
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones would like Spurs minority owner Michael Dell (net worth: $246 billion) to pay for some or all of her city’s $489 million share of a downtown arena. Dell hasn’t responded to her request, and Stanford University Roger Noll says that’s likely because the multibillionaire knows spending your own money on new sports venues is a dumb idea — “the incremental benefits of having a new arena are not as big as the cost” — which is why it’s only worth it if you can stick taxpayers with the bill.
The first of the Buffalo Bills‘ family of stainless steel buffalo statues has arrived, and fans are excitedly pointing out that bisons don’t really look like that! They’re not even usually made of steel!
Fairly regularly I get asked, “When are you going to write another book on sports stadiums?” I get the impetus behind the question: The first edition of Field of Schemes came out almost 30 years ago at this point, and while the book has been updated twice since then, a lot of stadium and arena shenanigans have gone down in the interim that are worth talking about in greater detail (or at least a more organized format) than the rambling ongoing conversation that is the 28 years of posts archived on this website.
There are two reasons why I haven’t pursued it, though. One is that, to be blunt, writing a book is a hell of a lot of work — I should know, I’ve done it twice — and there’s no way it would generate enough additional sales over what Field of Schemes still sells each year to make it a sustainable use of my time. (Not to mention that Joanna Cagan, who shouldered half the workload the first time around, is otherwise occupied now.) And second, a hypothetical Field of Schemes II wouldn’t look that different from the original book, thanks to the fact that the sports subsidy game is alarmingly unchanged over the last three to four decades: In the most recent revised edition of Field of Schemes, it was amusing to update the “Art of the Steal” chapter on the standard stadium playbook as “Art of the Steal Revisited” and conclude “Yup, owners are still deploying the same six gambits” while providing a few more recent examples, but how many more times does anyone really want to read the same conclusions written in slightly different ways?
That said, there are a few new developments that have cropped up over the years that are worth expounding on in a little more length than the daily news cycle really allows. The state-of-the-art clause dodge. The weird and wonderful world of sports venue vaportecture. The Casino Night Fallacy. I would genuinely enjoy writing more definitive essays on these topics — and even if that won’t amount to the word count (or the required work hours) of a book, it should make for a nice collection for subscribers to this site, especially now that I’ve run out of numbered cab-hailing lady art prints to send you all. Call it Field of Schemes: How It’s Going. (No, please let’s not actually call it that, though that is the working title of the Google doc that currently contains all my notes.)
Here’s how it’s going to work: Every month or so, I’ll complete a chapter on a topic that has come up since the last edition of Field of Schemes. It will immediately be made available to all monthly Patreon subscribers at the $5/month level and up. Once enough of these chapters have been completed — I have a list of seven to 10 topics I’m hoping to hit that are informative, funny, or both — I’ll package the whole thing into either a zine or a minibook (depending how many pages I have and what the most cost-effective binding option is) and send out both physical copies and an ebook version to both monthly and one-time donors, to sit alongside your copies of the real book on your real bookshelves.
The first installment, “The Grift That Keeps on Giving,” is available now as a free sample. If it looks like something you’d like to read more of, and you’re already a monthly FoS supporter, you don’t have to do anything: You’ll be receiving future chapters via email over the next year. (Supporters at the Cheapo level will want to upgrade for access.) If it’s something you’d like to read more of and you’re not currently a monthly subscriber, you can either sign up now, or wait until the whole project is finished and then make a one-time donation that’ll get you a copy. (And, yes, it will also get you fridge magnets, there will always be more fridge magnets.)
It’s a bit of a weird hybrid project, but then, these are weird times, for publishing as for everything else. If you have any questions, suggestions, or requests, please post them in comments below. This should be a fun excursion, and I’m looking forward to getting started.
This is a sample chapter of a forthcoming minibook supplement to Field of Schemes, to be published in 2027. To receive access to additional chapters as they’re finished and a printed copy when the whole project is complete, sign up as a Field of Schemes supporter.
In 1990, voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio went to the polls to vote on a hotly contested issue: whether to approve “sin tax” surcharges on alcohol and tobacco to raise money for new homes for the Cleveland Indians and Cavaliers. For a municipality whose schools were already starting to run short of funds in the wake of state property tax caps, slapping taxes on products disproportionately bought by lower-income residents in order to send money to wealthy sports owners was controversial, and the measure only passed by a narrow margin, 51.7% to 48.7%. But even if it came at a cost — about $170 million worth of extra fees on beer and cigarettes over the next 15 years—at least Cleveland had resolved one longstanding headache. “Happily,” noted Cleveland Plain Dealer sportswriter Bob Dolgan following the vote, “the new stadium will finally end talk about the Indians leaving town.”
This turned out to be perhaps a bit overly optimistic. Worries over Cleveland’s teams leaving town would, in fact, soon enough become a permanent feature of the local political landscape. First, the baseball and basketball projects ended up racking up about $30 million in cost overruns, which the city and county were required to cover. Then, five years after the initial vote, county residents were called back to the polls to give the okay for another round of sports funding — this time, they approved extending the sin taxes for another decade to provide money for a football stadium to host an expansion Browns team, after owner Art Modell had won permanent villain status by taking the original and absconding with it to Baltimore.
In 2014, it was back to the polls yet again. With the Indians and Cavaliers leases requiring the city and county to cover the cost of everything from major upgrades to replacing light bulbs, county residents approved an extension of the original sin tax for two more decades, raising $260 million to pay for “major capital repairs” on sports venues barely out of their teens. (Baseball team officials dragooned ushers into backing the measure by ordering them to wear “Keep Cleveland Strong” stickers on the job, reportedly under penalty of firing.) Another two years after that, Cavsowner Dan Gilbert asked for and got $140 million more to add public space and a hulking glass exterior wall to his team’s arena. (He would later ask for several hundred thousand more for a special coating to stop birds from blindly crashing into it.) The upgrade demands kept arriving, even as the remaining money in the sin tax fund dwindled: By 2025, county officials were looking at having to spend $400 million more on mandated future repairs than could be covered by future sin taxes, and were considering raising general sales taxes on other goods to cover the cost.
Soaring costs, shortened shelf lives
Ever since sports team owners discovered in the 1980s that they could boost their profits by adding stadium subsidies to their more typical revenue streams of selling tickets, hot dogs, and cable deals, the public price tags of new buildings have soared. Taxpayer costs typically ran less than $200 million per sports venue in the early 1990s; by the early 2020s, public contributions of more than $1 billion were becoming common, an increase of more than double the rate of inflation.
And just as quickly, team owners soon discovered that these initial stadium checks didn’t have to be their last public payday, as there were plenty of ways to go back to the well again and again for fresh infusions of taxpayer cash. Call it the grift that keeps on giving: If a team owner is clever enough about how to structure their lease language, they can turn a one-time windfall into a perpetual stream of public funds for their own private use.
Elected officials will often portray this as just the natural state of things: Things get old, and need replacing. “It is one of the oldest arenas in the league, which is hard for some of us to believe because it seems like it was just built,” Cuyahoga County executive Armond Budish said in 2016, when the county agreed to foot the bill for upgrades to a then 21-year-old Cavs arena. “But the useful life of arenas is not considered to be all that long.”
That hadn’t been the case for much of the 20th century, a time when team owners thought nothing of playing in buildings half a century old or more. Most of the new venues built then were either to support expansion into the South and West, as air travel made nationwide leagues more feasible, or to allow for multipurpose stadiums — the much-derided “concrete donuts” — that were thought to be more amenable to a newly car-focused suburban fan base.
All that changed once team owners realized stadiums and arenas were more than places to play games: They were also a mechanism for earning more on higher ticket prices and sales of everything from luxury suites to more elaborate food and drink options, while sticking taxpayers with the bill for these new amenities. Socializing costs and privatizing profits is a time-honored way to make money at taxpayer expense, as any banker bailed out by federal funds after the 2008 financial crisis could tell you; the main innovation made by sports team owners was in figuring out how to convince elected officials to pay for their new wine bars.
As Orlando Magic VP Cari Coats explained in 2001, with unusual candor, when her team was seeking a new basketball arena just 12 years after its previous one had opened: “We don’t want a new building just to have a new building. We would just stay where we are. If we’re using the revenue to build the building, then we’re not getting the revenue, and we’re right back where we started, and why do we have a new building?”
Sports economist Rod Fort put it even more bluntly. Asked at the time what was a reasonable shelf life for a modern sports venue, he deadpanned: “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year.”
The sweetheart lease time bomb
Cleveland’s problem, then, wasn’t that its new sports facilities hadn’t been built to last, but that its lease agreements with teams were exercises in planned obsolescence. In securing public stadium funding, the Indians, Cavs, and Browns owners had not only placed the buildings themselves under public ownership — handy for avoiding having to pay property taxes — but had secured leases requiring the city and county’s joint sports authority to cover future capital expenses. And unlike a private landlord who makes improvements to a property in hopes of charging more for it, those leases also prevented Cleveland and Cuyahoga County from getting added rent money or venue revenues in exchange for footing the bill for upgrades.
At the time the first Cleveland sin tax vote passed, Ken Silliman was working in the city’s law department, near the start of a career in local government that would lastnearly four decades. Back then, Silliman explained, no city or county officials gave any thought to the need to kick in for additional stadium costs down the road.“In 1990, that was not on people’s minds,” he recalled. “We’ve got basically a near emergency situation, we need to find a way to fund two new facilities. And there was not a lot of focus on what happens once they start aging and they needed capital repairs.”
In what should have been a surprise to no one, similar recurring emergencies began cropping up in city after American city. Perhaps the king of the open-faucet approach to sports subsidies was Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon. In 1999, Simon moved his team into a new $183 million downtown arena, for which he received $191 million in city money in exchange for a 20-year lease where he would pay just $1 a year in rent. Indianapolis officials boasted that Simon would be forced to pay off the city’s costs, plus $50 million in damages, if he tried to break the lease early: “We’ve made a provision that at the worst we end up with a first-rate facility that’s debt-free,” said city negotiator James Snyder. His boss, Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, said the choice had been stark: “Either we would have the Pacers and a new arena or an empty old arena.”
Goldsmith, at the time, was widely seen as a bit of a golden boy mayor. A county prosecutor with a reputation as a government “reinventor,”he had set out following his election in 1990 to privatize city services by using what he called the “Yellow Pages test”: “If the phone book lists three companies that provide a certain service, the city probably should not be in that business.” At the same time, he laid off hundreds of city workers, especially those responsible for oversight of city regulations. The results weren’t great. An attempt to privatize city swimming pools was withdrawn after three years when fees by private operators soared and pool attendance plummeted; when contracts for privately run golf courses provided that all capital improvements would be paid for by the city while virtually all revenues would go to the new private managers, the pros predictably hiked greens fees and kept the windfall profits for themselves.
Goldsmith’s proclivity for sweetheart contracts, it soon turned out, extended to sports leases as well. The mayor left the door open to future subsidy demands by providing Simon’s Pacers with only a 20-year lease, a decade shorter than most arena leases, while adding an opt-out clause that would allow Simon to move the team sooner if it showed operating losses. (Goldsmith apparently really liked opt-out clauses. He later inserted one into Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay’s lease at the Hoosier Dome, a decision that eventually led to Irsay receiving a new stadium in 2008 with what was at the time the largest public subsidy in NFL history, just 24 years after the city had paid to build its predecessor.)
Handing a franchise an opt-out clause wasn’t just an insurance policy for the team. It was also a loaded gun. A team owner with an opt-out clause doesn’t have to leave town, or even break their lease, to cash in on its benefits; instead, by merely gesturing at the possibility of opting out, they can encourage public officials to hand over additional money to avoid facing even the threat of a team breaking its lease and moving.
This is what Simon set out to do with the Pacers. In 2010, with nine years to go on his 20-year lease, Simon got the city of Indianapolis to provide another $33.5 million in exchange for him agreeing not to opt out of his deal for another three years. In 2014, he extended the Pacers’ lease through 2024, in exchange for $160 million more in public cash, which he used for everything from operating costs like liability insurance and security to upgrades to locker rooms and concessions areas. In 2019, Simon negotiated yet another lease extension for an additional 20 years — this time in exchange for another $600 million for more operating subsidies along with “technology upgrades.” By doling out lease extensions in short increments, Simon had managed to turn an initial $191 million windfall into nearly $1 billion in taxpayer cash, with the possibility of demanding still more once 2044 approached.
Pay-to-play
This kind of stadium recidivism soon began to catch on with other sports team owners looking to find a way to get local governments to throw good money after bad. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson took $87.5 million for a six-year extension of his lease from 2013 to 2019. Three years later, Atlanta Hawks owner Tony Ressler got $142.5 million in exchange for 18 more lease years. Three years after that, Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver agreed to accept $168 million to keep his team in town for an additional 15 years beyond 2019. All of these teams were playing in relatively new homes — the Panthers stadium and Hawks arena were each just 17 years old at the time the lease extensions were negotiated — none of which stopped their owners from demanding to be paid to continue to play in them.
In some cases, team owners have gotten elected officials to set aside future public spending on upgrades to their stadiums before those stadiums have even opened. In 2013, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed proudly announced that a new $1 billion Atlanta Falcons stadium would be ”a great public-private partnership” because the city would only have to put up $200 million toward the construction cost. Falcons owner (and billionaire Home Depot founder) Arthur Blank, it was promised, would cover the other $800 million.
Further investigation by local journalists, though, turned up a loophole. While the city’s newly created hotel-motel tax fund would only provide $200 million for the Falcons at first, it would keep on accumulating money once the initial construction cost was paid off. And rather than return any additional hotel tax funds to the city treasury, the proceeds would instead be directed to a “waterfall fund” earmarked for future “maintenance, operation and improvement” of the new Falcons stadium. As a result, the total public cost of the allegedly $200 million subsidy, Blank eventually admitted years later, would end up being “close to $700 million in public money.”
In the years following Blank’s sleight of hand, laying claim to an unending stream of tax money became a popular gambit for sports owners. In 2022, a $1.2 billion renovation subsidy that the state of Maryland had approved for Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos and Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti turned out to be worth potentially hundreds of millions more, thanks to a similar endless flow of future taxes. In fact, boasted Maryland Stadium Authority chair Tom Kelso, he viewed the stadium funding bills as “evergreen”: “Every time there is a new bond issue, the lease would have to be extended to last as long as the bond for the most recent project. … It allows the stadium authority to borrow up to $1.2 billion. As those bonds are paid down, it creates the capacity to borrow back again.” The state, in essence, had created a $1.2 billion slush fund for Baltimore’s team owners to tap again and again, creating an effectively bottomless pool of taxpayer money for future upgrades.
On the one hand, this was a creative solution to covering future sports spending needs: Maryland would hopefully be able to avoid continually having to dig under the sofa cushions for more tax money in dribs and drabs like Cleveland and Indianapolis have — albeit at the significant cost of writing effectively blank checks to the Orioles and Ravens up front. But it also goes to show how focusing solely on the initial cost of stadium construction can blind both elected officials and the public to the far greater sums of money they can end up being on the hook for down the road.
These kinds of continuing subsidy deals make it increasingly hard to pin down exactly how much a stadium has cost the public. If the preliminary price tag ends up being less expensive than the in-game purchases that follow, what is the true “final” cost of buying in? One way to evaluate this cost is in years of control: If a city gets a team owner to agree to a certain length of lease extension in exchange for a fresh round of public cash, then one can calculate the public expense in terms of cost per additional year before the team owner is free to come back with hand out again.
Just like up-front subsidies for stadiums, the public costs of lease extensions keep breaking new records every year. Just 11 years after Richardson received his $87.5 million in renovation cash in 2013, his successor as Panthers owner, David Tepper (Richardson had been forced to sell the team following multiple claims of sexual harassment of his employees), negotiated $600 million in additional publicly funded upgrades for the team’s privately owned stadium. Since the new deal only required Tepper to stay put for another 15 years — after that, he could leave if he paid off the city’s remaining debt on its $600 million expense — the per-year cost of the deal would be $40 million for each additional year of the team’s lease, tying the Ravens for the most costly per-year lease extension in sports history. It was a record that would stand for only another year and a half, until Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeffrey Vinik garnered $250 million in arena renovations from Hillsborough County in exchange for a lease extension of a mere six years, setting a new benchmark of $41.7 million per year.
“Cities need to be thinking a lot more about the long-term capital repair consequences” of sports venues, advised Silliman. To that end, he said, Cleveland’s latest sin tax extension — enacted when he was chief of staff to Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson — at least anticipated the need to set aside funds for future expenses, even if it ended up falling short of what the team owners’ leases required the public to cover. And it’s those leases, Silliman agrees, that are at the heart of the problem. “The only way another city or county could do better than we did in 2014 was to have more protective leases that put more of the burden of capital repairs on the teams,” he says.
To achieve that, though, would require a lot more backbone from local elected officials during sports negotiations — and possibly new legislation to make it easier for cities to play hardball or voters to force them to via public ballots — to prevent city councils and county commissions from treating every stadium and arena demand as an emergency in need of a solution, no matter what the future costs. Because once you’ve handed a billionaire a money printing machine, it’s awfully hard to convince them that they should ever turn it off.
If last Friday’s announcement that the Chicago Bears were “advancing” a stadium project in Hammond, Indiana was meant to end debate about where the team’s new home will be, it’s not working. If it was meant to stir up debate, by reigniting the bidding war that fizzled when the Illinois legislature declined to pass a big tax subsidy bill, it’s going gangbusters.
Porter County Commissioner Jim Biggs said Indiana’s plan to raise food and beverage and hotel taxes in his county, which does not include Hammond, would face a tough road to approval by the county commission: “To collect millions of dollars here and send it across county lines for something like a sports stadium … why would we do that? We have our own problems to deal with.” In Lake County, meanwhile, which does include Hammond, the president of the county council — yes, there’s a council and a commission for each Indiana county, go look at the org charts if you dare — said while he’s in favor of raising taxes to fund the Bears, it likely won’t happen much before the June 2027 deadline set by the state authorizing legislation. (Combined the hotel and food/beverage tax hikes would generate about $20 million a year, which would be enough to pay off about $300 million worth of stadium costs.)
Illinois State Rep. Dan Ugaste announced plans to introduce a new bill to provide property tax breaks and sales-tax-backed bonds for “megaprojects” costing over $500 million — just like the rejected bill did, so it’s unclear why he thinks this one has a better shot at passage. [CORRECTION: The original bill included any project over $100 million, so maybe that’s what Ugaste thinks will make the difference here; though the project size threshold wasn’t one of the things that torpedoed the last bill, so maybe not.]
So the Indiana stadium plans still don’t have final legislative approval or an agreed-on site, while in Illinois … pretty much the same. (Indiana did pass a state bill in February, but it left a lot of the funding details as TBD.) I was interviewed on Illinois radio station WMBD yesterday, and the last question when we were running out of time was “Where do you think the Bears will end up?” I answered, “I’m not placing bets on anything, because this is honestly still very early in the whole process,” and I’m going to stick with that: It looks clearer than ever like the Bears owners are still in the tire-kicking phase of this stadium shakedown, and there are likely many more twists and turns to come.
Meanwhile, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business claims that the Bears moving to Indiana could be good news for White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, since it would free up existing hotel tax money that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to use for a new lakefront Bears stadium. Yes, “freeing up” money that is being targeted for a project nobody except the mayor wants to build is a kind of nebulous concept, and yes, Hinz is the same guy who previously gave Reinsdorf tons of runway to argue for public money for a new White Sox stadium. Still, it’s a reminder that any time an elected official mentions a potential pot of taxpayer funds, local business leaders will smell blood in the water and come running with their hands out.
(And yes, I know that sharks can’t run and don’t have hands. It’s been a hectic week, allow me my mixed metaphors.)
I unfortunately had to cancel my trip to this year’s sports economics conference at University of Maryland-Baltimore County starting today, but friend of Field of Schemes John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability generously offered to liveblog from there instead. Take it away, John, I will be following eagerly along with other readers! —Neil deMause
8:30 a.m.
Good morning, everyone. I’m deeply honored to be trusted with the virtual keys to Field of Schemes, which is a daily read for me and an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to make sports team owners pay for their own stadiums. I feel a bit like a Wish.com or Temu “No honey, we have Neil deMause at home” but I’ll do my best.
(Also, I’m fully aware that I’m the dumbest and least qualified person in this lecture hall and it ain’t even close. Last night, I was embarrassed to suddenly realize that I was debating the economics of promotion and relegation in American soccer at the bar with someone who literally wrote the book on the economics of soccer.)
8:45 a.m.
The first two papers are on non-stadium-related topics, but I’ll try to summarize them regardless.
The first paper is “Whistle Politics: Nationality Bias and Own-Nationality Favoritism in a Multinational Basketball Officiating Setting,” by Georgy Shukaylo* and Veronika Dolar of the David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management at the University of South Carolina. Their question was whether American players are refereed differently in the AdmiralBet ABA League, the top-tier professional league for teams from the six former Yugoslav republics.
(Editorializing for a moment: The irony of a “Department of Sport and Entertainment Management” being named after someone who has been responsible for the 2019 and 2024 recipients of my organization’s “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year Award” is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Shukaylo and Dolar hypothesized a few different ways that refereeing bias toward American players might present itself in Balkan basketball: Did Americans get whistled more by local referees because of lingering animus over America’s role in the first and second Yugoslav wars? Or because of resentment over America’s basketball dominance? Or did they get fewer calls because the league wanted to keep higher-profile American players in the game to keep fans happy?
It turns out that the data suggests that final option: U.S. players got a slightly lower whistle rate, roughly half a foul less per 40 minutes than comparable players. The authors determined that this was the result of ‘passive leniency’ by referees calling fewer incidental “touch” fouls on Americans, not more fouls on local or other international players.
* Georgy recently completed his Ph.D at the University of Michigan, where he had the good fortune to celebrate national championships in football and men’s basketball during his time in Ann Arbor. Go Blue.
9:25 a.m.
Petr Parshakov presents a paper by himself, Dennis Coates, Dmitry Dagaev and Sofia Paklina on “Compatriot Bias in Evaluation of Football Players,” looking at the role that national and racial bias play in people’s assessment of soccer players, using the crowdsourced rankings from the EA Sports FIFA/EA FC video game as a starting point. The results are more complex than I’m competent to summarize, but broadly come down to “Yeah, people do have some bias towards people who are different but there’s a lot of other issues at play including rooting interests and player popularity.”
9:55 a.m.
On to stadiums and economic impact, which will be the focus of the rest of the day!
From UMBC colleagues Mike Andrews and Dennis Coates, we have early-stage work on “Estimating Local Effects of Stadiums Using a Runner-Up Design.”
Andrews describes the question as “How does a new stadium affect the local economy,” which he admits is a question that’s been asked a lot by economists in the room (and elsewhere), but that they are trying to use some different tools to answer the question “What would have happened if the stadium had not been built?” and then compare that to real-world post-stadium outcomes.
The interesting thing they’ve done is to look at winning and runner-up NFL stadium sites according to local decision-makers, figuring that sites that would be appropriate for stadiums should have had relatively similar trajectories if not for the stadium being built on one of them, so comparing the differences in outcomes should let you identify the stadium’s impact.
The first result is that they found no significant economic differences between the immediate areas around stadiums versus the immediate areas around runner-up sites, which is consistent with *gestures around at everything everyone in this room has been publishing for years*.
More interestingly, they then went on to look at what happened to growth in areas further away from the stadium and runner-up sites – two, four, six, eight and ten-mile rings. While the data is very preliminary and has issues with small sample size, there seem to be signs that growth in the immediate neighborhood of a stadium comes at the expense of areas a few miles away from the stadium in a way that doesn’t take place at non-stadium sites.
10:10 a.m.
Brief note while we prep for the next paper: As a non-academic, one of the most fascinating things about this kind of environment is the way that the post-presentation Q&A sessions are a combination of politely brutal critiques and collaborative suggestions for how to improve or follow up on research. I’ve heard some people argue that the research consensus on stadiums’ economic impact is an effect of “Oh, they all just agree with each other,” but once you hear economists holding each other’s feet to the fire on things like whether they should have accounted for a city’s grid design in their use of a circular radius for stadium impact it becomes pretty obvious that in this room, getting the answer right is more important than being polite.
Sample question: “I totally want you to be right, let me be clear on that, but…” followed by a sharp observation that the researcher had to admit was a potential issue with their conclusion.
10:20 a.m.
From UMBC master’s candidate in economic policy Bradlee Kilgore, we have “Impact of Stadium Projects on Nearby Home Prices.”
Using Zillow home price data in the areas around 67 stadiums and arenas across the country, Kilgore did a bunch of complex statistical work that flies several thousand feet over my head to find that on average, home prices around stadiums are 8% lower than similarly situated homes further away from the stadium, with arenas (as opposed to open-air or domed stadiums) having an outsized effect on that negative outcome. Kilgore finds the worst effects from NBA arenas, second-worse from shared NBA/NHL arenas, followed by NFL stadiums, with very slightly positive effects from NHL and MLB stadiums.
Basically, what this tells us is that the hassles of living near a stadium – crime, traffic, noise, parking pressure, etc. – outweigh the benefits for enough people that it drives down housing prices in the area.
11:25 a.m.
Next up are Jeffrey Carr, Jessica Morschakov and Mark S. Rosentraub from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), with “Legacy Central Cities and Fragmented Governments: Which Principles Shape Policies To Change the Spatial Distribution of Regional Economic Activity?”
(In the past, Neil has described Rosentraub as a “sports subsidy apologist.” I am not informed enough about his body of work to agree or disagree.)
Rosentraub and his colleagues are promoting a concept they call “Municipal Capitalism,” which (as I understand their definition) encourage elected officials to make investments in stadiums that generate more in tax revenues and other tangible benefits than they cost to finance. ‘Each community has to look at their own assets and needs, we know what the sports owner cartel wants to achieve, how can cities design stadium deals using market-based criteria to get a tangible return on taxpayers’ investment?’
They use the Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium project as their test case.
They claim $58.5 million in new tax revenues as a result of Allegiant Stadium, with most of that going to Nevada state government, generating $15-20 million more in tax revenues than are necessary to fund bond obligations.
Their conclusion was that it was a Municipal Capitalism success, arguing that its fiscal benefits exceeded the fiscal costs, that elected officials “faithfully executed their obligations to voters” by making a capital investment in the stadium that created a new revenue stream, and that the project provided intangible “big-league city” benefits to local residents.
They reference a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority claim that 61.8% of visitors at Allegiant Stadium were out-of-town visitors who identified the event as the primary reason for their trip to Las Vegas, which does not pass my personal sniff test.
They admit that Las Vegas is an unusual market, and there are some hard questions on whether anything learned from Allegiant Stadium has any real value to stadium projects in all the other cities that are not entirely driven by the tourism industry.
“Are you asking me to think of this as simply a description of how municipalities work…or are you claiming that this is a normative framework and that the world is better off if municipalities behave in this regard. Because if so, I’m not going with you,” asks their University of Michigan colleague Stefan Szymanski, pointing to negative externalities that the Municipal Capitalism model doesn’t seem to capture in its ROI calculations.
Rosentraub responds that it’s a hybrid, to which Szymanski says it can’t be, that it’s either normative or positive. Rosentraub’s ultimate response is that it’s largely normative, but “We’re not saying that there aren’t bad deals made, but let’s learn what we can from the good deals to improve future deals.”
10:35 a.m.
Quick note: The running joke this morning is “That was sarcasm” after something sarcastic is said, referencing a Q&A during an early presentation on whether an automated assessment of how soccer players are discussed on the Internet had correctly captured the potential that Internet users might, occasionally, be sarcastic about something.
11:55 a.m.
Next up is University of Colorado Denver’s Geoffrey Propheter, who has done useful work on the intersection of the real estate industry, property taxes and sports.
Propheter is presenting some of an upcoming “labor of love” book on the Oakland Coliseum, discussing his efforts to assess the facility’s total lifetime cost to taxpayers from 1963 to 2024.
He points out that many now-standard government finance mechanisms were first launched in California.
“TIFs were invented in California. You’re welcome!”
Propheter looked back at the at-the-time promises in 1963 of stadium boosters promising that (among other things) the subsidy from the city/county would go from $1.5 million/year to $536,000 by 1970, that it would be self-sustaining within 22 years and that it would be profitable by Year 30.
While the stadium subsidy did drop, mostly, to the promised levels five years late, and it most certainly never got self-sustaining or profitable.
12:05 p.m.
I studied philosophy and political science. When I see a slide like this, I get a loud vacuum cleaner noise in my skull.
But seriously, it just drives home how much hard work, expertise and care goes into answering a question as simple as “Do hotels do more business when a world-class sports superstar is playing in town?”
(More on that question in a moment)
12:25 p.m.
So, superstars and hotels.
Chan Hyeon Hur at Florida International University is presenting his work with Badr Badraoui of FIU and Timothy Webb of the University of Delaware: “Do Sports Superstars Generate Local Tourism Gains? Evidence from Hotel Markets after Messi’s MLS Arrival.”
Lionel Messi, they say, created “an uncommon natural experiment” in coming to Inter Miami FC, and that the demand to watch him either at home or away created a “rare, high-intensity league-wide demand shock” for MLS tickets that would not have existed without him. (Shohei Ohtani is the other current example of a superstar with this kind of drawing power.)
The research question they asked was whether the demand to see Messi play in Miami had any measurable impact on local-market hotel revenues.
Using a lot of math like the slide I shared above, they found a “transient novelty premium” generating a short-term spike immediately after Messi’s arrival, but no evidence of any long-term structural growth in hotel stays. They suggest this should be relevant for local government officials using projected growth in hotel revenues to justify dedicating hotel taxes to stadium projects.
(One criticism from the crowd is that the authors did not capture AirBnB and other similar non-hotel lodging services, which they said is something they are hoping to do in a followup paper.)
12:30 p.m.
Lunch!
I have asked presenters to check out this blog and let me know if I missed or misconstrued any of their work. If I get asked for edits, I’ll note them in the interest of transparency.
2:00 p.m.
A break from stadium stuff, with Dave Berri of Southern Utah University and Stacey Brook of the University of Central Florida presenting their paper “Does it Matters Who Swings the Bat? Player Exploitation in College Softball and College Baseball.”
Berri, who has been involved in a number of legal cases by athletes against universities and/or the NCAA: “The NCAA receives more than $1 billion per year from media rights for college basketball. It spends more than $60 million of this on legal fees defending its arbitrary rules.”
He argues that saying “college sports are not profitable” is meaningless, as colleges and universities are nonprofit institutions and departments within those schools – academic or athletic – will spend “as much money as they’re allowed to.” He also pointed out that college sports are tiny, from a budgetary perspective, using the example that the University of Maryland has a $2.98 billion budget, and its athletic department had $124 million in revenue in 2025.
Berri presented some evidence that the NCAA is doing a terrible job at maximizing revenues for ‘non-revenue’ sports – which he points out is a terrible name, since they do bring in revenues – thanks to its focus on maximizing its basketball and football media revenues. He presented a model to measure the value of NCAA baseball players and other similar players to university athletic revenues, and to use that to develop a structure to get an appropriate percentage that money to players, whom he argues are being badly under-compensated compared to the value they generate for their schools.
2:30 p.m.
University of Michigan doctoral candidate Jeff Carr returns with “Changes to Franchise Supply and the Effects on Teams in the Same Market: Niche Markets or Limits on Discretionary Spending?”
He’s attempting to measure the “substitution effect” for sport within a market, looking at what teams arriving or leaving did to incumbent teams’ attendance. If an MLB team shows up, what does that do to the local NFL or NHL team’s attendance? (He used the example of the Orioles’ attendance when the Ravens came to Baltimore.) If an NFL team leaves for someplace else, do jilted fans console themselves with tickets to the local MLB or NBA team?
There are a lot more pro sports teams out there than there used to be.
Cities have more pro sports teams than they used to.
His finding is that the arrival or departure of teams doesn’t tend to change the attendance of existing teams by a meaningful amount. The one meaningful outlier is WNBA teams, which Carr posits is a function of that league having a fanbase that is more likely not to be fans of other sports.
2:55 p.m.
Because of a scheduling issue, conference organizer Dennis Coates is filling in to present a previously published study from himself, Sabina Kosimova and Gleb Vasiliev titled “Performance Under Pressure in Elite Curling.”
Their findings generally confirm sports consensus that players make better shots when they’re either way ahead or way behind and there’s no immediate pressure, but perform worse in late, close games. They found a small amount of evidence that women (at least in curling) may do slightly worse than men in general, but better than men on common (as opposed to unusual or highly technical) shots.
I will admit that I did not expect a curling-specific paper today. (The Q&A has become an opportunity for those in the audience who actually understand curling to politely flex on their fellow attendees.)
3:30 p.m.
Pete Groothuis from Appalachian State University *pause for instinctive shudder from Michigan football fan* asks what he describes as “a philosophical question” about the ways that applied microeconomics papers use and define their population data, how they check their work to determine whether the results they’re seeing are truly statistically significant…and what “statistically significant” means in the first place.
Groothuis himself describes the issue as a “highly theoretical” exercise in econometrics, so your humble correspondent was deeply out of his depth around the third slide – and the first two slides were a title card and a photo of a mountain.
Leaving the details of the question to those more competent to explain it, I will say that yet again I’m struck by the way that the researchers in this room and their colleagues across the country are putting brain-meltingly intense intellectual effort into trying to get as close as humanly possible to the capital-T ‘Truth’ of what’s actually happening in the real world with their research.
As someone who’s a consumer of this work and relies upon it to form the foundation of advocacy for good public policy, it’s incredibly heartening to see this rigor in action.
4:15 p.m.
Clay Collins from the University of Georgia presents “Family Violence and Football at 15: A Review and Re-Evaluation of Card & Dahl.” It’s a revisiting of a famous paper from 2011 finding connections between domestic violence (now more commonly known as intimate partner violence) and NFL games, where “seemingly irrelevant events” such as an NFL team’s upset loss drives someone to violently lash out at a partner.
(Conference organizer Dennis Coates: “I would consider this an ‘economic impact’ topic.”)
Collins is using modern, more-comprehensive datasets to update the 2011 paper, which (among other things) used crime data that only covered roughly a fifth of the U.S. population.
“I run this, and I’m not getting any significant results,” Collins says. “So what’s going on here?”
His first take is not that Card & Dahl were wrong — “they don’t give out Nobel Prizes for nothing” — but that something else must be in play. Maybe the prevalence of gambling and fantasy sports is changing the emotional for NFL fans, so the “your team blows a game” trigger is less…triggering? There’s some research out there that suggests this is playing a role. Maybe people are venting on social media rather than via violence? In the Q&A, attendees are suggesting potential answers, data sets, statistical tools, etc.
4:50 p.m.
Doctoral candidate Aiden Powell of West Virginia University presents a very interesting investigation into sports externalities: “Professional Sporting Events and Emergency Medical Service Response Times: Evidence from San Francisco.”
Researchers (including some in this room) have documented increased police response times near stadiums during events, but Powell has focused on EMS response, specifically for people having “cardiovascular events” where delayed treatment can result in death or other adverse outcomes.
Powell’s research uses data from San Francisco Giants games in 2024 and 2025.
He finds that in the hour before a game, EMS response within a quarter-mile of the ballpark is delayed 4.7 minutes on average, a 51.6% delay. He estimates an additional seven seconds of additional EMS delay for each 1,000 attendees at the game.
After the game, it’s delayed 2.6 minutes; a 28.4% delay, with three seconds per 1,000 fans.
5:15 p.m.
Victor Matheson of College of the Holy Cross presents “The Impact of Mega-Events on Gambling Revenues – Evidence from the Las Vegas F1 Race.” The economic impact question he’s asking is deceptively simple: What did the creation of a Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix in 2023 do to gaming revenues in Las Vegas casinos?
(As a supporter of Detroit City FC in the USL, I need to shout out the deeply esoteric Hartford Athletic USL jersey that Matheson is wearing. So he’s the person who bought one.)
The up-front $500 million cost of the race’s permanent infrastructure was largely private, but there are per-race costs for infrastructure, police, etc. to Las Vegas, plus negative externalities headlined by a 10-week closure of The Strip.
Matheson puts up a slide where F1’s CEO predicted $1.7 billion in economic impact in the first year alone, asks “How many years have we been doing this?” as the room chuckles wryly.
Gambling revenues on the Strip are way up, $66.8 million. That’s almost entirely from high-stakes table games. However, revenues from slot machines and other lower-tier gaming are significantly down, as are gaming revenues overall in non-Strip casinos and casinos elsewhere in the state.
Matheson’s take is that the Las Vegas Grand Prix is “remarkably successful” for the large casinos on The Strip, that booked an extra $70 million in gross gaming revenue. However, that boom for the big, fancy casinos has come at the expense of a bust for the non-Strip casinos and casinos elsewhere in the state, which have gaming revenues down almost the same proportional amount.
“It might be up a bit in total,” said Matheson, “But it’s certainly not up enough to reach that billion-dollar economic impact figure.” He also noted that excitement over the race seems to be waning, with that bump in gaming revenues shrinking each successive year.
5:45 p.m.
Doctoral candidate Murad Latifov of Texas Tech University presents a paper on a fascinating question I’ve never seen asked, “The Impact of Professional Sports Franchise Movements on Crime Rates in Urban Areas.”
He’s not looking just at crime on gamedays, but in general at long-term baseline crime rates. Do new stadiums and/or teams make cities more or less law-abiding? Does it change if it’s the fourth or fifth team in a city, versus the first or second?
It’s especially interesting because stadium subsidy supporters often point to “uncaptured benefits” that sports teams bring to a city, including things like civic pride and a more robust civil society, which could, maybe, be seen in crime rates. (The crimes he’s looking at in the FBI data are rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft.)
This theory considers sports teams to be “Civic Anchors” around which a society organizes itself in a virtuous, upright manner that discourages crime. The counter-argument is that stadiums “concentrate motivated offenders and suitable targets” in a way that promotes crime.
It turns out that the latter seems to be true. Latifov’s work unearthed some meaningful, statistically significant results: “A city’s first franchise significantly raises violent and short-run property crime. The loss of a city’s last franchise lowers crime, especially for rape.”
Gaining a second, third, etc. team doesn’t seem to have any impact, and losing a team doesn’t seem to change things until a city loses its last team.
One relevant question that was asked and that Latifov had not investigated was whether this effect exists for cities that had major college sports teams before they had professional teams, such as Columbus, Ohio before the arrival of the NHL Blue Jackets.
5:50 p.m.
The last presentation of the day is an early-stage exploration by Shirin Mollah, Josh Davila and Jonathan A. Jensen of Texas A&M into “Why are stadium lifetimes getting shorter? Findings from a semi-parametric hazards model.”
One unusual finding is that a growing economy keeps older stadiums around, rather than pushing replacement. A 1% growth in GDP in a market reduces the probability that a stadium will be replaced by up to 14%.
The larger the city, the less public funding they offer — every 1 million in population decreases subsidies by $8 million.
The more expensive the stadium, the longer they’ll get kept around. Every $10 million spent on a stadium lessens the chance of it dying by 3.96%.
6:30 p.m.
And that’s it! Thank you again to Dennis Coates and the entire team at UMBC for gathering together such an excellent group of presenters, and for being wonderful hosts.
Thank you to the presenters, and I apologize for any errors or omissions I made in describing your work.
If you have any questions, comments or criticism, please feel free to email me directly.
Friday news dumps may not work anymore in their original purpose of hiding bad news, but they can still be useful when someone wants to influence the social media discourse without risk of anyone in an official capacity picking up the phone until three days later. That looks to be what just happened with the Chicago Bears, whose execs announced on Friday that, in the wake of Illinois not passing tax subsidies for a stadium there, they plan to “advance our stadium development project in Hammond,” Indiana. “Advance” meaning what exactly? Sorry, our offices are closed now, please call back during business hours!
A league source cautioned the announcement didn’t eliminate Arlington Heights as an option, were the state to find a way to give the Bears property tax certainty on the 326-acre plot they own. In fact, the source said, there was “still a lot of ballgame left to play” for Illinois lawmakers. It’s unclear whether waiting until the Senate and House reconvene this fall would be too late for the Bears, though.
Of course it’s a leverage play. If it wasn’t, a deal would already be done to build in Hammond.
Instead, the Bears keep talking to Illinois even as they supposedly focus on Indiana.
It makes sense for the Bears to try to persuade members of the media that Indiana isn’t a leverage play. (It doesn’t make sense for members of the media to swallow the hook, unless it’s a part of a broader quid pro quo for scoops and/or access.) For a leverage play to be effective, it has to be viewed as real. If it’s not viewed as real, the leverage won’t move the needle in Illinois.
Florio goes on like that for a while, talking about how a bluff only works if you don’t admit it’s a bluff, which, yes, we know.
The Indiana legislature has approved the outlines of a stadium deal that could provide billions of dollars in state subsidies, but there are lot of details left to be filled in, including: how big the omni-TIF tax diversion district within which property, sales, income and other taxes would be siphoned off for the Bears; whether a stadium would be built on a Hammond site described as being atop a “giant slag heap” or elsewhere; and whether Lake and Porter counties will vote to increase food and beverage taxes (by 1 percentage point) and hotel taxes (by 5 percentage points) to help fund the plan, which they would have to do by the end of June 2027. Both counties are holding elections this fall, so who takes office then could end up influencing how any potential stadium deal plays out.
That is, if the Bears owners even want to move to Indiana, which they don’t have to definitively decide for a while yet. Please tattoo this on your arms, state legislators of the nation: Stadium deadlines are for suckers.
Yuppppp. Arguing whether the failure of the legislature to pass subsidies for the Bears was a sign of an inept government or inept team management is missing the point: This was a crisis entirely of team ownership’s own making. It was Bears CEO Kevin Warren who set an end-of-May deadline — while simultaneously saying “we don’t have a set deadline” — in hopes that the threat of the team moving to Indiana would shake loose a couple billion dollars in tax breaks and transit upgrades. And if team execs now don’t like the choice of either Arlington Heights (stripped of the assurance of tax dollars) or Hammond, they can always just go back to what they’ve been doing the last few years and wait things out while playing in the stadium Chicago taxpayers paid to rebuild for them 23 years ago; they can even decide to stay there permanently, if the prospect of paying their tax bill in Arlington Heights is too pricey, and of moving to Indiana is too Indiana-y. (It’s happened before!) This wasn’t a fumble; it was an attempt at a cash grab, one that didn’t pay off, and now Bears owner George McCaskey needs to decide what cards to play next, as sports owners always do.
“The reality is that I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family, or team, and believe very much that the incentives that we provide for businesses are to be similar to the incentives we provide to this type of business,” Pritzker said at his Capitol office, after a marathon overnight conclusion to the session.
“As much of an emotional connection as many of us have to the Bears, and to keeping them in the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois, [the] No. 1 principle is we’re not going to foist this on the taxpayers of the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said.
The clock ran out on the Illinois state legislative session last night at midnight, but the decision on whether to pass legislation for a Chicago Bears stadium remained alive until this morning, when the Illinois house finally stuck a fork in it by adjourning without a vote. After the collapse of the team’s preferred megaprojects tax break bill over the weekend (Chicago Daily Herald: “Bears property tax break bill sacked“), state senators had worked frantically to issue a new bill (Capitol News Illinois: “Hail Mary effort to keep Bears in Illinois”), which cleared the senate at nearly 4 am (Chicago Tribune: “Illinois Senate in overtime passes last-ditch public stadium legislation”) and headed to the state house, which decided to take its ball and go home.
Setting aside sports metaphors equating passing stadium subsidies with scoring a touchdown — please, pleasestop doing that, people — what the hell actually happened this weekend, and where do things stand now with the Bears and their possible future homes? Let’s recap:
Late Saturday, after discussion of limiting legislation to only applying to the Bears to avoid handing tax breaks to billions of dollars of other projects, State Sen. Bill Cunningham declared the megaprojects bills dead, saying too many senate Democrats were opposed to the state subsidizing any Bears move out of Chicago to suburban Arlington Heights. Still, Cunningham said, he hoped to offer the Bears something by submitting legislation on Sunday that would put Chicago and Arlington Heights “on an equal plane.”
Nearly four hours after the midnight deadline for a bill, the senate voted 37-17 to approve Cunningham’s sports authorities bill. Rather than fake an 11:59 pm time stamp as the Illinois legislature did for a White Sox stadium bill in 1988, this time the legislature used a different end runtrick play gambit, evading a rule that bills passed after the session ends need a supermajority vote by putting no effective date on the bill, allowing it to go into effect next June, which would nullify the increased vote requirement.
While it’s kind of moot now, it’s worth taking a quick look at what Cunningham’s bill would have cost relative to previous proposals. Under a sports authority plan, Bears owner George McCaskey would have gotten a bigger tax break for a stadium owned by a sports authority, paying no taxes at all rather than a negotiated payments in lieu of taxes rate. Instead of saving an estimated $39 million a year, he would have saved an estimated $53 million a year, pushing the total present value of the stadium tax break from around $670 million to around $900 million. Making the surrounding property taxable, though, would have prevented McCaskey from getting more than a billion dollars in additional tax breaks for the rest of his planned development.
However, in a series of posts late last night, Center Square sports subsidy reporter Jon Styf noted that even though Cunningham said the Bears would pay for stadium construction, his bill would have allowed a stadium authority to sell bonds to pay for stadium infrastructure — and potentially pay it off by siphoning off sales tax revenues from a stadium district. It’s hard to guess how much this would have added to the total public cost, but it could have been hefty indeed if a stadium district were large enough.
Meanwhile, none of this would have actually authorized a stadium — it would just have authorized Arlington Heights, or Chicago, or Cicero or Schaumburg or Evanston, to create sports authorities to grant McCaskey his get-out-of-property-taxes-free card (and potential infrastructure bonds). With Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson having been vocal about wanting to offer team ownership a new stadium on the Chicago lakefront, it could easily have led to Chicago and Arlington Heights going toe to toe to win McCaskey’s heart, which could have gotten pricey for taxpayers.
None of that is happening now, though, at least not unless Bears execs decide to put off a stadium decision in hopes of a potential special session of the legislature later this summer. The team issued a brief statement this morning reading, “We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” which manages to be a threat to move to Indiana without actually closing the door on Illinois, well played. Until we hear back from them, add the Bears mess to the Tampa Bay Rays mess as situations where we won’t know the final score (dammit!) for a while yet.
Lots of state legislative sessions are wrapping up this week, but it’s been oddly quiet around actual stadium news, leaving room for lots of spin doctoring and other questionable takes:
Turns out today’s conclusion of the Florida legislature’s special budget session won’t be a deadline for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, as everything appears to be getting pushed off to even specialer sessions. Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that though there’s only $50 million in the state budget for relocating Hillsborough College buildings to make way for a stadium district on what’s now its Dale Mabry campus, there could be more state money later sometime: “We can do more on the infrastructure,” said the governor, adding, “I think maybe over time you would do more to spruce up the campus because I think it could be something meaningful. And I’m happy to support it.” (Ed. note: Yes, DeSantis leaves office in January. Yes, presumably he knows this.) Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan, meanwhile, said his “goal” is to hold county and city votes on a binding deal by a scheduled July 15 board meeting, “or maybe have to call a special meeting right around there,” which gives him around seven weeks to flip one of the four “no” votes on the Tampa city council. Rays owner Patrick Zalupski has remained silent on the current stadium stalemate, but DeSantis stepped in to levy a threat on his behalf, declaring: “Maybe if they don’t want to do it, I know Orlando’s ready, willing and able. I think you have Raleigh-Durham, Nashville, and those are great cities, but I’d hate to see us fumble a team and have it end up in some of those other areas.” Now that’s what friends and/or campaign donation recipients are for!
Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero say they want an MLB expansion team once the Athletics leave town for Las Vegas, and West Sacramento is set to provide $1 billion in money for a new stadium from property tax kickbacks, hotel taxes, and “additional sources.” The city could spend $1 billion and it “would not impact the City’s general fund or require a taxpayer vote,” explained a joint press release, because it would “be generated solely by activity in the ballpark district,” citing a figure that over 40 years, a ballpark district “is projected to lead to $1.77 billion in new tax revenue.” Citation extremely needed, but also even $1.77 billion over 40 years wouldn’t be enough to pay for $1 billion in stadium costs up front, why can’t our elected leaders math?
Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon will “do everything in his power” to move the team if he doesn’t get the full $600 million in public arena renovation money he wants, according to (checks notes) a sports talk radio host who runs public relations and crisis counseling firms. And other NBA owners would allow it, he claims, because “if he does relocate, there’s a relocation fee attached to that.” No, don’t ask why Dundon would readily agree to forgo the $365 million already approved by the state of Oregon and also pay an expansion fee to move someplace that isn’t offering a newer arena even after saying he has no intention of moving the team, PR isn’t about answering your questions.
The Seattle Seahawks are for sale, which means it’s time to ask if a new owner will want a new stadium, apparently. Answer (courtesy of me as quoted in the Puget Sound Business Journal): A new Seahawks owner would be dumb to pay to build one themselves when they have a perfectly good old one, but “if somebody else is going to buy you a new car, you’re not going to say no.”
Spending $600 million to help move the Cleveland Browns from one part of the state to another was a pretty bold move by Ohio, but saying it was giving the state’s data centers $136 million in tax breaks in 2025 alone and having it turn out to actually be $1.6 billion in tax breaks is even more impressive, way to go, Ohio.
With four days left before the end of the Illinois legislative session, Crain’s Chicago Business reports (citing no specific sources) that state senators are “considering dramatically scaling back a sweeping megaproject incentive bill” to cut out everything except tax breaks for a Bears stadium in Arlington Heights. The idea here is to avoid debate on allowing property tax cuts for any development project over $100 million, something that could cost the state billions of dollars — plus expanded sales tax kickbacks and funneling some of the remaining payments in lieu of property taxes to broad property tax relief — and instead just carve out a single-use subsidy that would still cost the state billions of dollars, but fewer billions.
One problem is that a bunch of that stuff was added to the bill by the state house because legislators there didn’t want to be seen as just opening the state’s wallet for the Bears — though adding more goodies for other developers and handing out a few dollars apiece in tax rebates for all property owners would only make the bill more costly and could ultimately force more tax hikes elsewhere. (Interestingly, Crain’s notes that the Bears owners themselves opposed the tax relief provision, because it “would incentivize local taxing authorities to push for a higher annual payment” by the team in order to have something to dole out to homeowners.) A Bears-only bill “is more viable in the Senate than the House,” says Crain’s (citing “sources familiar with the talks”), leaving the possibility that the senate could revise the bill to gain passage there, but couldn’t win the support of the house in reconciliation talks.
Meanwhile, the bill’s chief house sponsor, Kam Buckner, lashed out at Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas’s office for its analysis of the megaprojects bill, calling it “field-of-dreams budgeting” and “fantasy accounting” because “you can’t count full tax revenue from a project that doesn’t exist. … The real choice is not ‘full taxes versus reduced taxes.’ The real choice is a negotiated payment on a real project, or full taxes on an empty lot. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”
This is a common argument for development subsidies — there’s nothing there now, so getting any taxes at all from the site is better than nothing — but it overlooks two massive issues. The first is that developments come not only with benefits but with costs — roads for its occupants to drive on, police and fire services to protect it, schools for its residents’ kids to go to — and that’s precisely what property taxes are meant to cover. If you allow a developer to erect a bunch of buildings and not pay for the associated costs, somebody else has to cover those, which means either increased taxes for other residents (bye-bye, tax relief) or cuts to other services.
The second issue is opportunity cost: One advantage of a vacant lot is you can still build something on it, whereas a developed site is as developed as it’s ever going to get. As the treasurer’s report noted, there are plenty of non-subsidized projects like shopping malls that generate economic activity while still paying their taxes, and every time you use up another lot on a tax-limited project, that’s one you can’t use on one that’ll pay its full weight. Buckner should know this: He represents a district in Chicago, which in the first decade of this century became the poster child for carving up its tax base into Swiss cheese to promote development, leaving gaping budget holes as a result.
And that’s where things stand right now, on Thursday morning. Though Capitol News Illinois editor Jerry Nowicki just chimed in with a video interview where he said his reporters talked to Gov. JB Pritzker and he “seemed optimistic” about passage of a bill, for whatever that’s worth. There’s also still the question of whether the Illinois legislature will provide $855 million in infrastructure funding, mostly for transit upgrades, before team execs have provided a traffic plan explaining why they need $855 million, something senate bill sponsor Bill Cunningham has said is unacceptable. I’ll update this post later today on the off chance we get any more clarity on what’s going on in Springfield; stay tuned, but don’t get your hopes up.
