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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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Chicago to vote on swiping $287m in tax money from next neighborhood over to fund Fire soccer stadium development

access_time personNeil deMause

Last September, when the Chicago city council voted to approve a new Fire soccer stadium at the downtown The 78 site that had previously been considered for a White Sox stadium, I reported that “Fire owner Joe Mansueto says he’ll build [it] with his own money, so there should be no public funding involved” but also that “some details still need to be ironed out” so “maybe it’s best to say there probably won’t be any public funding involved, fingers crossed, knock wood.”

Ten months later, how’s that going?

Chicago officials plan to redirect $287 million of West Loop property tax revenue for infrastructure surrounding Chicago Fire FC’s new stadium at the 78, a shift poised to help jumpstart the South Loop megaproject and reduce risk for developer Related Midwest.

But wait, you may ask if you’ve been paying way too close attention to this story, isn’t The 78 already in a TIF district where any rise in property tax receipts is kicked back to pay for “infrastructure” development? Ah, but that TIF district only has enough projected property tax revenue to pay for part of the infrastructure; this would be money from a different TIF district, the Canal/Congress TIF District nearby, which would be diverted to the Roosevelt/Clart TIF District that the Fire stadium would be built in. This, writes Crain’s Chicago Business with a bit too narrow a focus on the last word in its name, “likely makes it easier for Related to finance the project’s $425 million infrastructure bill at a time when many institutional investors and lenders are avoiding the city,” which it certainly would. it would also leave the Canal/Congress district with $287 million less money, and what that district using its property tax receipts for, anyway?

“What gives me concern is the plan to raid the Canal/Congress TIF in order to pay for it,” [alderman Bill] Conway said, arguing the move will leave the city without TIF resources for maintenance of Union Station, Ogilvie Transportation Center and a Greyhound bus station the city is buying. “It seems like it will have a significant negative impact on public transit in the city.”

(Why, yes, Conway’s district includes the Canal/Congress TIF area but not The 78, why do you ask?)

The city council finance committee already voted 30-1 to approve the TIF shift on Monday, with the full council set to vote today. If it approves the deal, Mansueto would still technically be building the $750 million stadium with his own money. He would, however, be getting $425 million worth of other free stuff: $216 million for “public structures, plazas, and open space”; $105 million for “road infrastructure”; and the rest for things like upgrades to the wall holding back the Chicago River and improvements to the site’s Metra commuter rail connection.

The total price tag for everything that the city of Chicago will be building for The 78 developers via kicked-back property taxes still remains about the same — $700 million for the whole site — so this is less an increased taxpayer cost than the city running short on the originally planned source of funds and having to find other pockets to dip into, a la everything that’s going on in Cleveland. Not sure if that makes it better or worse, but raiding funds that could otherwise go to upkeep of the city’s train and bus stations so that a billionaire soccer team owner and his $70 billion real estate developer partner can “reduce risk” sure doesn’t sound great, unless you’re a member of the billionaire class.

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Portland could vote on $120m Blazers arena subsidy before knowing where money would come from, this should work out well

access_time personNeil deMause

And speaking of “Approve sports spending first, work out the details later,” this just in from Portland, Oregon regarding Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon’s $600 million arena renovation request:

As a deadline to commit public dollars to Moda Center renovations rapidly approaches, it appears that Portland city councilors will be asked to approve spending $120 million on arena renovations next month without knowing where that money will come from in the city budget.

According to city officials, that’s because the Portland Trail Blazers have yet to share details of the renovation plans they have in mind for the Moda Center. The Blazers say they need the city to commit to funding before they’ll share designs.

Sorry, wut? If ever a moment called for the employment of that Simpsons “aurora borealis” meme — oh good, looks like J.C. Bradbury is already on it.

With Dundon keeping his pig firmly within its poke, that limits Portland’s options for coming up with its $120 million share, because two sources of funding — the Portland Clean Energy Fund and a city economic development fund — have restrictions on what they could be used for. Not that it really matters: If those funds aren’t used, Portland will have to come up with other tax money, and if they are used, Portland will have to come up with tax money to pay for whatever those funds would have otherwise been used for.

Still, the fact that the Portland city council is set to commit to a term sheet for Blazers lease talks on August 12 and won’t know by then how it would pay the $120 million bill it would be committing to is, let’s go with “not great.” There’s nothing stopping the council from calling Dundon’s bluff, of course, and saying they won’t release his money until he releases his arena plans. That would seem to be the absolute least they could ask him to do, since it wouldn’t cost him any actual money — and Portland lawmakers could still totally request that he chip in more of that — but nobody ever became a billionaire by acceding to reasonable demands.

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Proposed Indiana tax hikes could fail to pay off $1B in Bears stadium bonds, leave taxpayers on hook for even more

access_time personNeil deMause

Five months after the Indiana state legislature passed a funding bill for a Chicago Bears stadium that amounted to “What if we built an NFL stadium construction plan entirely out of handwaves?“, the Chicago Tribune’s Robert McCoppin has taken a look at exactly who would be paying for what under the deal. Better yet, he asked two public financing experts — University of Colorado Denver economist Geoff Propheter, who should need no introduction here, and University of Illinois Chicago Government Finance Research Center director Deborah Carroll — to go over the figures and see what’s what.

The myriad tax packages approved by Indiana for a Bears stadium would include:

  • Between $12 million and $18 million a year from a 1% food and beverage tax surcharge in Lake and Porter counties (assuming Porter County goes for paying toward a stadium that’s not in Porter County).
  • At least $5 million a year from doubling Lake County’s innkeeper’s tax.
  • Around $12 million from a 12% ticket tax on stadium events.
  • Less than $16 million a year by diverting sales, income, and food and beverage taxes from an mega-TIF district containing the stadium and parking and training facilities.
  • Up to $10 million a year from an omni-TIF district diverting property, income, and sales taxes from an area surrounding the stadium.

McCoppin says this adds up to a best-case scenario of $55 million a year in tax money; I get $61 million, but maybe I’m parsing things like “less than” differently that he does. Either way, Carroll projects that it’ll cost $60-62 million a year to pay off the $1 billion in stadium bonds Indiana is proposing — meaning any shortfall in tax revenue, and Indiana could be left having to scramble to raise additional taxes; state officials might want to talk to Cuyahoga County about how that’s worked out for them.

“If any of those assumptions fail to materialize,” [Carroll] wrote in an email to the Tribune, “the reality can drastically change the financial scenario.”…

“And what happens if the revenue falls short?” Carroll asked. “I assume that’s where the broader tax sources unrelated to the stadium come into play, which would increase the tax burden for Indiana residents.”

Finally, Carroll wondered, “What other events might draw the necessary crowds? And will enough people attend those events? These are really important questions considering there are only a handful of home football games each season.”

The stadium’s total cost, meanwhile, also remains a mystery, notes Propheter, and will depend on such unknowns as where exactly it would be built, how much would have to be paid to acquire land, and how much it would cost to maintain. And while he doesn’t mention it in this article, another huge TBD is the size of that omni-TIF district surrounding the stadium: Indiana’s legislative analyst previously declared the total tax diversion to be “indeterminable” given that the district could always be expanded to cannibalize taxes from a larger area, which is good if you’re worried about the state being able to pay its bills, bad if you’re worried about the state raiding its existing budget to do so.

All told, then, Indiana is proposing at least $1 billion in subsidies for a Bears stadium, but possibly more, and it’s unclear if the proposed tax package will be enough to pay for all that or if additional taxes will be needed. If Bears execs go for all that — which also remains a major unknown — it will be down to a new state stadium authority to decide on the specifics. “Approve stadium first, have an unelected body work out the details later” isn’t the ideal way to go about state economic policy, but it’s apparently the one Indiana has decided to roll with.

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Can Portland make Blazers owner pay a fair share of $600m arena renovation cost? The Oregonian investimagates

access_time personNeil deMause

The Oregonian ran an incredibly long (by 2026 standards) article on Friday on the Portland Trail Blazers arena situation, including lots of useful information but thematically muddled to the point where if you read it and aren’t sure what it was saying overall, you’re not alone. In all likelihood, you didn’t read past the headline (“As the Trail Blazers dig in on Moda Center costs, Portland looks for leverage”) and first three paragraphs, as the Oregonian is hard-paywalled for subscribers only; thanks to a kindly FoS reader who passed along a copy, we can go through it bit by bit and try to see what to make of it all:

The Blazers, through a sibling organization, lease the Moda Center from the city. The team pays no rent. It also pays no property taxes because it no longer owns the arena. In addition, it keeps the revenue from the arena’s naming-rights deal, advertising, concessions, as well as a significant share of the cash generated from ticket sales and parking at Blazers games, as well as some revenue from other events.

Those terms are all negotiable in the team’s next lease, which must run for at least 20 years to unlock the public financing windfall.

That is indeed a very bad lease, one that goes back to 2024 when the city agreed to buy the arena from the estate of the late Paul Allen. And if Blazers owner Tom Dundon doesn’t want to put in a significant share of the $600 million in arena renovations he wants — currently his final offer is “I pay taxes, why should I spend anything on arena renovations?” — then getting him to pay some rent seems like a reasonable demand.

City Councilor Steve Novick has done back-of-the-napkin math that shows tweaking lease terms could make the city whole for its expected $120 million renovation investment, even if Dundon doesn’t chip in a nickel…

In an email, Novick said he wants to craft a lease that kicks back every dollar the city puts into the arena, including the expected $120 million for renovations and $14.5 million in annual operating costs.

That’s not really Dundon not chipping in a nickel, of course: It’s Dundon chipping in $300 million ($120 million for the city’s renovation costs plus the present value of 20 years of $14.5 million operating payments). But if Novick wants to frame it as “Dundon doesn’t have to put in any money for renovations so long as the city can take it out of his increased lease payments,” that’s fine, two can play at the Casino Night Fallacy.

And that wouldn’t all be new money that Dundon would be putting in, because, as it turns out, while his current lease doesn’t require him to pay rent on the arena, it does require him to share some arena revenues:

The city makes $10.5 million a year from the Blazers’ current lease, Novick said. That includes $2.9 million from its 6% fee on Blazers tickets and $4.3 million from non-Blazers tickets. It also makes $3.3 million from parking in municipally-owned garages, a little less than half of the Rose Quarter parking revenue. The rest goes to the Blazers.

So now we’re down to covering $120 million in renovation costs plus an added $4 million a year in operating costs, which comes to about $170 million. That’s clearly $170 million that Dundon doesn’t want to pay — he already pays taxes, that means he gets everything else for free, it’s just how being a billionaire works! — but if it unlocks him getting $600 million in public funds total, he should take the deal and be up $430 million, right? In fact, one could argue the city should really be asking for more than $170 million, on the grounds that there’s county and state spending to be made up as well — Oregon officials have argued that state taxpayers will be made whole by all the income taxes the Blazers pay, which 1) no, probably not and 2) residents who don’t own basketball teams don’t get to devote their employees’ income taxes to their own business expenses — and while Dundon would undoubtedly rather get to keep his whole $600 million windfall, a $200 million or $300 million windfall for doing absolutely nothing aside from continuing to play in Portland is still a pretty nice day at the office.

Ah, but Dundon has leverage too, writes the Oregonian:

The worst-case scenario is grim: If the Blazers leave, the city could get saddled with an aging asset with no marquee tenant, one in need of more than $400 million in maintenance, and no backing from the state or county, which are respectively expected to contribute $365 million and roughly $101 million.

That $400 million in “maintenance” costs doesn’t have a cited source, and elsewhere the Oregonian refers to the projected $14.5 million in operating costs as “maintenance,” so maybe the paper is just adding up the costs of keeping the lights on at the arena for the next 30 years? In which case, first off, that’s not $400 million in present-day costs, whereas the city’s arena renovation costs would all be paid out right now. And second, as just established, that’s money that is mostly being paid off currently by those ticket taxes and parking fees, and if the Blazers left town, there would be 41 added dates a year for the arena to fill with concerts to make up for at least some of the tax revenue shortfall from not having the NBA.

All of which presupposes that Dundon would really move the Blazers if he doesn’t get his $600 million — or if he only gets $430 million, or $300 million, or whatever. And for what it’s worth, Dundon straight-up said in May that he has no intention of moving the team, and even if that was just an attempt to look less like a supervillain to the public, it’s certainly worth using in negotiations.

In the end, the Oregonian article is hamstrung a bit by viewing the Blazers arena squabble mostly through two sets of eyes: The vast majority of the piece is devoted to quotes or information provided by either Novick or Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins, presumably on the premise that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. But it’s at least an indication that some Portland elected officials are trying to push for a better lease in return for Dundon getting a pile of up-front public cash, which is better negotiating than lots of cities do. Right now the city is overdue sending its initial lease proposal to Dundon, but may as well take the time to get it right — after all, it’s Dundon who risks missing out on $600 million if nothing is approved this year, so who knows, maybe he’ll blink.

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Friday roundup: On being a fan of the World Cup without being a fan of the FIFA World Cup 2026™

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we start with this week’s roundup, a note about the World Cup: I’m enjoying it! The one-game knockout format, even in its dumb expanded iteration, is great for generating drama, and when you mix in international politics and colonial history, you get even more opportunities for hilarity.

But I enjoy most sports, even the dumb ones. The issue about sports mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics isn’t whether they should exist, but whether they should exist in their current form, as means for extracting tons of money from host cities and delivering it to corrupt oligarchs. The reports just keep coming in confirming that any claimed economic benefits of hosting the games are overwhelmed by the public costs — look, here’s another one from Atlanta about vendors trying to get their money back after being suckered into joining a city-sponsored program for World Cup-related booths that turned into what one called “a financial nightmare” — and while big public watch parties are fun, you don’t actually need to have the World Cup in your city, or in your country, to hold one. The World Cup, like pretty much all sports at this point (I may be willing to make exceptions for curling and Ultimate Frisbee), has been weaponized to transfer money from the many to the few, which is why we keep complaining about it here every week. If we have to live under toxic capitalism, the least we should get to do it the joy of pointing and laughing.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s gone on recently that is likely to cost you money on the grounds that sports are fun, please enjoy ridiculing it:

  • Washington, D.C. is preparing to sell $975 million in personal seat licenses allowing fans to buy Commanders tickets and use the proceeds for stadium construction, which momentarily excited me until I realized it looks like the PSLs will be funding the team’s share of costs, notwithstanding the city’s involvement in doing the sales. Anyway, some quick long division determines that team officials are presumably planning to ask for an average of $15,000 per seat for the mere right to spend hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets, though it’s always possible the team will have to take a loss on the whole transaction if fans aren’t willing to pony up that much.
  • Congratulations, everyone in the United States: You now get to help pay for $25 million in road work around the new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, after that city won a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for “reconfigured freeway ramps and streamlined local roads [that] will lead to the stadium and the surrounding entertainment district.”
  • The city of Oakland may try to sell the Oakland Coliseum and its neighboring arena in separate deals after concerns that wavering plans for redevelopment of the stadium site are holding up the arena sale. The Coliseum is set to finally be entirely empty next year, after the announced departure of the Roots USL Championship club to, uh, somewhere, they’ll get back to you on that.
  • Two contrasting headline styles in reporting on the return of corporate stadium names after FIFA decreed them unallowable during the World Cup because they might compete with their own sponsorship contracts: “Lumen Field returns as Seattle says bye to World Cup and Seattle Stadium” vs “Praise Be: ‘Philadelphia Stadium’ Once Again Bears the Name of Our Corporate Financial Overlords.” Well played, Philadelphia sports site Crossing Broad, even if you do appear to be mostly an excuse to run lots of posts promoting sports gambling.
  • Not sure which is more on the nose for 2026, a proposal to have the Bay Area’s Cow Palace host a data center now that it’s been superseded by the Golden State Warriors‘ new arena or a related proposal to have it host a helicopter landing pad. No word yet on whether these would require public money, but given that a data center is involved, probably.
  • New Dallas Stars vaportecture renderings, though they’re mostly unspecific and from a great distance, aside from the one that appears to show fans watching a Stars playoff game on a giant video screen atop a new team store, which is maybe even more on the nose for 2026.
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Rays stump for $2B stadium subsidy by releasing pictures of fans all raising fists in air at once

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since Tampa Bay Rays officials released any stadium renderings, and with talks on getting almost $2 billion in cash and tax breaks from the city and county seemingly on hold, no time like the present to drum up any excitement possible from some images of what a new building may or may not look like one day, so fire up the vaportecture cannons:

As is by now cliche in the genre, fans here show their appreciation for a Rays two-out rally in a blowout of the Cubs by standing, thrusting their fists in the air, and waving the team flags that baseball fans everywhere bring to games on the regular. Though it’s possible they’re actually cheering the passing lightning storm visible through the part-see-through roof, or just high on the thrill of watching a game with no backstop or netting, so that any of them may be killed by a foul ball at any time. There’s nothing more exhilarating than being reminded of the preciousness of life while watching (squints at the scoreboard, recognizes Jonny DeLuca and Chandler Simpson for starters) the same lineup your team fielded three years earlier.

A view of the same game (see the scoreboard and accompanying video screenshot) hours earlier during the daytime, though still in the bottom of the 5th inning with the same batter up, time will clearly work differently in the 2030s! The fans in the upper deck in their vintage Evan Longoria and Carl Crawford jerseys are just as excited to throw their fists in the air, though, even the ones at the bar who are only following the game by looking over their shoulders at the sky.

Fans stream into the park via center-field escalators, and back out of the park at the same time via escalators on the opposite side of the entry plaza. All the better to see the partly shaded, partly transparent roof, which lets fans view the airplanes pulling “GO RAYS!” banners that fly by whenever there isn’t a lightning storm.

But is there anywhere fans can go to drink any entirely ignore the game, you ask? Is there ever! They can also ignore the overhead plantings supported by nothing at all and the video boards with advanced stats on them, though one guy nearby is still raising his fist in the air, just to let everyone know they’re at a baseball game.

This is all very silly, as these kinds of renderings always are, but the release of the pretty pictures did manage to get Marc Topkin to write a whole article in the Tampa Bay Times about it, so mission accomplished, probably. One hopes that the Tampa city councimembers and Hillsborough County commissioners set to debate that $2 billion subsidy won’t be too swayed by levitating planters, but sports funding bills have passed for dumber reasons.

 

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Building a Marlins stadium during the financial crisis is about to hit Miami with a tsunami of debt payments

access_time personNeil deMause

Something I like to harp on here is that news articles that rage against governments still paying off stadiums after they’ve been torn down are missing the point: How to pay for a stadium, whether with cash now or bonds that can be refinanced into the far future, is just a financing choice, like deciding whether to pay for a car up front or over time. And while continuing to pay for a car that’s long since been totaled (or for Bobby Bonilla) can stick in one’s craw, it doesn’t necessarily cost more than making all the payments while you were still enjoying your stadium/car/alleged third baseman.

There can still be financing decisions that are terrible, though, and the bills for one of those are starting to come due for the Marlins stadium in Miami:

Here’s what we do know: the county issued bonds to build a stadium that it owns but from which the Marlins derive all income. An issue that yielded $80 million was to cost $1.2 billion to repay, one that yielded $319 million was to take $1.3 billion to repay, and one that yielded $50 million was to take $200 million to repay. Most of that debt remains, and payments are soon to balloon.

That’s not good! Also not good: Miami-Dade County commissioners apparently don’t even know exactly how much they’ll be on the hook for, even as they try to figure out where to come up with the money to make the balloon payments that Miami-Dade agreed to when the stadium was first planned in 2009. On the bright side, the county got out of paying its Marlins stadium bills in 2009, when it didn’t have the money; on the less bright side, it now has to pay even higher bills over the next two decades, when it still doesn’t have the money.

Way back in 2013, I guesstimated the county’s ultimate cost as being about $800-900 million in present value to pay off about $400 million in bonds, which was not a great deal no matter how you slice it. (One Miami financier told the Miami Herald at the time, “This is the sort of financing you do when you cannot afford it.”) But it was an emergency after all, with the Marlins threatening to move someplace — today’s Miami Today op-ed says Las Vegas, I remember it as mostly San Antonio, it was probably both of those and more over the decade that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria spent going back over and over to local governments in search of subsidies — and who can put a price on what Miami got out of its investment:

Today, in a covered ballpark built solely for baseball and with a winning team, sales average 12,735 per game – two-thirds as many as in an open-air football stadium. The problem clearly wasn’t the stadium.

A second promise was that a new stadium on the site of the defunct Orange Bowl – whose bonds were still being paid off – would rejuvenate Little Havana, which surrounds it. It hasn’t happened yet, 15 years later.

The third promise was that in a ballpark for which it pays no rent the team would spend more to get better players. The New York Mets this year top league payrolls at $328 million, followed by Los Angeles Dodgers at $302 million and the New York Yankees at $297 million. The Marlins, in contrast, pay $80 million, more only than Cleveland’s $79 million.

Oh, well, live and learn! Or at least Loria gets to live his life, still running his beloved art dealership after selling the Marlins for more than seven times what he paid for the franchise, while Miami-Dade taxpayers learn the dangers of balloon payment financing. Whether they or their elected officials will remember the lesson the next time it comes up is another story: The Marlins’ lease expires in 2047, so we can expect whoever owns them in a decade or so to start talking up the need for a new stadium then, unless all of Miami has relocated to Texas or Nevada by then.

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World Cup economic impact still hard to find, but at least we’ll always have the “togetherness”

access_time personNeil deMause

The U.S. Men’s National Team is now extremely out of the World Cup, joining co-hosts Canada and Mexico on the sidelines, but North America still has two more weeks of the sweet, sweet international tourism that comes with hosting the tournament. Or, you know, not:

As Toronto’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 hosting duties come to an end, data shows that the city saw little economic gain during the first two weeks of the tournament…

Data from payment processing company Moneris between June 12 and 26 — the first two weeks of the World Cup in Toronto — showed that debit and credit card spending at restaurants and bars in the city rose by just three per cent compared with the same time last year.

A 3% increase isn’t actually terrible in a city the size of Toronto, which can swallow 40,000 or so soccer fans without much noticing. The bigger problem, notes the CBC, is that Toronto taxpayers spent about $380 million on hosting six World Cup matches, which is tough to earn back one debit card charge at a time.

In Texas, meanwhile, the news site Border Report interviewed our old frenemy, sports economist Andy Zimbalist, and learned that “events like the World Cup generate little or no net economic benefit because FIFA keeps most event revenue while host cities absorb major expenses.” Then the site ran this under the whiplash-inducing headline “Impact of World Cup in Texas goes beyond the dollars and cents,” because Zimbalist said the games were maybe “worth it because there was so much togetherness.”

But anyway, who are you going to believe, some pointy-headed bean counter or a respected international sports business entity? Philadelphia’s 6abc digital staff doesn’t need any “experts” or “numbers” when it can just reprint the official press release:

With the final match at the Philadelphia Stadium in the books, FIFA is releasing new details about the World Cup impact locally.

More than 409,000 people attended the six matches — five of which were sold-out. …

Fans consumed 290,000 beers and more than 55,000 hot dogs.

After each match day, any food from the stadium that was not consumed was given to local food banks, totaling 15,000 pounds of food.

Getting 15,000 pounds of leftover food for a mere $380 million — who can put a price on that? Other than $380 million, sure, but that’s the bean-counter way of looking at things, whereas if you count up all the actual unused beans … I’ll see myself out.

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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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