The St. Louis Board of Aldermen passed two bills on Friday granting full exemptions from property taxes and sales taxes on construction materials to a new St. Louis MLS stadium, and here’s how various news outlets described the public cost:
One bill will provide 25 years of property tax abatement on the value of the new construction, saving the owners about $34.5 million.
The other measure allows a sales tax exemption for materials used to construct the 22,500-seat stadium and related facilities. An estimate on what that’s worth has not been released yet.
The approvals pave the way for subsidies, including partial tax abatement, sales tax exemption on construction materials, amusement tax abatement and special taxing districts that would impose a 1% sales tax. The taxing districts will require additional legislation.
The ownership group for the stadium will cover most of the cost of the more than $200 million facility, but is asking for some city incentives to cover the cost of some infrastructure improvements.
That’s some pretty bad reporting! The Post-Dispatch wins by default for at least attempting to give some numbers, though it might have at least attempted a guesstimate on the cost of the construction sales tax break: The St. Louis city sales tax rate is 4.23%, so if costs are split anything like roughly evenly between labor and materials on a $200 million stadium, we’re looking at a few million dollars’ worth of cost here. Also that $34.5 million in property tax savings over 25 years is more like $19 million in present value, and nobody is mentioning the $57.4 million over 30 years in ticket-tax rebates that were already approved by the city (present value around $29 million), making for a total public subsidy of around $60 million.
But then, the reporting can’t even agree on the total cost of the stadium: KMOV says it’s “more than $200 million,” KSDK says $461 million, while the Post-Dispatch says $350 million to $400 million. The highest number appears to be from a December report by the city’s Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, which may be higher because it includes the cost of not just the stadium but an entire mixed-use district, or because it includes things like interest costs over time and not the present value of the cost (you don’t calculate the price of a house you just bought by adding up all your future mortgage payments over time), or something else entirely — nothing appears to have been reported in detail or to be available online, though I did find a helpful page on how to apply for your own tax breaks from the city of St. Louis.
If your eyes are starting to glaze over from all these numbers, that’s kind of the point: $34.5 million in tax breaks on a $461 million project sounds like a lot less than $60 million in subsidies for a $200 million one, so it’s in the team’s (and the city’s interest) not to be too specific about who’s paying how much for what. It’s why Judith Grant Long had to spend ten years compiling data on actual stadium costs (see it in animated GIF form here), because reporting on it is so all over the place.
Anyway, we can say for sure that St. Louis taxpayers are going to kick in something for a private soccer stadium, and that it’s less than most of the cost, but more than nothing. If that’s unsatisfying to you, try calling up Long and seeing if she’s up for updating her study — it just may take a decade for you to get an answer.