Spurs owner pours $6.5m into campaign to win Tuesday’s arena subsidy vote

access_time personNeil deMause

Early voting is underway for San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt’s ballot measure to get $311 million in Bexar County tax money over 30 years (about $150 million in present value) as part of a $750 million public funding deal, and here’s what’s happening:

Guessing at what will happen when the polls close is always fun, and with surveys showing county voters slightly opposed to the arena funding measures, and being outspent by only a 32:1 ratio often being enough to defeat a sports subsidy measure, it’s fair to say that Holt is going to need all of that $6.5 million to spend on last-minute campaign ads. Not that a defeat on Tuesday would be final: As Wolff observed, there’s nothing stopping Holt from coming back with a slightly different plan — he could even do so the very next year, lots of other team owners have! His arena is just 23 years old and was just renovated 10 years ago, you’d think he’d be in no rush, but billionaires gonna billionaire, it’s how they got to be billionaires in the first place.

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Mavericks, Stars owners launch war for Dallas arena supremacy, taxpayers hold on to your wallets

access_time personNeil deMause

A shooting war has broken out between the owners of the Dallas Mavericks and Stars, with the Mavs owners filing suit yesterday against the Stars owners for … well, it’s complicated. But suffice to say that it all looks to have to do with two elements that are increasingly common factors in sports arena scheming: an expiring lease, plus a battle for dominance between a city’s NBA and NHL franchise owners.

When the Minnesota North Stars first relocated to Dallas in 1993, they shacked up with the Mavericks in Reunion Arena, a then 13-year-old arena owned by the city. The two teams convinced the city to spend $420 million to replace that arena with the American Airlines Center in 2001, and have been co-tenants there ever since, paying $2.2 million a year each in rent and other payments. (No, you are correct, that does not come close to paying off a $420 million construction cost.)

Ever since Sands casino owners Patrick and Sivan Dumont (along with Miriam Adelson) bought majority control of the Mavericks from Mark Cuban in 2023, however, they’ve been increasingly focused on building a new arena-and-casino complex somewhere in the Dallas area. (Casinos aren’t legal in Texas, but the Mavs owners aren’t sweating that part just yet.) Stars CEO Brad Alberts said at the time of the sale that he was fine with going it alone at the current arena, possibly with some renovations, but needed to wait to hear the new Mavs owners’ plans first.

Since then, things have deteriorated fast. Late last year, the two teams failed to reach agreement on a planned $300 million renovation of the current arena — to be paid for half by the city of Dallas, the rest either by the two teams jointly or the Mavs owners alone, depending on who you ask. This was immediately followed by the Mavs seizing the Stars’ half of the arena operating company and withholding their arena revenues. The conflict only escalated with yesterday’s lawsuit filing, in which the Mavs owners charged the Stars owners with breach of contract for moving their corporate headquarters from Dallas to nearby Frisco — in 2003 — and with obstructing improvements to the current arena.

Why the Mavs owners would want to pay to renovate an arena they want to move out of is an excellent question; there’s some speculation that they were simply hoping to lock the Stars into the current arena to keep them from building their own new one. And sure enough, since everything fell apart the Stars owners have begun talking up the possibility of building a new arena themselves, possibly in nearby Plano, or possibly in Frisco, The Colony, Arlington, or Fort Worth.

If all this is starting to sound familiar, it’s likely because of the recent throwdown in Philadelphia between the Flyers and 76ers owners. That was a slightly different scenario — their arena is privately owned, solely by the Flyers owners — but it played out similarly: Sixers owner Josh Harris launched plans to build his own new arena to outcompete the Flyers for concerts, and eventually used this as leverage to get the Flyers owners to agree to jointly build a new arena at the current site. (There’s since been talk of a similar possible dispute in Boston between the Celtics and Bruins.) Two arenas in even a moderately large market can be tough on the owners, who are left needing to compete for concert dates and may even have to offer discounts to land them; but threatening to build competing arenas can be a lucrative game of chicken if you think you can force your fellow team owner to agree to an arena deal that benefits you to avoid being second fiddle in their own city.

Both team owners are playing their arena leverage plans close to the vest, but this whole situation is well worth watching, especially as the teams’ leases expire in 2031 and they’re both hoping to use that to their advantage. Each has several Dallas-area cities they can try to play off against each other for arena subsidies, but at the same time both need to outmaneuver each other, something that the city governments could themselves use as leverage, if they play it smart. Hoping that city officials play things smart is usually a bad bet and early indications aren’t great, but there’s at least a chance here, so fingers crossed!

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Chiefs owner to decide soon how much to demand for what kind of stadium and where, maybe

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the prerogatives of being a sports team owner is you get to have your every utterance turned into a full-length news article, and Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt took advantage of this on Monday, revealing that he’s definitely going to demand a new something somewhere:

“I wouldn’t say we’re in limbo. Stadium projects move at their own pace,” Hunt said. “We’ve learned over the years that you can’t really force them to go faster, even if you want them to. And so it’s just important for us to keep working on both options.”

“Both options” here means either renovating the Chiefs’ current stadium or building a new one “somewhere in the metropolitan area” either in Missouri or Kansas, which is technically more than two options, but whatever. If Hunt chooses renovation, he said, “there’s a chance that we would be on a ballot next year,” which presumably would mean another vote for Jackson County along the lines of the one that residents decisively rejected in April 2024, to provide county money on top of the $750 million in state money Missouri already has promised.

It’s unlikely that Hunt is still really thinking about what he wants here, given that the Chiefs stadium shakedown saga has been ongoing for more than three years. He almost certainly is, however, still weighing how to best use his leverage to extract the maximum in taxpayer money — for example, if he puts a county funding measure on the ballot next year, how can he still threaten to move to Kansas if it fails, given that Kansas wants an answer by the end of this December? It’s a lot of work being a billionaire and demanding more billions, you wouldn’t want to be in Hunt’s diamond-encrusted shoes, let me tell you.

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How much is Cleveland’s mayor giving up in exchange for $80m Browns payout?

access_time personNeil deMause

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and the Cleveland city council are fighting over whether the council will get to rework Bibb’s settlement of the Browns stadium standoff, and I almost wrote about it yesterday but didn’t because 1) I slept late, 2) my regular computer is in the shop and it takes me forever to type anything on the old one, and 3) it didn’t seem like that big a deal, Bibb’s proposed payoff (described as $100 million but really more like $80 million in present value) may not be amazing but it’s whatever. Until this:

How did the entire Plain Dealer editorial board miss that the "$100 million deal" with the Browns obligates Cleveland to commit to funding an unspecified amount on infrastructure improvements to support the Brook Park stadium?

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.com) 2025-10-27T11:45:14.479Z

Hmm? Jimmy Haslam has asked for $70 million in state money for road improvements for the Brook Park stadium site — this on top of $600 million in state money for the stadium itself, and despite saying openly that he’ll keep the team in the state even if he doesn’t get it — but is he asking for city money too? I asked Bradbury, and he pointed me to this in the Browns’ press release about the Bibb agreement:

Parties to mutually support infrastructure plans related to road and air travel with respect to both the Brook Park stadium mixed-use project, the modernization of Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport, the development of the Cleveland lakefront, including the redevelopment of the Burke Lakefront Airport property.

I think that means that Haslam and Bibb will both “support” the infrastructure plans as in work together to get them approved by the state, not support them with actual cash. (While I could certainly see Haslam wanting city cash toward road improvements, it’s hard to see him offering to put his own money in.) So this probably isn’t a commitment of more city money. Though Bradbury certainly has a point that somebody in the media should ask Bibb to clarify this, something that reporters interviewing Bibb and other reporters doing the same and those writing explainers seem not to have done.

And either way, Bibb agreeing to team up with Haslam to lean on the state (and the council) to okay the Brook Park deal isn’t great. The council has say over city spending, so Haslam getting to give the city a payoff and then demanding how it be used (to rehab the waterfront where their current stadium stands) is a sucky precedent. As is the notion that an $80 million payoff can not only buy the city’s silence, it can buy its support of state highway spending when Clevelanders pay Ohio taxes, too.

The bigger problem here, though, is how this entire deal is being negotiated: The Haslams get to lock in each level of subsidy, then go for more, whereas the public is at best fighting to hold the line. Even if Cleveland getting $80 million in exchange for dropping its legal challenges turns out to be maybe an okay tradeoff, the Browns owners get to keep haggling for more subsidies as long as they want — Bibb revealed last week that team negotiators wanted any settlement contingent on getting Cuyahoga County to put money into the Brook Park stadium, and while the mayor successfully resisted that being a condition, the Haslams still plan on pushing for county money on top of state cash anyway.

The city council, at least, seems intent on closely examining Bibb’s proposed agreement, saying Monday night that it will subject the legislation to four separate committee votes. Here’s hoping that at least one of those committees will use its time to investigate the fine print.

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Friday roundup: Pritzker endorses “infrastructure” spending for Bears, Royals could soon propose Kansas vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to threaten to leave town without threatening to leave town: San Antonio Spurs edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Early voting has started in the San Antonio Spurs arena public funding ballot measure, and the local news media is on the job warning that the team could move so that its owners don’t have to. Today’s report from KSAT-TV report asks the question up front — “If the team doesn’t get the downtown arena it wants, could it leave San Antonio entirely?” — and then proceeds to answer it via an odd sequence of interview subjects:

  • A guy on his way to vote, who said he would “probably” vote for the Spurs funding, because “if they lose the Spurs, they’re going to lose a lot.”
  • The owner of a construction firm, interviewed at the Spurs’ practice facility, who said, “Say my valuation of my business is $1 billion, and I can move and double that valuation in a day … Be careful what you wish for, San Antonio.”
  • Spurs lawyer Bobby Perez, who refused to answer questions about whether the team would try to move if the ballot measures were rejected.
  • Finally, sports economist Geoffrey Propheter, who noted that “There has been no threat, direct or indirect, from the Holts, at least publicly, that says they are going to move,” and that lots of other teams, such as the San Francisco Giants, have had referendums shot down, multiple times even, and not moved.

It’s all factual enough reporting, and certainly readers are going to want to know if a move could be in the offing if voters turn down the $311 million over 30 years (about $150 million in present value) that Spurs owner Peter Holt is asking for. But it’s hard to miss that the framing ends up supporting owner Peter Holt’s attempts to make this into a vote on whether to keep the Spurs — notably reaching out to Austin’s mayor in recent weeks — while downplaying the public cost (which would likely total $750 million or more) or the fact that San Antonio just built the Spurs a new arena 23 years ago amid promises by Holt’s dad of neighborhood redevelopment that never came.

All this is very much part of what we dubbed the “non-threat threat,” where a team owner denies intending to move a team, but hints that you don’t want to push him and find out, and then leaves it to elected officials and the media to sound the alarm. (It is related to, though not exactly the same as, Jerry Reinsdorf’s edict that “a savvy negotiator creates leverage,” even if it’s leverage you have no intention of using.) If the KSAT story is any indication, Holt Jr.’s attempts at framing the story this way are having an impact; though if this set of person-on-the-street interviews is representative, most people are still weighing whether the promise of exciting new stuff is enough to outweigh giving money to “megamillionaires” instead of fixing “all of the stuff that needs to be fixed, that’s not fixed,” with no one mentioning the threat of losing the team at all.

The vote is likely going to be close, and as Propheter points out, almost exactly equal numbers of these referendums succeed or fail. The more interesting part may end up being what Holt’s Plan B is if he loses: As we’ve seen both in the early days of the public stadium boom and again more recently, megamillionaires tend not to take direct democracy lying down when there’s a group of legislators they can go to for a second opinion.

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Missouri official tags ballot measure to repeal $1.5B stadium subsidy with language warning it would make Chiefs move

access_time personNeil deMause

A Missouri law firm is trying to get a pair of ballot initiatives on the November 2026 ballot to overturn the $1.5 billion in Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadium money the state legislature approved in June, and instead direct the same amount of money to fund Medicaid in the wake of federal cuts. But we can’t even talk about that, or at least the Missouri news media can’t, because right now everyone is focused on Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ summary language for the ballot measures, which is uh:

“Shall Missouri law be amended to repeal the ‘Show-Me Sports Investment Act,’ which provides state bonds, appropriations, and tax credits for professional sports stadiums and related events, thereby likely causing the Kansas City Chiefs to move their stadium from Missouri to Kansas?”

Leading the Missouri Independent to add:

There is no mention of the Royals, an omission that sparked a flurry of questions — and criticism.

Excuse me, I have other questions! Like why is the secretary of state editorializing in ballot initiative language about how the Chiefs need subsidies or they’ll move to Kansas, when 1) it’s not at all clear that team owner Clark Hunt is serious about a move or just using it as leverage and 2) Hoskins didn’t also warn of, say, the likely consequences of a “no” vote on Medicaid funding levels. (I’ll skip asking about why it says the Chiefs would “move their stadium” like they would back a truck up to it and tow it across the border.) Seriously, dude, what’s your deal?

When asked by The Star why the question mentioned the Chiefs and not the Royals, Hoskins’ spokesperson Rachael Dunn said the language focused on the “clearest, most immediate potential consequence based on information available at the time of review” and was not based on any internal knowledge of either teams’ plans.

So the Chiefs moving to Kansas is “clear” but not based on any “internal knowledge,” meaning Hoskins got it from watching TV, probably? It’s just how policy is made these days.

Hoskins’ office also said that the initial draft summary is just the “first bite at the apple,” with advocates able to take Hoskins to court if they disagree with the language — something that Brad Ketcher, the lawyer who is working on the ballot measures, said is tantamount to intentionally writing a crap summary to force proponents to waste time in court: “Hoskins is all but admitting that he drafted flawed language with an eye toward slowing the measure.”

Slowing the measure could end up a key factor, as there is also the question of whether the Chiefs and/or Royals will finalize their stadium funding before the ballot measure can be voted on: Don’t forget that the St. Louis Cardinals previously got public stadium money despite local referenda barring sports subsidies, because courts ruled the money had already been allocated by the time voters voted. But, sure, let’s debate whether the ballot language should also warn that the Royals will move to Greensboro, that’s an excellent use of everyone’s time.

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Friday roundup: Stochastic parrot edition

access_time personNeil deMause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Spurs arena vote faces “uphill battle” as poll shows residents currently oppose using tax dollars

access_time personNeil deMause

The first polls are in for the November ballot measure to raise hotel and car rental taxes and use part of the proceeds to pay about $150 million toward a new San Antonio Spurs arena, and they’re not great for Spurs owner Peter Holt: Bexar County voters who responded to the poll were opposed to the plan by a 46-40% margin, with 14% still undecided.

Considering that Holt is in the middle of $2 million in ad spending to convince county voters of why this is a good idea, this has to be a disappointing result. Voters do narrowly approve of Holt’s greater Project Marvel redevelopment project (45-40%, with 13% unsure and 2% no opinion), but that’s technically being funded by the city, not the county, even if the county is looking to help fund the arena parts of it. Also, there are actually two measures on the ballot, one to help fund a new arena, and one to pay for upgrades to the Spurs’ old arena so it can be used by the San Antonio Stock Show, and the new-arena one currently appears to be losing.

Bryan Gervais, director of the University of Texas at San Antonio Center for Public Opinion Research, which conducted the poll, told the San Antonio Express-News, “It’s fair to say that the effort to secure venue tax funding for a new Spurs arena faces an uphill battle.”

The city of San Antonio is also proposing to put in $489 million toward the arena, plus $60 million to buy land for it, which it says it can do without a public vote; however, city officials have said the whole deal will fall apart if the arena ballot measure doesn’t pass on November 4.

What’s a poor sports mogul to do in this situation? Increase his ad spending, probably, to try to drown out the opposition: While the old rule of thumb that stadium and arena campaigns only win when proponents outspend opponents by more than 100:1 doesn’t turn out to always be true, it is true that the bigger the spending gap, the bigger the margin of victory, so place those ad buys! Also, maybe drop some hints that the team might move if people don’t vote for the arena subsidy, any cities handy that you can play footsie with?

In October 2023, Austin-based Spurs Sports & Entertainment (SS&E) executive Brandon James texted [Austin Mayor Kirk] Watson an invitation to a private wine event with legendary coach Gregg Popovich.

James described the gathering as a “very deliberate plan to get the right people in the room.”

Ex-cellent.

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