Category: San Antonio Spurs

Friday roundup: Angels owner could be skimping on stadium repairs, St. Pete may send Rays owner a bill for their wasted stadium time

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, did you hear the one about the time that then-New York governor and now-New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo gave two of Elon Musk’s cousins $750 million in public money to open a solar-panel factory that ended up not making any solar panels but just re-sold another company’s solar panels for twice as much per watt as the national average? Me neither until recently — consider it bonus topical content.

Meanwhile, back in the now:

  • Anaheim city officials have no idea how much maintenance work is needed at city-owned Angel Stadium because the Los Angeles Angels‘ lease doesn’t require them to tell the city about repair needs, but it could be “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth, according to state auditors. They suggested either asking Angels owner Arte Moreno if the city can do occasional inspections or maybe seeking a court order. It’s important because Moreno is on the hook for certain maintenance costs, while others would fall on the city; the Angels owner recently said, “I’m not going to put $200 or $300 million into a stadium that a city owns without any of their participation. Maybe we’ll get a new mayor and council that wants us to stay,” which is not exactly a commitment to live up to his lease obligations.
  • Pinellas County is considering sending Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg a bill for county time and money spent on the St. Petersburg stadium deal Sternberg ultimately backed out of, and St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said the idea “has merit” and he may do the same. “Yeah, why not?” remarked county commission chair Brian Scott, who was previously for the stadium deal. “When we find out what that is, we’ll send them an invoice.”
  • Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still wants to raise sports gambling taxes to raise $600 million toward a Cleveland Browns stadium (and more toward other future stadiums), but the state legislature still prefers its omni-TIF idea to do the same, and DeWine hasn’t said he’ll veto the legislature’s plan. As for the idea of just not giving Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, no one (besides state house Democrats, but who cares about them) seems to be interested in that, way to go, Ohio.
  • Bexar County, the city of San Antonio, and the Spurs owners have signed a nonbinding agreement not to use county property taxes to fund a new $1.5 billion basketball arena, instead relying on hotel and car rental taxes, which, uh, was the plan all along? Could this nonbinding agreement just be a way to get headlines like “Bexar County agrees not to use property taxes to fund new Spurs arena”? Surely elected officials would not be that cynical!
  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman says he has “multiple [stadium] opportunities on both sides of the state line,” because of course he does, he wants to be a savvy negotiator, after all.
  • The USL is expanding to compete directly with MLS and adopting promotion and relegation even, and you know what that means: lots of new stadiums! Modesto, California gets one, and Rogers, Arkansas gets one, and Albany, New York gets one, and by “gets one” I mean of course “gets to help pay for one,” that’s just the price of doing business in a world where there are now two leagues that could be forced to compete for the right to play in markets, hmm.
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Friday roundup: A’s hire ex-Raiders stadium czar, Texans want renovations paid for by somebody

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another week, and, yeah, it sure has. Feeling this very strongly this morning, you all go on ahead and read this week’s bullet points while I get my second wind.

  • The Athletics have new Las Vegas stadium renderings (pretty similar to the last batch, only with more entourage) and a new president, Marc Badain, who formerly worked in the same role for the Las Vegas Raiders before abruptly quitting. Badain’s role in getting the Raiders’ stadium built (with $750 million in public money) and the fact that the Nevada legislature is coming back into session this year have people speculating that Badain could be on board to go back to the state for more cash to fill owner John Fisher’s budget hole; there’s no actual evidence that’s in the works that I can tell, but this entire project has been little more than tea-leaf reading for close to two years, why stop now?
  • New Houston Texans president Mike Tomon says he doesn’t want a new stadium, just renovations to the old one. The Houston Business Journal reports: “As far as funding potential renovations to NRG Stadium — which, coupled with projects around NRG Park and maintenance, could cost billions of dollars — Tomon said it’s too early in the process to determine what that would look like.” Lobbying strategy still hazy, ask again later.
  • The A’s and Tampa Bay Rays playing in minor-league stadiums this year are “cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who apparently missed the parts about how the A’s are in Sacramento because they alienated Oakland officials enough to torpedo talks of a lease extension there and the Rays are in Tampa because a hurricane blew their roof off, and neither of those things would be changed even if local officials hadn’t engaged in “inaction,” which they actually didn’t. Friends don’t let friends read Jeff Passan think pieces, is the lesson here.
  • San Antonio’s “Project Marvel” that would include a new Spurs arena, convention center expansion, and other crap has “tepid” 41-36% support, according to a new poll. The plan could be up for a public referendum as soon as this November, so that undecided 23% should start reading up on the details ASAP.
  • The San Jose Giants have agreed to extend their lease from 2027 through 2050 in exchange for $5 million in public stadium upgrades, and I’m going to go out on a limb and call this not that bad — the Single-A team has even agreed to double its rent payments from $20,000 a year to $40,000, which is next to nothing but not completely nothing. It’ll probably come out next week that San Jose has to turn over development rights to 10,000 acres of land or something in addition, but until then I’m filing this under “could have been so much worse.”
  • Someone wrote in to Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist Jason Williams to ask if Hamilton County residents could have a re-vote on the tax hike that is paying off the Bengals stadium, and Williams replied, not a bad idea, it could be expanded to help fund a new arena, too. Pretty sure that’s not what the letter writer meant, Jason.
  • There’s actual video of actual cranes doing actual work to build Inter Miami‘s new stadium, maybe this thing will actually open eventually, even if the 2026 target date still seems ambitious. Or it could be the latest fake video, for all we know, hard to trust anything coming out of south Florida these days.
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Deal to spend $500m+ in taxpayer money on new Spurs arena moves ahead, judge promises it won’t cost taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

Bexar County commissioners took another step toward approving at least half a billion dollars in tax money for a new San Antonio Spurs arena yesterday, voting 4-1 to approve a memorandum of understanding with San Antonio and team owner Peter Holt to start negotiating terms of an arena deal. Or perhaps that should be continue negotiating terms of an arena deal, because the initial framework of a deal is already in place:

The county’s so-called venue tax is made up of two taxes: one on hotel rooms and another on car rentals. It could yield up to $397 million in revenue if the hotel occupancy tax remains at 1.75%, or as much as $449 million if the county asks voters to raise that tax to the maximum of 2%, County Manager David Smith told commissioners early this month….

Aside from the venue tax, the new Spurs arena could be financed with other pots of public dollars, such as revenue from the city’s project financing zone and increases in property taxes within a tax increment reinvestment zone.

The hotel and car rental taxes appear to be headed for a public referendum, possibly in November, otherwise next May. The TIF district and project financing zone (basically a TIF for business and hotel taxes) wouldn’t have to go through a public vote, but would require the approval of the city council or county commission.

The total public outlay from all this is as yet undetermined. (The city is also considering gifting Holt a publicly owned golf course, market value likewise undetermined.) But it’s not stopping proponents of the arena project from saying it’s clearly better than the current situation, where the Spurs are forced to play in an ancient 23-year-old arena that is practically falling to bits, probably:

The county would need to pour about $78 million into improving the Frost Bank Center through 2029, Mike Wooley, co-founder of Venue Solutions Group, told commissioners Tuesday. The venue would require about $245 million worth of improvements over the next 20 years — if it continued hosting an NBA team.

The San Antonio Express-News doesn’t bother to ID Venue Solutions group, so let’s look them up: They were “launched in 2011 by three industry professionals with over 65 years of collective experience in the public assembly facility industry” (names of said professionals not included on the company website) and have done “facility condition analyses” for a bunch of different arenas, though when you click on “view case study” no actual studies are available. So while county judge Peter Sakai and county manager David Smith both said that’s $245 million the public wouldn’t have to spend on arena improvements if they built a new arena, there’s no way to tell how much the public would have to spend on improvements for a new arena, which in 20 years would be almost as old as the one the Spurs owner is desperate to get out of now.

But anyway, spending [insert large number here] dollars of tax money on a new Spurs arena to replace the one that was opened during Season 14 of The Simpsons won’t cost taxpayers anything, promises Sakai, because reasons:

Sakai made clear numerous times that putting this on the backs of County taxpayers is a non starter for him.

“For me to continue to have the county be invested, no homeowner property tax,” he said. “It cannot fall on the seniors. It cannot fall under disabled. It cannot fall on the veterans who are on fixed income. That’s that’s a deal breaker for me.”

Well, that’s okay then! Wherever the money comes from, it won’t take away from money for seniors or the disabled or veterans or adorable puppies, because they’ll have just as much public money at their disposal, from all the magic beans that will come with this deal, once it’s negotiated, for sure. Also, Sakai promises, the current Spurs arena will remain “sustainable and viable for the long term” and won’t “turn into the next Astrodome” — because that always works out well.

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Friday roundup: Browns officially demand $1.2B in tax money, DC and San Antonio residents call out public cost of sports plans

access_time personNeil deMause

And how’s your city’s week going? That good, huh? It’s going around.

I would share more Bluesky snark with you, but there’s stadium news to be gotten to:

  • The Cleveland Browns owners have formally issued their request for funding for a $2.4 billion domed stadium in Brook Park, and it includes $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. (The breakdown is $600 million state, $178 million county, $422 million city, if you’re an Ohioan and are wondering which of your government budgets the money would be coming out of. Also, though it’s being described as “new tax revenue,” it really isn’t; hey there, Casino Night Fallacy!) Team owner Jimmy Haslam is describing this as a “50/50 public and private partnership,” though of course that’s only on the spending end; the chances of taxpayers getting an equal cut of stadium revenues are estimated as ROTFL. At least one of the elected officials being asked for cash was extremely unenthusiastic: Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, who has stated that he’d rather the Browns remain within the city of Cleveland, said, “We have to throw a flag on the play” and “it’s a Hail Mary to throw out numbers that don’t square,” sorry, we’ve reached our maximum daily exposure to football metaphors, we’ll have to pick this up again next week.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told a community meeting that she wants to build a Washington Commanders stadium at the RFK Stadium site, and according to WTOP, “When someone asked whether Bowser would commit to not offering a subsidy, she said no.” News reports didn’t describe the crowd reaction to that non-pledge, but given the overall skepticism about a stadium plan expressed at the meeting, we can picture it for ourselves.
  • Speaking of resident reaction, “‘Highly speculative’: Residents bristle at lack of answers on funding for new Spurs arena” is a pretty evocative headline, well done, San Antonio Express-News. And unlike in D.C., in San Antonio massive public scorn matters, because the Spurs arena development plan — which goes by the truly jaw-dropping name Project Marvel — is going to require a public referendum to pass, so the Spurs owners have some bristling to address.
  • The United Soccer League says it’s planning to launch a new top-tier division in 2027 to compete with Major League Soccer, made up of some of its existing second-tier franchises and some new ones, and you know what new soccer teams means: new soccer stadium demands! USL officials talked a lot about how the U.S. needs a system more like Europe, where there are tons of soccer teams in cities large and small, but left out the part about how those teams’ stadiums are typically built without large public subsidies, curious, that.
  • And speaking of soccer stadiums, a clown study by the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis claims that a new soccer stadium in Bridgeport would “generate $3.4 billion in economic output and sustain 1,300 new permanent jobs annually until 2050.” Wait, 1,300 permanent jobs annually? Like, 1,300 jobs one year, then another 1,300 jobs the next? It will not surprise you to learn that the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis is connected with UConn’s business school, not its economics department, though it may surprise you that the report was apparently issued last August but only got reported on by the Hartford Business Journal this Wednesday, slow week in the stenography industry, I guess.
  • You may think you don’t want to read a long profile of College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson in the school’s magazine, but what if I told you he provides scientific tips on which lottery numbers to avoid picking? Matheson also discusses stadium funding (“Let’s just say that I’m fairly happy that I have long-term job security as a critic of spending massive amounts of taxpayer money”) and the fact that he wears a different soccer jersey to class each day, which, yes, requires a lot of soccer jerseys.
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Judge okays moving ahead on Spurs arena deal that could cost $500m+ in tax money

access_time personNeil deMause

One sports stadium patsy leaves, one enters: Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who last month declared that he would put a hold on any public referendum on using taxpayer money for a new San Antonio Spurs arena until somebody figured out how much it would cost, now says ah, hell with it, let’s get this show on the road:

The Commissioners Court voted 4-1 Tuesday to allow Sakai to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the city of San Antonio and the Spurs that would create a framework for them to discuss holding a future venue tax election.

“This is just a starting point to collaboratively assess, explore and evaluate,” Sakai said. “There is no deal. There is no agreement.”

No, it’s not an agreement, but an MOU would be an agreement, so an agreement is very much what Sakai is now working on. The San Antonio Express-News reports that an arena deal could include two piles of tax money: county hotel taxes and county car rental taxes, which would be worth $397 million if the county hotel tas remains at its current 1.75% or $449 million if it’s raised to 2%. The newspaper neglected to indicate if those numbers are present value or cumulative over many years, and if so how many years. (RIP, editors, you had a good run.)

So let’s try to do some quick calculations: The county hotel tax amounted to $21.3 million in revenue in 2023, while the car rental tax was $12.2 million. Extend that out over 30 years, and you could pay off about $500 million in arena costs by siphoning off the taxes to pay for a new arena rather than keeping them to spend on other public needs — and likely more than that if hotel and car rental spending increases over time.

But wait!

Sakai and other county officials emphasized they also have a responsibility to maintain the Frost Bank Center and Freeman Coliseum, which are estimated to need at least $100 million worth of upgrades and help improve the surrounding area.

The tax has been used in the past for projects like San Antonio River improvements, performing arts and amateur sports facilities.

“That pool of money is the pool of money you have to do all of those things,” [Bexar County Manager David] Smith said.

Presumably all of that pool of money has until now been used to do other things, so really any money spent on an arena would come at the cost of not doing other stuff. It would be nice to have a list of where that money is going currently, but again, this is 2025 journalism we’re dealing with here, we need to temper our expectations.

All of this would still need voter approval in November, because Sakai missed the deadline for a spring referendum by waiting until now. At least that gives San Antonio residents nine months to ask some pointed questions — local journalists can start things off if they want, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

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Texas judge blocks Spurs arena subsidy vote until somebody can explain how much it’ll cost

access_time personNeil deMause

Good news, everyone! Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai says he’s not going to put a tax subsidy for a San Antonio Spurs arena on the May 3 ballot, because nobody knows how much tax money would actually be involved:

State law allows the county to raise the hotel portion of the tax to 2%.

Asked Tuesday if raising the tax was part of the discussion, Sakai said, “Those are all preliminary questions that need to be addressed.”

At least, there won’t be a public vote until November at the earliest, by which time the judge (yes, Texas counties are run by judges, it’s left over from when Texas was its own country) hopes to have those questions answered: “We are moving forward to find the win-win solution in this complex issue that we call the new Spurs arena.”

Finding a “win-win” in funneling an unknown but huge amount of money to the local NBA owner to replace a 22-year-old arena seems like a challenge, especially when one main argument for is “locals bring visitors because of the authenticity,” but sure, okay. The basic principle of “maybe people should know what they’re voting on before they vote” is a good one, so here’s hoping that Sakai actually gets Spurs owner Peter Holt and the city to cough up some financial details before moving ahead with a public ballot measure. If nothing else, it might make those polls Holt has been doing of San Antonio residents on the arena plan more valid if there’s an actual dollar figure involved.

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How not to write a sports arena editorial, San Antonio Spurs division

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the key factors in perpetuating the billions-of-dollars-a-year system of public subsidies for private sports stadiums is what’s been dubbed the sports-media complex: the way that local news sites in most cases parrot the arguments of team execs and local elected officials for devoting taxpayer money to new sports venues. There are a bunch of reasons for this, from news outlets’ reliance on team access for reporters and team-related ad spending to the media’s inclination to uncritically repeat claims made by powerful people — Joanna Cagan and I were writing about this as early as 1998. The upshot is that voters, when they even get any kind of say in these deals, are usually working from information that is heavily skewed toward what the people who stand to benefit from stadium subsidies are saying, whether it’s true or not.

To see how this works in practice, let’s check out today’s San Antonio Express-News editorial on the prospect of a May vote to direct tax money toward a new arena for the Spurs:

Winning May vote for Spurs arena combines county venue tax, private funding

Okay, that is just a terrible headline. Is county tax money and private funding required in order to win the May vote? Is the May vote a winning idea, because it would include both tax money and private funding? How much of each would be combined? Why does a vote to spend tax money on a Spurs arena qualify as “winning,” as opposed to a more neutral term like “passing”? The whole thing seems designed to confuse readers more than enlighten them, which is not the traditional goal of journalism.

May is absolutely the right time for a public vote. A May election provides ample time for debate and discussion. A vote would serve as a capstone to Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s tenure. … Finally, with the Spurs’ lease agreement at Frost Bank Center set to expire in 2032, should a public vote fail, there would be plenty of time to bring a revised plan to voters.

So voting on (or for?) an arena deal would be a “capstone” for the mayor, because what longtime local politician wouldn’t want their legacy to be “tried to send a bunch of tax money to the local nepo baby rich guy“? And no worries that voters might not agree, because if they say no, there’s plenty of time to ask them again and see if they can be convinced to say yes.

Should Bexar County dedicate its venue tax — on rental vehicles and hotel rooms — toward the new Spurs arena? Yes, it absolutely should. But commissioners should do this with a negotiated guarantee from the Spurs and the city for investment in around the Frost Bank Center.

It absolutely should! Because reasons! But only if the Spurs owners agree to “invest” enough in and around the arena to make up for the cost of … how much would this be costing the city again?

Should the Spurs make a major contribution toward a project that will exceed $1 billion? Yes, absolutely.

The whole project will cost over $1 billion, okay. (Actually previously reported as maybe as much as $4 billion total, but who’s counting?) But what deal exactly does the Express-News think voters should be voting on, or for? The only attempt to estimate how much hotel and sales tax money San Antonio could divert to pay for arena costs is “holy sh*t that’s a lot of money” (actual quote from an actual economist!), so it would be nice for the paper to provide some numbers, but that’s apparently outside the scope of the editorial board.

One criticism of a potential new arena is that the Frost Bank Center would sit empty, but the reality is that if the Spurs were to move (and we are not suggesting that will happen), then the Frost Bank Center would still be empty and the surrounding area would still lack economic development.

So building a new arena would leave the city’s 22-year-old current arena vacant and redundant, but that’s okay because if the Spurs moved, to somewhere, which they won’t, but they could, to somewhere, then the arena would be vacant anyway. Checks out!

The best path forward is for a May vote on a new arena downtown, with a commitment to a new economic development approach to the area surrounding the Frost Bank Center and a sizable contribution from Spurs ownership.

And from city taxpayers, a contribution that is … what’s 100% minus “sizable”?

Newspaper editorials are always weird and maybe a bad idea overall: They simultaneously give newspaper editors a soapbox where they can throw all pretense at accuracy and fairness out the window, while simultaneously making it seem like the paper’s news coverage must be objective, because it’s not the editorial page. But to the extent that there is any point in the things, it’s that newspaper editors are supposed to know stuff, by virtue of being in charge of reporting the news all day, so when they say something is a good or bad idea, they know what they’re talking about. When instead they just use that public stage to repeat what Important People are whispering in their ears … I’m not sure what it is, but it sure ain’t journalism, and it sure ain’t earning the public’s trust.

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Friday roundup: Rays stadium deal falls apart more completely than their roof, San Antonio considers massive tax subsidy for new Spurs arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry that this has turned into Tampa Bay Rays week here, but stuff keeps happening. And last night, perhaps the most happeningest stuff happened, with the St. Petersburg city council meeting and 1) voting 4-3 to approve spending $23 million toward repair of the Tropicana Field roof; 2) voting 5-2 to put off selling $450 million in bonds for a new stadium and surrounding infrastructure; then 3) voting 7-0 to undo the vote to spend on fixing the roof, after Rays co-president Brian Auld declared “our agreement effectively died” with Tuesday’s county commission vote to delay issuing bonds and “I don’t believe we can make the economics around this arrangement work any more.”

A new council vote on the city bonds is now possible for January 9, assuming the county re-votes to approve its own bonds on Dceember 17. But even in the unlikely event that that happens, two new anti-stadium city councilmembers will have taken office by then, making city approval unlikely. Plus there’s increasing expectation that Rays owner Stu Sternberg will officially cancel the stadium plan anyway in the interim; Auld said that he didn’t even care about the roof repair vote, saying wasn’t confident repairs could be completed by 2026 he would “have more certainty” working out a settlement with the city instead. (Auld also apologized for “the tone” in which team execs’ letter before Tuesday’s county vote declaring the stadium deal “suspended” was received, saying it wasn’t meant to be a threat — whatever it was, it clearly backfired.)

This is crazytown, especially when you consider that this whole thing was set off by the four county commissioners who joined two prior stadium deal opponents in voting to delay the stadium bond sale in October, in order to be all respectful of the losses to Hurricane Milton and everything, apparently without considering that they might lose their pro-stadium majority on election day before their next meeting. As unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, it looks like unless Sternberg and his cronies can find a way to flip one county commissioner by December 17 — and threatening to move the team sure didn’t do the trick — everything is going back to square one now, with Sternberg shaking trees to see if anyone else wants to give him $1 billion for a stadium somewhere, while MLB has to go back to sitting on its hands waiting for this mess to be resolved before discussing expansion. Not to mention that without a repaired Trop, the Rays could be playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Tampa, even as the Oakland A’s are playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes at you fast.

Meanwhile, that wasn’t even the only big city council meeting about sports venues yesterday: In San Antonio, the city council held hearings on using tax money to help fund a potentially $4 billion redevelopment including a new Spurs arena. I didn’t watch the meeting, but fortunately University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoff Propheter did and liveposted about it on Bluesky, so let’s just revisit some of his highlights:

Leading finance mechanism for the district will be a hotel tax and sales tax TIF that will span 3 mi from the district center. The zone can capture all of the 6% hotel tax and 6% sales tax. Holy sh*t that's a lot of money that can be captured. Doesn't mean they will use the full amount.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:02:39.800Z

Without evidence, the assistant city manager says that most people that went to a Bad Bunny concert at the Alamodome weren't from Bexar County. Did they survey every attendee and double check their addresses against IRS or DMV records?

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:12:25.690Z

"locals bring visitors because of the authenticity"…I don't understand what this means.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:17:22.930Z

Showing potential funding sources…and as usual, tax expenditures aren't on the list. When you give tax breaks, you are spending money. We know the team and others will end up with tax breaks. Those should always be part of funding discussion.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:18:51.102Z

courage: how does more tourists lead to better homelessness solutions? better housing solutions? better paying jobs–not just low wage ushers or retail workers? How many residents will be able to attend a spurs game compared to today or stay at a hotel in the district? great questions.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:30:35.069Z

courage strikes me also as cautiously optimistic, which puts the council tally at 8-3 if a vote were held today is my guess. I'm assuming the mayor would support.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:33:16.645Z

and the special session is over. Overall thoughts: lots of ideas, nothing concrete, and a lot of silly reasoning. A sport entertainment district is not a novel idea despite some members believing so. Members seem to believe that diverted tax dollars to the project don't hurt existing services.

— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:38:41.620Z

 

After all that, do we still have the stamina for the week’s bullet points? Let’s try a couple, at least:

  • Athletics owner John Fisher pulling out of his stadium deal with Oakland to instead move to Las Vegas (maybe) might have blown up his plans to get discounted land in Santa Clara for a San Jose Earthquakes practice facility as well, with the city board of supervisors slamming the brakes on the deal after retiring supervisor Joe Simitian said he’s “not convinced [the Earthquakes] would be a good-faith partner” and warned that the sweetheart land deal represented “essentially a $100 million giveaway to a private enterprise.”
  • Speaking of Oakland, the city finance department issued a warning last Friday that the city is on the brink of bankruptcy and can’t count on money from the on-hold sale of the Oakland Coliseum to bail it out — then reversed course and quietly replaced that report on the city’s website with a new, less apocalyptic one.
  • This week was so nuts that a piece of the Dallas Cowboys roof falling off barely even makes the small print. Team owner Jerry Jones doesn’t want a new stadium, at least, or else we know where this would be headed.
  • And we haven’t even gotten to voters in Forsyth County, Georgia approving a TIF district to kick back tax revenues to pay for $225 million in bonds toward an NHL arena, assuming Forsyth County, which is 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, can land an NHL team. We will revisit this if an Atlanta expansion team gets past the dreaming stage, or if this firehose of Rays stadium news ever stops, whichever comes first.
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Friday roundup: Two counties plan Royals tax votes, plus fresh subsidy schemes for Spurs, Wild, Jazz, Bengals, [headline capacity reached, stack overflow]

access_time personNeil deMause

No time or energy for niceties today, let’s get straight to the firehose of news:

  • The Jackson County Legislature plans to vote Monday on putting a measure on the April ballot to extend a 0.375% sales tax surcharge for 40 years to fund new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects, even though neither team has decided what kind of stadium projects they want, let alone agreed to lease terms that would determine what if anything the county would get in return. (Jackson County Executive Frank White counters, “You don’t want to rush into something that the taxpayers have to be responsible for for 40 years without getting some equitable agreement with both teams,” but nobody appears to be listening to him.) Meanwhile Clay County appears to be readying its own sales tax hike ballot measure, only with a much larger (as yet undetermined) sales tax surcharge rate because Clay County has fewer people and so less sales. Bidding wars, man, they can’t be beat — I really need to see if I can get New York and New Jersey to compete to see who’ll agree to renovate my kitchen.
  • The San Antonio city council approved a plan to siphon off any future increase in hotel tax revenues from within three miles of the city’s convention center and spend it on convention center upgrades, a renovation of the Alamodome, plus possibly a new Spurs arena. Estimates are that the hotel tax money could come to $222 million, but it’s not clear if that’s present value or over time, and anyway the whole thing is just a guess at how much will be spent at area hotels in the future and what it’ll be spent on is still TBD, but suffice to say there’s a slush fund now should anyone want to tap it.
  • St. Paul Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher says city officials want to spend “several hundred million” dollars on upgrading the Minnesota Wild‘s arena, and when he says wants to spend, he means he wants the state to spend it, not his city. The Wild’s current 23-year-old arena is “aging,” reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and while it’s true that all 23-year-olds are aging just like the rest of us, that’s not usually what the word means.
  • Utah Jazz ownership is exploring building a new arena and entertainment district south of Salt Lake City, and city officials are already preparing a counteroffer to keep the Jazz downtown, playing different parts of a metro area off against each other in a bidding war is absolutely the flavor of the month.
  • As Hamilton County prepares to spend another $39 million on upgrades to the Cincinnati Bengals stadium under their infamous state-of-the-art clause, county board of commissioner president Alicia Reece says she’d like the team’s next lease to require the team owners to pay more of the costs than the 4% they’ve kicked in so far: “You need to put some skin in the game for our team. Give us some respect.” No official word yet on whether Bengals ownership will be insisting on a no-respect clause in any new lease.
  • Tampa Bay Rays co-president Brian Auld says team officials won’t agree to accept $600 million in public money for a new stadium if it would require changing the name to the St. Petersburg Rays because they “want to make sure that this entire project screams inclusive welcomeness.” That’s it, perfect sentence, no notes.
  • I guess “Experts disagree on economic impact of 2023 Super Bowl in Arizona” is better than just reporting the bogus economic impact claims in a press release without rejoinder, but it’s still bothsidesing when the weight of the actual evidence is that the actual impact is a tiny fraction of what the NFL claims.
  • What will the Baltimore Ravens owners be spending their $600 million-and-more in state subsidies on? For starters, a bunch of high-end clubs including an “ultra-premium field-level experience” connecting  to an “exclusive members-only club featuring a speakeasy.” No reports yet on whether it will include a fire pit where well-heeled fans can actually burn taxpayer money.
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Friday roundup: Oakland sends MLB owners gift boxes, personalized baseball cards to forestall A’s Vegas move

access_time personNeil deMause

As we come to the end of another programming week, let’s pause briefly to wish a happy 25th birthday to Good Jobs First, the corporate subsidy watch group that Greg LeRoy founded the same year Field of Schemes launched. Neither this site nor our book would exist without LeRoy, whose 1994 report “No More Candy Store” was a constant reference as we got up to speed on the then-new phenomenon of companies, whether sports teams or auto plants or computer chip factories, demanding giant piles of public cash in exchange for relocating to or remaining in a city. Happy birthday, GJF, and I hope neither of us still needs to be doing this another 25 years from now.

And now, the news:

  • With MLB owners preparing to vote on whether to approve the Oakland A’s relocation to Las Vegas, opponents are turning up the pressure to try to get eight owners out of 30 to vote “no.” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao sent a letter to 15 potentially swayable owners on Wednesday, pointing out that her city is offering more than $900 million in infrastructure money for a stadium project at Howard Terminal and pointing out that owners would be giving up a potential $2 billion expansion fee in Vegas if they let John Fisher move the A’s there for free. Also included were “Stay in Oakland” gift boxes provided by a local bar apparel company named for the Oakland Coliseum’s nickname of the Last Dive Bar, which include an A’s cap, a “Summer of Sell” DVD, a “Keep the Athletics in Oakland” postcard, and a personalized baseball card for each of the 15 owners. Meanwhile, the A’s released new renderings of their planned Vegas stadium, but apparently released them only to MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle, who described them on an investor call as “spectacular” and left it at that. Fisher’s agreement with Tropicana Las Vegas to buy their site for his stadium is only good if MLB votes for the relocation by the end of the month, so expect a lot of dueling fruit baskets when owners meet next week.
  • Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai, who holds sway over spending decisions in San Antonio because San Antonio is weird, says he’s open to the idea of the Spurs moving to a new downtown arena so long as team owners do something to boost job development in the East Side location of its old arena. “We will bring exciting new projects in this area and incentivize business developments to harness the potential that exists,” said Sakai, which is awfully handwavy, so we’ll just have to wait to see if he has anything in particular in mind or this will just end up with the Spurs buying local schools some new basketball nets.
  • Here’s a report by Kansas City’s NPR station claiming that it would cost as much to repair the Royals‘ Kauffman Stadium as to built a new one, based entirely on a 2022 report by Populous, the company that is hoping to design and build the new one, nope, no conflict of interest there.
  • The Las Vegas Sphere concert arena lost almost $100 million in its first three months, LOLDolan.
  • Would it be cheaper for Baltimore to condemn and buy the Orioles rather than give them possibly $1 billion to sign a new lease? Sure, say local activists Andy Ellis and — hey, it’s Bill Marker, he was another early interview for our book, hi, Bill! Anyway, even they say the condemnation route is a longshot, but it’s still worth noting that the city has other potential responses available to O’s owner John Angelos than “Sure, how much should we make the check out for?
  • And speaking of Baltimore, here’s me being interviewed by Nestor Aparicio yesterday about the whole Orioles (and Ravens) mess, and how they’re just following the playbook that other team owners have laid out, though given that John Angelos’s dad Peter helped get the ball rolling on stadium subsidies back in the late ’80s, they can probably lay a claim to intellectual property rights.
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Field of Schemes