Search Results for: Santa Clara group starts petition drive, is upstaged by blown power line

New taxpayer-funded Bills stadium features record number of state-of-the-art obstructed-view seats

access_time personNeil deMause

Buffalo Bills ownership held an open practice on Sunday to show off their new $2.1 billion stadium (public cost: $1 billion and change), and it did not go well:

Other Bills fans pointed out that many of the new stadium’s seats are not obstructed, but that didn’t do much to quell the online furor, especially after Buffalo residents had to both help pay to build the thing with state and county tax dollars and then cough up for personal seat licenses, only to discover that the designers appeared to have paid somewhat less attention to detail than your average Minecraft stadium builder.

After the Sunday evening newscasts were full of photos like the above, Bills president of business operations Pete Guelli told reporters on Monday, “So far, we’ve heard from less than 1 percent of our PSL holders about anything sight line related,” and also that “seats with truly obstructed views have not been sold as a PSL or for any football games,” which would make just under 1% of fans still griping seem pretty bad, actually. Guelli said some of these seats might only be sold for concerts that take place only at one end of the field, but it’s kind of hard to imagine what that bottom-right image would be good for a ticket to, unless it’s a band you desperately don’t want to see.

Guelli went on to say that complaints would be addressed “on a case-by-case basis,” which presumably means if you complain enough, they’ll try to move you to seats where you can actually see the game. Still, it’s hard not to notice that the Bills had a perfectly good stadium right next door that offered 11,000 more seats, significantly fewer of which faced onto concrete, even if it didn’t feature as many ways to sell you food. In the end, enshittification comes for us all.

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Multnomah county chair hires Blazers negotiator who heads pro-arena lobbying group, sees no conflict of interest

access_time personNeil deMause

Uproar continues to grow over Multnomah County hiring a negotiator in the Portland Trail Blazers arena renovation fight who has a curious resume:

Chair Jessica Vega Pederson disclosed Thursday that she had tapped former Trail Blazers executive Chris Oxley to represent the county as it worked with Portland officials on a framework aimed at keeping the NBA franchise in town for at least the next 20 years.

Okay, that’s a little weird, hiring an ex-Blazers exec. But maybe it’s not so bad to hire someone who knows the opposition’s side of things; after all, local governments way too seldom have people with actual sports business expertise on their side, and it’s not like this guy is currently working for —

Oxley also happens to be board president of nonprofit Sport Oregon, which has led a coalition that’s lobbied city and county leaders to back the proposed $600 million arena facelift requested by the team, which would be exclusively bankrolled by taxpayers.

Welp.

County commissioners were predictably gobsmacked when they heard about the hiring of Oxley, with commissioner Meghan Moyer interjecting, “I’m sorry, did I mishear? He is on the board of Sports Oregon that is currently lobbying us on how much we should contribute to this deal? We hired a negotiator that’s on the board of an organization that is lobbying us on this issue? How is that not a wild conflict of interest?” Vega Pederson replied that it’s not a conflict of interest because Oxley isn’t paid for his role as board president of the group that is behind the pro-arena-spending We Are Rip City campaign (which has most recently been paying influencers to stump for the public arena funding plan); that didn’t convince Moyer, but apparently placated the other commission members, who approved the hire by a 4-1 vote. Congratulations on your new job, Chris, and I’m sure you will have no trouble balancing the demands of your new paid gig to get the best deal for taxpayers and your unpaid gig getting the best deal for Blazers owner Tom Dundon.

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Does Tom Dundon really want to move the Trail Blazers, or he just creating leverage?

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the persistent themes in the ever-non-evolving Portland Trail Blazers arena saga has been the question of what new team owner Tom Dundon really wants. Oh, he’s made clear enough what he’s asking for: $600 million in taxpayer money to spend on upgrading his 31-year-old arena, in exchange for which he’ll keep paying (some) taxes. But does he really want Portland officials to give in and cut him a check? Or is his secret plan to burn enough bridges in Portland that he can pick up the team and move it elsewhere?

This has been Oregonian Bill Oram’s theory for months now, going back to a February column where he wrote of “the overleveraged incoming owner who knows his new team’s greatest value lies in his ability to move it,” all as part of a plea for Oregon legislators to open their wallets, and fast, to head off such a dire outcome. But this week Oram was joined by former Oregonian columnist John Canzano, an opponent of the $600 million arena spending plan, who wrote in his (paywalled right after this point) Substack that “well-placed sources tell me they’re increasingly skeptical about Dundon’s motivations. He continues to appear disinterested, they say, in negotiating.”

As I’ve written here previously, figuring out whether a team owner is really looking for an excuse to move or is just using one of the oldest tricks in the playbook to create leverage is no easy task: They look pretty much the same from the outside, and one of the prerogatives of being a monopolist is that you don’t have to decide if your threat is a bluff or not until you see how well it works to shake loose public money. Some sports teams do move, absolutely; the vast majority of those that threaten to don’t, though, with some setting deadline after deadline until somebody finally takes their threat seriously. And as economist J.C. Bradbury noted in his presentation to last year’s sports economics conference, there really aren’t that many open sports markets that would be upgrades on current ones. (Bradbury will likely revisit this topic in today’s 5 pm Pacific webinar with fellow economist Victor Matherson, hosted by two Portland city councilmembers.) Yet even when this is the case, and when none of the smaller cities available are offering much in the way of venue funding to boot, team owners are still quick to suggest that they have one foot out the door.

So did Tom Dundon really buy the Blazers just to move them, or does he just believe in never giving an inch in negotiations? Another way of asking the same question: Is Tom Dundon playing 4D chess, or is he just an asshole? The answer, as always with billionaires who got their starts as used car salesmen, is always: It can be both! Presumably he’ll go with whatever makes him the most money, but billionaires can do things for dumb reasons just like other people, so maybe not. Either way, it’s Portland officials’ job to get the best deal for its constituents, and sometimes that means not giving in and repeating, “I will answer you when you stop yelling.”

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Broncos execs tired of waiting for someone to give them land and money for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been almost a year since Denver Broncos owners Greg and Carrie Penner, Mayor Mike Johnston, and Gov. Jared Polis announced plans for a new stadium to be built by 2031 at Denver’s state-owned Burnham Yard railyards, with the big remaining questions being how much the Penners would pay for the land, how they would get it rezoned for sports use, how much public money they would get for “infrastructure” like new roads, whether they would get tax increment financing to kick back sales and/or property taxes to help pay for construction, who would clean up contaminated soil at the site, and what kind of community benefits agreement to agree to. They’re still figuring most of that out, and last weekend Broncos president Damani Leech went to the hustings to tell reporters that team officials are growing annoyed that things aren’t moving faster:

“I’ve got to be honest, I wish we were further along in some areas than we are now. I think areas where we do control, particularly real estate, you mentioned Burnham Yard, real estate, engaging with the community, we’ve done site tours of the location, the design of the stadium continues to evolve, the master plan continues to evolve. All of those things are moving along really, really well, but we also understand that we can’t do this alone.

“There are certain things we don’t control. I think as an example, the community benefits process is something that we can’t control. We’ve had a lot of initial great discussions with community representatives. More recently here, it’s been on more of a staff level. We’re eager to engage with those community members directly, understand what they’re looking for, what needs and interests they have on the development. Things like that, we have to continue to progress. We said many months ago, this is an ambitious timeline, so for that to happen, we need everybody to be involved. We can’t do it alone in order to get to 2031.”

Leech said opening the stadium by 2031 is “still achievable for sure,” but that “everybody has to be involved.”

Is there frustration with the process?

“I’ll be honest, there are days when I have concern,” Leech said, “there are days when I have frustration because you can’t control it all, so I think that’s fair.”

This all starts off reasonably enough — shit takes time, damn that bureaucracy — and it’s unclear from NBC Sports’ Mike Florio’s recounting whether it was reporters or Leech who introduced the word “frustration.” (Denver Sports’ longer quote makes it seem more like the latter.) Still, taken as a whole, this becomes a clear message to city and state officials and community negotiators: Why doesn’t anyone else share our urgency about giving us what we want so we can open our stadium by our chosen date? It’s like you all have other priorities or something!

The Penners did win an agreement in May with the state Department of Transportation for a right of first refusal to buy the rail yards for $45.8 million, $23.6 million less than the state paid for the land and a track easement between 2021 and 2025. (Under the deal, the team will pay for cleanup costs.) But the sale isn’t finalized yet, nor are the rezoning or the TIFs or the infrastructure money, so the total public cost is still very much up in the air.

Meanwhile, Leech also called requiring fans to buy personal seat licenses in order to buy tickets to be “a pretty likely thing to happen,” which is both unsurprising — most other NFL teams do it, as a way to monetize their season ticket holder waitlist while hoping nobody notices that fans often end up holding ticket rights that nobody wants to buy — and likely to be unpopular given how fans of teams like the Buffalo Bills are growing concerned that they’re being priced out of affording tickets. This is absolutely something that city and state officials could be making part of their negotiations, but negotiating is so tiresome, can’t we get to the fun part already where we get to build our stadium? Go write that down, reporters, we’re trying to build a narrative here!

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Hearing to get public feedback on Royals stadium shut down early after public gives too much feedback

access_time personNeil deMause

Representatives of the Kansas City Royals and the Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation held a required public hearing on their rezoning proposals for a new Royals stadium complex yesterday, and and they absolutely heard from the public:

“We already said no to a downtown baseball stadium, and here it comes back again,” said Mary Ellen Vincent, a Roanoke neighborhood resident. “[It feels like] a trick, like they went around us, and they’re going to jam this through no matter what we say.”

Roanoke neighborhood resident Olo Szylleyko, shared her concern about bypassing a public vote and raised broader economic concerns, pointing to mixed results at stadium developments in other cities.

“You have to look in other cities and you see what are the pluses and minuses of this type of enterprise and how much money they actually been spent by the taxpayers and by the owners,” he said. “We’re looking at this as an absolutely perfect success. We don’t know that.”

And:

“I think a lot of us are really excited for the development,” said Ben Lindner, board president of the San Francisco Tower Association. “We’d love to see some new life being breathed into the Crown Center area, but this plan seems to create more questions than it’s answered.”

And:

About an hour into the meeting, as the last remaining speaker was at the podium, members of the Missouri Workers Center erupted in chants of “let us vote.” The progressive labor advocacy group broke out in chants and heckled speakers….

The meeting ended about 15 minutes early. During a question-and-answer period, when presenters addressed prescreened questions from the crowd, a host announced they would end the meeting amid the ongoing outburst.

(You can see the “Let us vote!” chants here. Nobody seems to have gotten video of any heckling or the announcement to end the meeting, so it’s hard to tell how disruptive it was; KCTV did an entire lengthy report without even mentioning that the hearing ended early, though it’s always possible their reporter didn’t stay till the end.)

The Missouri Workers Center, you will recall, has collected signatures to put a vote on the stadium plan on the November public ballot, to which Royals officials have responded, pretty much, “ha ha, not if we get all the approvals first!” And whether or not the rest of the attendees approved of the chanting — “a lot of people were at the wrong meeting,” groused one local resident — the general sentiment seems to have been that Kansas Citians have multiple concerns about the project that they would like to have addressed. This should be no surprise to anyone, given that at past public hearings residents have raised questions about the public cost (unspecified as yet, but likely $1.3 billion or more) and that the city is pushing this plan forward after voters overwhelmingly rejected another public funding plan for a Royals stadium in 2024. It’s almost like people in Kansas City want some way for their opinions to be heard beyond writing down questions and having team officials pick and choose which ones to answer, hmm, there must be some provision in democracy for doing this, can’t think of what that would be right now.

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Blazers execs to Oregon taxpayers: Consider yourselves lucky to only be giving us $600m

access_time personNeil deMause

Two days into the week, and Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon’s strategy for getting arena renovation money is becoming clear: Send team officials to talk to the media under cover of anonymity to sell his $600 million demand. That’s a typical enough gambit — though finding two media suckers in a row to agree to print your unnamed quotes, The Oregonian last night after The Athletic on Sunday, is impressive — but what’s breaking new ground is that Blazers officials have introduced negging to the sports subsidy game, declaring that really it’s Oregon taxpayers who would be getting a “sweetheart deal” by only giving Dundon $600 million:

The official said one “very real” potential outcome of that meeting could be the ownership group resetting the negotiations and starting over, including tossing aside the $365 million commitment the state made earlier this year. … The official added, “The deal doesn’t get better. It gets worse with time.” …

The team official argued that “the city of Portland doesn’t even recognize that they got a sweetheart deal,” suggesting that an arena renovation is far less expensive for the public than had ownership pressed for a new facility. …

The team official stressed a move is not the Blazers’ preferred outcome but did not rule it out.

If Dundon were to attempt to move the Blazers to another market, he would likely have to pay a steep penalty to the league. That may not necessarily be the deterrent some relocation skeptics believe it would be for the famously thrifty owner.

“It’s not like we lose money moving the team,” the team official said. “We might spend money, but we don’t lose money. It might be OK to spend a billion dollars on a relocation fee if the valuation of the team doubles.

“Of course you would do that.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but in short: Dundon’s execs are claiming that their boss’s offer to take $600 million in tax money while paying no rent or property taxes is really doing Portland a favor, because he could either 1) demand even more money for renovations, 2) demand even more money for a whole new arena, or 3) move the team to a more lucrative market, even if it costs $1 billion in relocation fees. For the Blazers’ value to double, in case you’re wondering, according to Forbes figures they would have to become the fourth-most valuable team in the NBA, behind only the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers, and New York Knicks. Where on earth they could make that happen is one of many followup questions that it would be good to ask — but which no other news outlets can, because the Blazers Deep Throats aren’t taking questions, they’re only issuing statements.

Responding to resistance from elected officials to giving you everything you want by threatening to demand even more, meanwhile — and at a time when his lease actually prohibits him from seeking out new cities to relocate to for another four years — is a bold move, but then, Dundon has always been known for his unorthodox business practices. If the next anonymously sourced article claims that if Portland doesn’t approve its share of the $600 million immediately Dundon will shoot a dog, don’t act all surprised.

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Friday roundup: Tampa plans for Rays keep going sideways; new stadium funding demands in Orlando, D.C.

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday to those of you who can see this through all the burning Canada! Everyone stay safe, mask up, and stay indoors to read the latest sports subsidy news, only most of which this week involves Florida men:

  • Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan said Wednesday that if the Tampa city council won’t go along with contributing tax money to a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, maybe the county will just go ahead without them. Hagan did not go on to describe where he would find $180 million to replace the city’s planned contribution. Rather than object to being threatened with a good time, Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin warned his recalcitrant colleagues, “Unfortunately, there’ll be a cost of the city not having participated in the process.” He didn’t say what kind of cost he meant, but he gave his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough with old Clenny.
  • The chances of convincing Tampa elected officials to spend public dollars on a Rays stadium, meanwhile, could plummet if Florida voters adopt sweeping property tax cuts in November, which would decimate local budgets. On the bright side — sort of — that would at least make any property tax exemption for the Rays stadium project worth less, since there would be less in property taxes to exempt, though it still would leave Tampa in the same budget hole for the project.
  • And finally, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred also chimed in on the Rays stadium situation, saying at the All-Star Game, “Every delay just makes it more difficult to hit a timetable of when the stadium is going to open,” which, yes, that’s how time works. Maybe Manfred would like to impose a pitch clock on stadium talks?
  • The group of wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owners say they have more than $2 billion in place combined for acquiring a team and building a stadium, and with MLB’s expansion fee expected to be more than $2 billion, they’re asking the state of Florida to kick in $975 million in tourist tax dollars toward a stadium. The prospective ownership group said this would 100% be worth it, as a new team in Orlando would generate $73 trillion dollars in new economic activity in the first week alone (or something like that, I didn’t write down the actual number, mine is equally likely to be accurate). It also raises the question of whether Orlando is really a move threat for the Rays if it would require state money too, meaning state officials would really be bidding against themselves.
  • Some rich people in Nashville would like an MLB expansion team too, but city officials there say that’ll only work if they can privately fund a stadium, good luck with that.
  • The Chicago city council, as expected, approved spending $425 million in property tax proceeds on roads and public plazas and stuff surrounding a new downtown Chicago Fire stadium. Alderman Anthony Beale called the project “what exactly TIF is supposed to be used for,” adding, “When you look at the jobs that are going to be created by this, when you look at the revenue that’s going to be brought into the city by this project, the restaurants, the parking, the ticket sales and all the things that go along with that, that’s how we make our economy grow.” Beale did not explain how moving the Fire from one part of Chicago to another was going to create all this new revenue — or, for that matter, how encouraging construction of new housing in one part of Chicago rather than another — but surely he knows what he’s talking about, no reason not to trust him just bceause he once attended a fundraiser in his honor held by the taxicab industry the week before before voting to water down taxicab regulations.
  • Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson has proposed spending $300 million in city money on expanding D.C. United‘s stadium to 28,000 seats and building a roof on it, with the team owners on the hook for the other $320 million. In exchange, the district would receive “stadium-generated revenues and economic activity,” which is to say no actual money, just “maybe it’ll host some more concerts and not everyone buying tickets would have been spending their money elsewhere in D.C. anyway.”
  • The city of Portland broke the stalemate in Portland Trail Blazers arena talks yesterday, sending team owner Tom Dundon a draft term sheet that doesn’t include rent payments but does include payments in lieu of property taxes starting at $3 million a year and escalating over time. This came after NBA commissioner Adam Silver griped that Dundon’s plan to get $600 million in public money for arena renovations while putting in nothing of his own money “seems to have gone off track,” then refused to promise that the Blazers would stay in Portland even if the $600 million was approved — which seems to be a violation of Extortion 101, but maybe you do catch more flies with vinegar than honey, who knew?
  • Cleveland’s Gateway Economic Development Corp. just got a $52 million bill for projected repair needs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and doesn’t have $52 million to pay it with. Surely nobody could have seen that coming when the city agreed to cover the teams’ future capital expenses as long as they played there! Live and learn, or in Cleveland’s case, just live.
  • More World Cup economic impact data points: Some businesses in Atlanta are doing well, others are not; Arlington businesses are only doing well if they sell tourists on Texas-y things like barbecue or access to cattle drives; New York’s bars made out better during the event than its hotels; bars in England are doing great, too, despite England not actually hosting any games; downtown Seattle got an extra 3 million visitors on World Cup hosting days, but the Downtown Seattle Association didn’t release figures on whether the rest of Seattle got fewer visitors than normal on those days; and Miami and Los Angeles and Arlington should all see massive economic impact, report news sites (mostly former news site CBS) that only cite FIFA’s numbers.
  • Economist Geoff Propheter decided to get into the vaportecture game with AI designs for a new Blazers arena, and after some online kibitzing it ended up here, 10/10, no notes.
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Indiana gov to Porter County: If you want to miss out on fun of giving $250m in tax money to Bears, your loss

access_time personNeil deMause

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun says he isn’t sweating Porter County leaders’ opposition to raising food and beverage taxes for a new Chicago Bears stadium the next county over, because really it’s Porter County that would be missing out on all the fun of taking part in shoveling money at the Bears owners:

Under the law, Porter County would have to approve a one-percent food and beverage tax to have representation on the stadium authority. The governor said if it doesn’t get approved, the biggest impact would be on Porter County itself.

“If they choose not to put any skin in the game, they’re not going to have any say-so for what happens from all the economic benefits we’re going to get from it,” Braun said.

Maybe you’re the one up a stump, Porter County! Does a county get a chance to fund a stadium deal every day?

The whole Porter County kerfuffle points up one of the weirder things about the Indiana Bears stadium deal: Though it was passed by the legislature back in February, it didn’t precisely spell out who would be spending what on a stadium, or even where exactly it would be. A newly created sports authority will be able to offer the Bears owners money from a whole bunch of taxes, only some of which actually exist yet:

  • All new property tax, income tax, and sales tax for the next 35 years from an omni-TIF district encompassing the stadium and an undetermined number of square miles around it. This could certainly amount to billions of dollars, much of it potentially cannibalized from spending that has nothing to do with the Bears, but just as we saw in Kansas, it’s impossible to say exactly how much without knowing the size of the district.
  • A doubling of the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10%, which would provide at least $90 million.
  • Those 1% food and beverage tax surcharges in Lake and Porter counties, which would be worth about $250 million each, if approved.
  • A 12% ticket tax, which would be worth about another $200 million, though as established ticket taxes are unlike other taxes in that they tend to come out of team owners’ revenues.

The best guess at the total public cost is “easily past $4 billion,” but that could go up or down depending on what gets approved in terms of that tax diversion district plus the new taxes. And a quarter-billion dollars from Porter County seems like a significant amount of money, though I suppose Braun is right in that if county leaders balk at that, the state could always compensate by running the omni-TIF district all the way to the Ohio border.

All this makes Indiana’s bid for the Bears a bit of a moving target in the state’s bidding war with Illinois, which is no doubt very much to Bears owner George McCaskey’s liking. (“You’re willing to give us $1.5 billion in property tax breaks and infrastructure money, you say? Well, what if I told you Indiana was offering a TIF district the size of the entire Local Group?”) Right now you have a three-way — or more, given the various Illinois factions — game of chicken going on, and nobody’s showing each other their cards, and … okay, maybe it’s too early in the day for me to be writing extended metaphors. If anyone says they know how much money Bears execs could get out of either Indiana or Illinois, they’re lying, that’s the upshot here.

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Friday roundup: Pelicans owner seeks deal for state-funded velour, ballot measure on Royals stadium could face court fight

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, a special note of thanks to all the FoS supporters who get daily posts by email for your patience while I’ve spent the last week or two figuring out how to make the formatting more readable on mobile devices. (The actual code took just a few minutes to write; figuring out where to insert it in the convoluted system that sends out notices as soon as posts are published was a much longer saga.) I hope this reduces your eyestrain, even at the risk of easier access to stadium news raising your blood pressure.

And speaking of stoking ire, here’s the rest of this week’s news items that didn’t make the daily cut:

  • New Orleans Pelicans owner Gayle Benson is reportedly working on a lease extension with the state of Louisiana to be signed by the end of this year, which could be a 10-year deal with additional five-year options like Benson’s Saints got. No one’s saying a word about the important stuff — how much the state would kick in for arena renovations as part of the deal, and whether Benson would pay any added rent or revenue sharing to help repay the state’s costs — but given that the Pelicans owner has previously said she wants more luxury suites with crushed velour furniture in order to boost the team’s profits, which are currently only about $77 million a year, don’t hold your breath on this “public-private partnership” including a ton of private.
  • A Kansas City labor organization has succeeded in getting enough signatures to put a vote on the November ballot on whether to use city money to fund a new Royals stadium. Mayor Quinton Lucas has declared “the train’s already left the station” and threatened to get the deal signed off on before November, to preclude the public from having a say; the group Missouri Workers Power has threatened to sue to block Lucas from doing so, citing legal precedents where courts struck down legislative actions taken on issues where voter initiatives were pending.
  • North Carolina house speaker Destin Hall is not so crazy about the idea of setting aside a pile of state money to build a Raleigh-area baseball stadium for a proposed MLB expansion team, saying, “Private companies should pay for their own facilities instead of relying on the General Assembly. However, if someone presents a proposal showing that North Carolina taxpayers would get a strong return on the investment, I am willing to consider it.” State senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his primary by 23 votes in March, has been the main advocate of a stadium funding bill; both Hall and Berger are Republicans, while Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said this week, “We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it.”
  • Some Illinois state legislators don’t seem inclined to revisit tax subsidies for a Chicago Bears stadium no matter what Gov. JB Pritzker says: Comments this week (all from Pritzker’s fellow Democrats) included, “What the Bears wanted was a blank check We not only said no but, excuse my language, hell no,” “If you come to the table in Springfield and you are a liar, it doesn’t bode well for you,” and “The big issue that came about was, Are we going to give billionaires more taxpayer dollars?”
  • A Cuyahoga County councilmember is suggesting using part of the proceeds of a 0.25% sales tax surcharge meant to cover building a new jail and repairing a courthouse to instead pay for repairs and upgrades to the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, because surely there’s nothing else the county could use that money for. Just not paying for unlimited upgrades ad infinitum and daring the team owners to give up their sweetheart leases — or even threatening to do so in order to get the team owners to agree to a compromise solution — remains an option, guys.
  • Neighborhood leaders around the Chicago Fire‘s proposed stadium at the The 78 site say if the city is going to devote tax money to parking garages for the stadium, it should also kick in for a community benefits agreement to provide funding for transit access, affordable housing, anti-displacement protections, public infrastructure, and support for local businesses. Whether to view this as a vital instrument of democracy to ensure that regular citizens can get dealt into public spending priorities or just a way for developers to buy off local community leaders by cutting them in on the deal is, as always, a reasonable question.
  • Most of the news coverage of the economic impact of the World Cup has disappeared as coverage of the games themselves has taken over, but Seattle’s KUOW did check in on local businesses this week and found that food outlets near the stadium that sell drinks or quick grab-and-go food items are doing great while businesses farther away or those that sell things fans may not crave before or after a soccer match (Vietnamese cookies, vintage clothing) are having a miserable time of it. Yup, checks out!
  • Buffalo Bills ticket prices are too damn high, clearly we need to reduce red tape so the Bills can build more seats.
  • Yes, that Crain’s Chicago Business article claiming Bears tax subsidies weren’t public money was real bad, but as Geoffrey Propheter reminds us, it’s still no Bridge Detroit.
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Pritzker ready to okay Illinois giving public money to Bears, even if everyone’s pretending it’s not public money

access_time personNeil deMause

Crain’s Chicago has another article quoting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as saying the ball is in the Chicago Bears owners’ court as far as coming up with a demand for an Illinois stadium bill, just like Pritzker already said last week. The governor went a bit further this time in saying that Bears execs are actually working on cobbling together a new bill — “I think they’re looking at both of the bills that passed — the one in the House, the one in the Senate — hoping to put the provisions of each of those together in a form that they think will pass” — and reiterated that he’s willing to call a special session of the legislature as soon as team officials have all their votes in a row.

That’s all old news, so instead I’d like to take the time to focus in on this paragraph from the Crain’s piece:

Even though the bill didn’t provide any public money for the stadium, many Illinois legislators were cool to the idea of providing property tax breaks to a privately owned football team at a time when constituents are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes.

Look, I get it. There are only so many minutes in the day to report and speed-type reports like these, though at least Crain’s writer John Pletz appears to have a more reasonable one-article-a-day workload. And journalism shorthand is an established thing, so wanting to say “public money” when you mean “direct cash subsidies” is sort of understandable.

Still: Saying the rejected megaprojects bill “didn’t provide any public money for the stadium” but did “provide property tax breaks” is just nonsense, and doesn’t belong in any self-respecting news outlet. Tax breaks are very much public money — they’re calculated as such in an annual “tax expenditure” report by the state comptroller, for one thing — and are equally valuable to team owners’ bottom line, as saving $700 million on your property tax bills is no different from getting $700 million worth of government checks. So while the turn of phrase may seem innocuous, it ends up misleading those readers who are worried about the higher cost of living and struggling with their own taxes. And that’s before even considering that one of the bills previously considered would take sales and hotel taxes collected in a stadium district and use them to pay off stadium bonds, which isn’t a tax break at all, it’s just a government check.

As for where an Illinois stadium would go, the Bears-owned site in Arlington Heights is still the most likely target, though that isn’t stopping other communities from trying to get in on the bidding: In addition to the industrial suburb of McCook, state rep Curtis Tarver has proposed a site at 85th and Lake Shore Drive on the far South Side near the Indiana border, saying that he told Bears CEO about the idea and “he certainly did not tell me that’s the worst idea I’ve seen in my life.” Hope springs eternal, and summers eternal too, at least when a special session is on the table.

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