Category: Cleveland Browns

Ohio legislators considering passing both Browns stadium subsidy plans at once, maybe

access_time personNeil deMause

When last we left off with the great Cleveland Browns stadium shakedown, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had had his plan to spend $600 million in new sports gambling taxes on a stadium shot down by the state legislature, which instead wanted to spend $600 million in existing sales, income, and other taxes on a stadium, but DeWine was still considering whether to veto that. Can’t we all just get along?

At last, a compromise solution of sorts seems to be in the works, courtesy of several Republican state senators, who say they’re preparing a kind of hybrid of the two plans: State Sen. Lou Blessing has introduced a bill to create a permanent fund for stadium projects and youth sports using increased gambling taxes, but maybe with the omni-TIF stadium district still in place, too? It’s all very muddled, even before you get to this:

While [state Sen. Lou] Blessing said he wasn’t sure whether either of his budget amendments would be accepted, he said he believes that his fellow senators are “amenable” to the governor’s assertion that they need to find a long-term solution to funding stadium projects in Ohio.

Otherwise, he said, if the Browns and/or Bengals get state assistance, it will open the floodgates for other pro sports teams in the state to come asking for help with their own stadium projects.

Right, can’t have every team owner in the state demanding their own public stadium funding, better head that off by, uh, creating permanent stadium funding that any team owner can tap into, wait, not sure we thought this through all the way…

From the sound of things, state senators are still trying to figure out exactly what they’ll support, which undoubtedly will rely on what the governor will support, which in turn will likely rely on what the governor can get the legislature to approve. It’s all a big tangled mess of political gamesmanship, but when all the elected officials in the state want to give money to the local sports billionaire but just can’t agree on which pot of money to use, there’s generally a compromise close at hand. Still not sure what would then happen with the $600 million that Cuyahoga County and the city of Brook Park would be expected to come up with, given that one seems uninterested in helping the team move out of Cleveland proper and the other has a tax base the size of a thimble, but plenty of time to cross those bridges once they come to them.

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Friday roundup: Oregon okays $800m in MLB stadium spending because “transformative”

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a minute since I’ve issued an appeal for new supporters for this site, so: If you aren’t already a supporter of this site, please consider becoming one! There are both monthly and one-time options, and in addition to subscriber benefits like receiving all the stadium and arena news in your email inbox and getting whatever tchotchkes I come up with next, you ensure the piece of mind that comes from knowing you’re helping to keep this site going into its 28th year, which just began this month! Shedding light on the sports subsidy game in any way that affects actual policy turns out to be harder than even a professional cynic like myself thought — for all the reasons this site covers every day — but if we can all just keep it up for another 28 years, I think we might finally start getting somewhere.

As always, thanks to everyone who is contributing now or has contributed in the past — it not only lets me pay the ever-increasing costs of hosting this site and enables me to spend time writing it without going broke, it’s heartening to know that people think this issue is important enough to devote your hard-earned dollars to. Or maybe you just like pointing and laughing at billionaire failsons, that works, too. I hope to be able to keep this site going until it’s no longer necessary, at which point you’re all invited to the victory party, if any of us are still mobile enough by then to dance.

And with that cheery thought, here’s your weekly dose of ways everything still mostly sucks now:

  • The Oregon state senate voted 24-5 to approve $800 million in public bonds toward building a Major League Baseball stadium, just as soon as Portland gets a Major League Baseball team. Senators say the project will pay for itself by using money from player income taxes (it won’t) and that it will be a “forward-thinking, transformative opportunity” and “a showcase of what is beautiful, central, core to our constituents of Portland,” which is giving money to ex-Nike execs so they can have their own private sports team, I guess? Please enjoy your requisite J.C. Bradbury Simpsons meme, it’s well earned.
  • What do Washington, D.C. councilmembers think of the news that their mayor is on the brink of agreeing to spend $850 million toward a Commanders stadium at a time when the district budget is just red ink up to its eyeballs? “Is this really going to cost us close to a billion dollars?” asked council chair Phil Mendelson, while economic development committee chair Kenyon McDuffie called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” before being asked how the city could afford it and replying, “I haven’t seen the details.” It’s okay, all the other kids are doing it!
  • Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman says he does not support the Cincinnati Bengals owners’ request for $350 million in state money toward stadium renovations, and wants to hold out for a deal where taxpayers “can actually make money” like … the Cleveland Browns deal? I’m getting kind of tired of linking to my explanation of the Casino Night Fallacy, but seeing as this seems to be some sort of mass delusion that state legislators are signing up for, maybe it can’t be explained enough.
  • The Kansas City Chiefs and Royals owners are still kicking tires on potential stadium sites, yep, that’s excuse enough for a news story, nothing else journalists should be spending their time covering, probably. Local business leaders say it’s important, anyway, and if we didn’t have a free and independent press taking its editorial directives from the local chamber of commerce, where would this country be?
  • Modesto, California is trying to build a stadium to get a soccer franchise. Of all the 2025 things that you never expected we would be living through, that’s one of the 2025iest.
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Podcast claims $1.2B Browns subsidy wouldn’t cost Ohioans anything, because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

If you read the internet, which clearly you do or how else are you seeing this, you may have noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to actually get any information from news sites these days. Between paywalls, a barrage of ever more intrusive ads, and clickbait editorial stylings (This Famous Celebrity Just Did a Thing You Won’t Believe!), readers are increasingly fighting a losing battle to find out what’s going on in the world, and that’s even before we get into everything increasingly being written by ChatGPT.

Which brings us to yesterday’s headline at Cleveland.com:

“If you’re not going to the games, it’s largely not going to affect you:” Breaking down the Browns stadium deal

Hmm? That’s the argument being made by advocates of a Cleveland Browns stadium subsidy, certainly: This is all “stadium-related” tax money, so it doesn’t matter if the state gives $600 million of it to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam. (Another $600 million would come from the city of Brook Park and Cuyahoga County, and that’s also part of the stadium deal, but apparently it’s considered rude to say so out loud.) Except that the bill would siphon off all taxes — sales, income, anything else not nailed down — from an as-yet-undetermined area surrounding the stadium, so it could affect you even if you’re just going near the games. And since these are taxes that are currently being paid into the state’s general fund on Browns-related sales and income at their existing stadium, instead giving the money to Haslam would be a net loss for anyone who relies on the state of Ohio to fund anything else, like schools or roads or what have you.

So who said that quote, anyway? An economist? A state legislator? A Browns lobbyist? ChatGPT? The Cleveland.com story, which is only two paragraphs long (unless there’s a longer version behind the paywall, but if so most readers will never see it*), doesn’t actually cite the quote at all, forcing interested readers to dig through its Today in Ohio podcast episode, which sports the title “Ohio House budget makes another devastating assault on public schools.” That title only refers to proposed property tax breaks that are threatening to eat into the schools budget, though; what about proposed tax redirection for Haslam?

Scroll past enough Home Depot ads, and you finally get to the Browns section around eight minutes in:

Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn: “The Haslams have put together a financing deal that on the surface looks a lot better for taxpayers than the recent deals for renovations for the Guardians and the Cavaliers….”

Impact editor Leila Atassi: “When you actually dig into the numbers on the Brook Park proposal, it is a lot better than the deals we’ve seen for renovations at Rocket Arena or Progressive Field. Here’s what we’ve found: The Haslams want, of course, the state and Cuyahoga County to each borrow $600 million to help build this new stadium, but the way they plan to pay it back is different: About 85% of the taxes would come directly from people who use the stadium, through things like ticket and parking taxes, or taxes generated by the surrounding development. Only about 15% would fall on the general public, like tourists who stay in hotels or people renting cars. So basically, if you avoid hotels in Cuyahoga County and rental cars, you won’t be paying for this stadium.”

Okay, let’s take a minute and talk about how the system of taxation actually operates. There are two pieces to it: First, the state or another governmental body collects them; then, it spends the proceeds on something. If the tax rate is raised to pay for a project — as was done with cigarette and alcohol taxes for the Guardians — that’s new tax revenue. And if more tax money comes in than would have without the project, those are incremental tax revenues.

Read the podcast quote again, and it increasingly comes off as complete nonsense. The money used would all come from existing taxes, not new ones, so people going to games or renting cars wouldn’t be paying any more than they would be in the absence of a new stadium. The difference is in what would happen to that tax money once it was collected, as it would now be handed over to Haslam instead of being kept to pay for government services. So the only way it wouldn’t cost regular Ohioans anything would be if there was an incremental increase in the amount of taxes collected as a result of the Browns moving a few miles south and any additional development that happened in Brook Park that otherwise would not take place anywhere in Ohio — neither of which are things that the Haslam proposal even pretends to claim it can prove would happen.

But let’s keep listening and see where that quote in the headline comes from:

Quinn: “At heart, they’ve come up with a plan where if you’re not going to the games, it’s largely not going to affect you. And we haven’t been able to say that about any other stadium deal pretty much in the history of Cleveland. And so that’s why it was kind of important to do the story. I don’t think people hate them are going to take the trouble to read it; they’re just going to say, ‘No. No. No.’ But the idea is they’re going to have to play somewhere, and they’ve come up with a deal that, from my standpoint, I don’t have to pay anything. That’s okay with me to not have to pay anything for this.”

Atassi: “That’s true.”

At the risk of being predictable: No. No. No. It’s simply not true that Ohio can take $1.2 billion in tax money and give it to the local billionaire sports owner and it won’t cost Ohioans a dime. But by employing enough doubletalk and hoping that listeners won’t think too hard about how taxes work, it’s possible to pretend that public money isn’t really public money, because someone related to the team touched it once.

I’m the first to acknowledge that modern journalists have a rough time of it, what with a dwindling handful of reporters forced to stay on top of the news while being graded on how many clicks they get. But this is straight-up journalistic malpractice: Two top editors at the city’s most prominent news source misleading listeners about basic economics, without even asking someone who could explain how budgets work.

And what does an actual economist have to say about this?

When compared to other shit sandwiches, this shit sandwich isn't so bad. #journalism www.cleveland.com/news/2025/04…

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-04-14T23:41:57.559Z

Now there’s a headline. Somebody get J.C. a job as impact editor.

*UPDATE: A reader finally sent me a copy of the full paywalled version of the article, which does cite Quinn as the source of the quote, though it doesn’t identify who he is. And it also includes this disclaimer:

Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from Today in Ohio, a news podcast discussion by cleveland.com editors. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions.

Something tells me that when readers were asking for more “text stories” based on podcasts, they didn’t mean AI hallucinations. Though honestly the AI doesn’t appear to have been hallucinating here any more than the human podcast hosts, so maybe it’s all just part and parcel of the gray goo.

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Friday roundup: Bengals want $350m in stadium money from Ohio, A’s still insist Vegas stadium is happening for real

access_time personNeil deMause

The spring legislative season is always exhausting, but at least we’re already up to … April 11, is that all that it is? At least we can hope that all the team owners lining up for stadium and arena money have already gotten their bills submitted, though plenty of subsidy demands have emerged this late or later: Today is in fact the second anniversary of the Maryland legislature approving $1.2 billion in public money for renovations for the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens (a number that would eventually grow to an unlimited number depending on how much in taxes comes in) essentially without warning, so it wouldn’t be that much of a shock to see a surprise demand emerge from out of nowhere.

And speak of the devil:

  • Hamilton County and Cincinnati Bengals owners the Brown family have declared that if the state of Ohio is set on giving $600 million in tax money to the Cleveland Browns for a new stadium, it should also give $350 million to the Bengals for renovations. The entire renovation plan would cost $830 million and would include a new scoreboard, suite upgrades, new roof canopy, new seating, and improved walkways, escalators, and elevators — which sounds like a lot for that work, honestly, unless the suite bathrooms would be getting diamond-encrusted faucets — and would presumably include county money as well, though officials didn’t specify how much. “Our lease ends before theirs,” griped Hamilton County commissioner Stephanie Summerow Dumas. “Just wondering why is there so much focus on the Browns.” (Hmm, can’t possibly imagine why.) No word on whether the Bengals owners would tear up that insane state-of-the-art clause in their lease as part of the deal, you would think that would be important to ask, I’m looking at you, Cincinnati Enquirer.
  • Newly appointed West Sacramento Athletics president Marc Badain has declared that the team is still on track for a June groundbreaking for its Las Vegas stadium, blaming “skeptics” and “negativity” for the idea that John Fisher may not be able to find $1.15 billion in construction costs on top of the $600 million he’s set to get from the state of Nevada. “There’s a lot of people that make a living out of questioning the success of sports venues and what they actually do for a community,” said Badain, and while on the one hand I feel seen, I do question his description of this as “making a living,” as well as questioning whether a groundbreaking actually means you’re going to build a stadium given that just about anyone with a few shovels can hold one — whoops, there I go with the skepticism again, Badain sure has me pegged!
  • The Denver city council has some skeptics about spending $70 million for land and infrastructure for a NWSL stadium, with councilmember Sarah Parady saying, “We are facing the collapse of global financial markets. … I think we’re gonna be sitting here in a year [and] we will have paid in our amount of money from our incredibly scarce dollars that we are going to need for so many fundamental needs in the city.” Also concerning is the estimated additional $80 million in property taxes the city would be giving up by agreeing to buy and own the land under the stadium, according to  University of Colorado-Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter, who is not only a local but also the expert in calculating such things.
  • Just a few months after $900 million in tax money was approved for upgrades to the Utah Jazz and Utah Hockey Club‘s Delta Center and the Salt Palace convention center, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s office abruptly expanded the project’s TIF district last Friday to also redirect taxes from two luxury hotels, an apartment tower, and parking facilities on an adjacent block, providing an additional $59 million in tax money kicked back to the developer, according to Propheter. (That developer would be Jazz and Hockey Club owner Ryan Smith — quelle coincidence!) Then on Tuesday the Salt Lake City council unanimously approved creating the embiggened tax district, with councilmember Victoria Petro bemoaning that “we had no options” but adding that “there is no decimal point here that has been taken with anything less than the gravest consideration,” assuming the gravest consideration can be applied in just two work days.
  • “Salt Lake Bees’ new stadium in Daybreak expected to bring economic impacts, growth to local businesses” was the headline on Utah’s ABC4 website on Tuesday, and if you’re wondering “expected by whom?” and your guess was the owner of a single local coffee shop, you’re a winner!
  • Bridgeport, Connecticut now has an idea for how to pay for a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium, and it’s a TIF district, surprise, surprise. Also the full cost would now be $100 million, and would involve additional state money as well, but who can put a price on being one of the umpteen million cities to have a team in one of the nation’s two warring sets of soccer leagues?
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Ohio house passes $600m subsidy for Browns stadium even as owner says team would stay without it

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected the last time I wrote an “I expected” lede, the Ohio state house has approved $600 million in tax subsidies for a new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park that would cost a total of $2.4 billion and also require another $600 million in city and county money. The final version of the bill tweaked the terms very slightly — Browns owner Jimmy Haslam would pre-pay $50 million of his share instead of $38.5 million — but it’s still basically the same plan that Cleveland city and Cuyahoga County officials all hate.

The main person whose disdain for the plan matters, though, is Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who could veto it if he wants, though he’s hedged so far on whether he’ll actually go that far. The state senate needs to weigh in, too, and could make more changes if it wants.

All of this sounds very reasonable on the surface — democracy in action! — until you step back and consider the big picture of what’s going on here:

So what we have is one of the most expensive public stadium subsidy proposals in history, to induce a team that wouldn’t leave anyway to move a few miles south, to escape a building that is younger than Elle Fanning and which was just renovated and the team owner has said could be renovated again. And yet it looks like the main roadblock will be if the governor throws a hissy fit because it would require spending the wrong $600 million. We don’t get the checks and balances we want, and maybe not even the ones we deserve, unless we have all been very, very bad indeed.

 

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Ohio legislature kills governor’s stadium slush fund, will he veto its Browns subsidy bill in return?

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected, the Ohio state legislature has killed Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal to use increased sports gambling, cigarette, and cannabis taxes to fund a $2 billion stadium slush fund, and will instead move ahead with its own plan to collect all sales and income and other state taxes from in and around a new Cleveland Browns stadium and use them to give Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million toward the stadium’s construction cost. (Cuyahoga County and the city of Brook Park would be on the hook for another $600 million.)

DeWine still would have to sign off on the legislature’s omni-TIF plan, though, and if the pro-stadium NEOtrans blog is to be believed, he may veto it instead:

[DeWine’s] opposition — including a possible veto — to HSG’s funding proposal could also cause removal of the funding before the legislature votes in a couple of months on the a proposed biennial budget that starts July 1, 2025 and ends June 30, 2027.

But if it remains in the final bill, there’s a strong possibility that DeWine could veto it. If he does, it requires a 3/5 majority vote in both the Ohio Senate and Ohio House of Representatives to override a governor’s veto — and that supermajority may not exist.

That’s an overwhelming number of coulds, but, sure, a three-fifths majority is harder to muster than 51%, so the threat of a DeWine veto would throw at least a medium-sized wrench into Haslam’s stadium plans. So is the governor really threatening a veto, or what?

At a forum at the Columbus Metropolitan Club led by the Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles, DeWine was asked if he would veto the amendment. It would add the $600 million bond package to the budget and would eliminate his proposed sports facilities fund, paid for by doubling the tax on sports gambling operators, who are mostly located out of state.

“If you look at the next 10 to 20 years, there’s going to be a lot of demand on the state budget for this. I don’t think we can afford to continue to go into the general fund of our budget and take this money,” DeWine said.

That is, as Statehouse News Bureau put it, “stopping short of threatening a veto” — though the site didn’t speculate about whether DeWine actually doesn’t intend to veto the legislature’s plan or just isn’t threatening a veto yet. Add in that DeWine was still trying to push for his own now-dead subsidy plan at the time he said all that, and it’s really impossible to say for sure what the governor’s game plan is until he responds to the legislature stripping his plan from the budget, which he hasn’t yet done.

But so long as we’re reading tea leaves, I’ll play: The Republican-led state legislature didn’t axe DeWine’s tax plan because they’re antsy about handing money over to sports billionaires, but because they’re antsy about anything that can be said to be “raising taxes”: “Anywhere where there was a program that was proposed to be added or expanded, we either said no or dialed back the increase,” finance chair Rep. Brian Stewart bragged. Taking the money from existing taxes and giving it to Haslam, though, doesn’t count as “spending” in their eyes — same as giving income tax deductions to Ohioans who donate to anti-abortion fake medical clinics isn’t considered spending, even if it’s exactly the same from a budget perspective.

What we have here, then, is a squabble not over whether to give gobs of money to the Browns and other Ohio sports teams to build stadiums for their own profit, but rather which money to use. This seems like the sort of thing that a bunch of fellow Republicans could hash out a compromise over — or that could lead legislative leaders to wait out a lame-duck governor and see if the next one is more on their wavelength. Sure would be nice if the main debate here were over whether the subsidies are worth it at all and not just where the money will come from, but we live in the worst of all possible timelines.

 

 

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Browns owner: If Ohio won’t give me $1.2B in tax money, I’ll keep playing in Cleveland

access_time personNeil deMause

Apparently all the stadium news decided to happen in the last 24 hours, that’s okay, I didn’t have any better plans for things to do with my Tuesday. Anyway, in Cleveland yesterday, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam revealed his “Plan B” if the state, county, and city don’t approve $1.2 billion in public money for a new stadium in Brook Park:

Haslam said it will come down to whether Ohio lawmakers approve $600 million in funding for the stadium proposal in the budget at the end of June. If so, the plan is to have shovels in the ground to begin construction in Brook Park in the first quarter of next year.

If not, Haslam told reporters that the Browns would move to “Plan B,” which would be renovating the existing Huntington Bank Field in downtown Cleveland.

So, wait, hang on. That $600 million in state tax money, the revenues that supposedly would cease to exist without the Browns playing in Ohio, is needed because without it … the Browns would keep on playing at another location in Ohio? Even if you think that Cleveland would be better off reclaiming its lakefront property that is currently occupied by the Browns stadium, there is no math by which it’s worth spending $1.2 billion in government money just to move the Browns and their fans a few miles southwest.

There is certainly a theme emerging to this firehose of a news day, and it is this: From Oregon to Arizona to Ohio, sports team owners and their pals in state and local government are tallying up every scrap of tax revenue they possibly can as “attributable” to the local sports team, and then demanding a check in that amount — and never mind if it’s tax revenue that the government would be getting anyway because if the team left people would just spend their money elsewhere, or because the team owner has no intention of leaving regardless. There haven’t been many big changes in the stadium subsidy playbook over the 27 years I’ve been writing this blog, but I’m tempted to say that the increasing reliance on the Casino Night Fallacy is a growing trend. Next up: To find out whether state legislators can see through it as well as Oscar Madison, or if they’re happy enough to use it as an excuse to hand over public cash to the local sports billionaires, whether it makes any damn sense or not.

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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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Ohio legislature proposes omni-TIF to funnel tax money to Browns and other stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

Ohio’s Statehouse News Bureau has obtained the draft legislation that would provide $600 million worth of state tax dollars to Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam for construction of a new stadium, as well as potentially more money to other teams such as the Cincinnati Bengals, and an initial read reveals some interesting details:

  • The proposed state budget amendment would allow the state legislature to redirect all state taxes “attributable to the professional sports franchise,” after first subtracting out how much in state taxes were paid by the sports facility district in the year prior to the first year of a team’s lease. This would include taxes levied under chapters 5739, 5741, 5747, and 5751 of the state code, which are sales tax, use tax, storage tax, income tax, and commercial activity tax.
  • The district is defined as “the geographic area encompassing the land upon which the 19 transformational major sports facility mixed-use project is located,” with no apparent limit on the size of the area within which taxes will be kicked back.
  • The money would be available to any “transformational major sports facility mixed-use project,” which would be defined as any project that 1) includes a “major sports facility,” 2) includes any size of mixed-use development, and 3) “is expected to generate increased state tax revenues.”

This is, in technical budget terms, some damn sweeping legislation. By allowing the state to create stadium and arena districts of any size where all new sales, income, and other tax revenues are kicked back to the team to pay construction costs, the bill would effectively prioritize projects on otherwise vacant land — or at least land that can be made vacant by the year before the stadium lease starts. And there’s no provision for determining whether the “new” tax revenue in a stadium district would be new to the state as a whole — meaning Ohioans could end up paying a team to move its economic activities from one part of the state to another, then 20 years later paying them again to move it back.

There have been plenty of sports projects in the past funded by tax increment financing, or TIF, projects, which usually just mean kicking back increased property taxes; occasionally, other taxes are rolled in too, creating the less common mega-TIF. This legislation ups the ante even further, and really deserves a new name: “Omni-TIF” has a nice ring to it. The state legislature will be debating what’s in the final budget until next Tuesday, April 1, with a full floor vote slated for the following Wednesday, April 9 — we should get a sense by then how much this language would be expected to cost Ohio taxpayers, but with the ability to draw a circle of unlimited size around a stadium and kick back and any all taxes from it, looks like the sky’s the limit.

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Friday roundup: Oregon considers upping MLB expansion stadium ante to $800m, baseball owners twirl mustaches in glee

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s vibes.

  • An Oregon state senator has introduced a bill to increase the state’s spending on a possible Portland MLB stadium from $150 million to $800 million, provided Portland gets an expansion team whenever MLB next expands. The source would still be funneling player income taxes to pay off stadium bonds, yet another Casino Night–style funding scheme that is both risky and not really free money, for reasons we’ve covered here before. (The increased figure would rely on rising player payrolls since the initial $150 million plan was approved more than 20 years ago.) The $800 million figure is apparently meant to compete with Utah’s proposed $900 million in property tax kickbacks for an MLB stadium in Salt Lake City; expansion city bidding war, activated!
  • Denver’s NWSL franchise is planning to build a 14,500-seat stadium, and “the ownership group is paying for the stadium in its entirety,” according to the Denver Post. Also according to the Denver Post, four paragraphs later, a tax increment financing district is already in place on the team’s proposed stadium site, meaning the team would recoup property taxes worth some number that the Denver Post didn’t deign to mention. The city would also be on the hook for buying $24 million worth of land for the stadium project, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston says “the city would always own that public space and that could come back to us for repurposing in 50 years from now if the stadium were to move,” so really it’s an investment, see?
  • Will the Tampa Bay Rays draw more fans this season, despite playing in an 11,000-seat minor-league stadium, thanks to now being on the side of the bay where more people with more money live? Doesn’t look like it, based on the fact that opening day is one week away and hasn’t sold out yet. It doesn’t help that Rays management raised average ticket prices by 30% in response to the smaller capacity, which could complicate efforts to use the 2025 season to answer the age-old question, “Is it St. Petersburg, or is it just Florida?“
  • Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne says the financing plan for a new Cleveland Browns stadium would require average ticket prices to rise to $800 over 30 years in order for the math to work, while a Browns spokesperson says this isn’t true, and nobody’s showing their math, that’s no fun! (Yes, this website is predicated on the notion that math is fun. I’m sorry if you’re learning about this late.)
  • A Massachusetts judge heard arguments this week in a lawsuit charging that a new stadium for BOS Nation F.C. (soon to be renamed, finally) violates a state law requiring a two-thirds supermajority of the state legislature to approve any new uses of land taken for conservation purposes. The Boston mayor’s office insists that tearing down a public school stadium and rebuilding it as a pro women’s soccer stadium that public school students would still get to play in is really the same use — cue the Ship of Theseus debates!
  • The Eugene Emeralds are absolutely, positively moving out of Eugene after 70 years, uh, just as soon as they find somewhere else offering to build them a new stadium. Until then, they’ll still be playing in Eugene. But they’re gonna leave, just you watch! Don’t call their bluff, voters who rejected giving them $15 million last May!
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