Category: Denver Broncos

Friday roundup: Possible VA locations for $3B Commanders project revealed, Tulsa mulls USL stadium on race massacre site, and more!

access_time personNeil deMause

Too much news to recap this week to have time writing an amusing intro, sorry!

  • WUSA-TV “went in search of tax plans for the new [Washington Commanders] football stadium. What we found was so much more.” Actually, they didn’t find anything about the tax plans, but they did find an internal document from December, provided by “a source close to the Washington Commanders stadium project,” showing which three sites in Virginia team owner Dan Snyder is looking at for a stadium: the Loudoun Quarries in Sterling, across the highway from Dulles Airport; a plot of undeveloped land between Summit School Road and Telegraph Road in Woodbridge, off I-95 about 25 miles south of D.C.; and Potomac Shores in Dumfries, a new development even farther south along the west bank of the Potomac River. Each site would be developed with not just an NFL stadium and training facilities but “a 14,000-seat amphitheater, hotels and a conference center, residential buildings and mixed-used retail including nightlife.” No price tags were included ($3 billion has been the going figure), nor plans for who would pay for acquiring the land, whether it would be on the public rolls and thus skip out on paying property taxes, or anything like that, but if anyone wants to start debating the vital question of how long it would take to drive to Commanders games — up to 90 minutes during a Thursday night rush hour, according to WUSA — have at it.
  • One Orchard Park councilmember wants the Buffalo Bills owners to pay for extra police on game days if they get a new stadium, and one New York state assemblymember wants the Bills owners to lower food and drink prices if they get stadium subsidies. Both of which are reasonable asks — if you’re going to hand over close to a billion dollars in tax money for a stadium, you may as well get something in return — but both are also likely to amount to a rounding error compared to the state’s price tag for a stadium, so neither would be so much a win as a consolation prize.
  • Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell says there’s talk underway of building a new stadium for the F.C. Tulsa USL team on the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and surprisingly this isn’t going over real well, not just because the city already built a Tulsa Drillers minor-league baseball stadium on a possible burial site for victims of the massacre, but because the surviving descendants of the city’s Black community still live there, and a soccer stadium isn’t especially at the top of their development list.
  • Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee reports on the roots of the Milwaukee Brewers owners’ demands for upwards of $70 million in stadium upgrades under their state-of-the-art lease clause, and notes a list of things the money would go for, including replacing the air conditioning, replacing parts of the retractable roof, replacing all the seats, replacing all the lights, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards, replacing the LED ribbon ad boards again 10-15 years later, and upgrading the sound system to a “multi-zone system.” A Brewers exec said this list wasn’t “comprehensive,” so put on your owner goggles and imagine your own wish list as well!
  • “Will a new Denver Broncos owner mean a push for a new stadium, too?” The Denver Post actually has no idea, but the Broncos‘ current stadium is a whole 21 years old already, you can’t expect these things to just last forever before tearing them down and building a new one, and another new one, and another…
  • John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, an FoS reader and maker of excellent stickers, published an essay at Baseball Prospectus asserting that the baseball lockout makes stadium subsidies even worse, since now stadiums aren’t even providing the meager tax revenues that they usually do when baseball games are being played. This prompted an email discussion between myself and John about whether the substitution effect means that when stadiums are shuttered people will just spend money elsewhere in the area so it’s really a wash; and then more emails between myself and an economist about what the data shows about whether, say, a stadium in a city can at least be a net plus by siphoning off spending from the suburbs. No conclusive evidence yet, will report more later if and when I find out if we have yet another reason to hate Rob Manfred.
  • Chris Fedor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer tweets: “NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said they are estimating a roughly $100 million economic impact for the city of Cleveland as a result of All-Star Weekend.” Asked and answered!
  • Neither the Boston Red Sox nor the Chicago Cubs are planning to move out of their popular, historic ballparks, and yup, that qualifies as a reason to write a whole Athletic article these days.
  • And here’s a whole article about the housing group that pointed out that the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium land purchase likely violated the state Surplus Land Act, I guess there’s just a lot of sports-page space to fill what with spring training getting wiped out by the lockout. Not that I’m complaining, they’re interesting enough overview articles, but it would be nice if publications were investigating things we didn’t know instead of rehashing what we already do, that’s all.
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Friday roundup: When is a football stadium too old to be a football stadium?

access_time personNeil deMause

If it wasn’t clear from the photos of devastation in the Bahamas, the death toll from Hurricane Dorian is going to get much, much worse than the official confirmed number (30, at this writing). You can find a list of some organizations raising money to help survivors here; please give generously if you can. And remember as you do that it’s the warming oceans that helped make this so bad.

And with that, on to news that’s marginally less life and death:

  • Denver Metropolitan Football Stadium District chair Ray Baker says the Broncos‘ current stadium (which just got a new corporate name, go keep track of these things on your own if you like because I can’t be bothered to remember them) should last “between 50 and 60 years,” at which point Broncos president Joe Ellis replied that “I can’t judge where entertainment venues are going to need to be in the future” and “I can’t tell you whether or not, in 10 years, the city of Denver and our seven-county region has an appetite to host a Super Bowl or an appetite to host a Final Four, which means you need a roof. Or do you need a new stadium?” The new naming-rights deal lasts 21 years, at which point the stadium will be 40 years old; please place your bets on whether it will still be standing by then.
  • RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., will not make it to its 60th birthday in October 2021, which is all well and good as nobody plays there now and it’s costing the city $3.5 million a year for maintenance, landscaping, pest control, security, and utilities. (Note: Yeah, that seems like a lot to me too for an empty stadium.) D.C. officials say they plan to build an indoor sports complex and food market on the site, but have no plans as yet for an NFL stadium, no matter how much Mayor Muriel Bowser might want one.
  • Cleveland Browns COO David Jenkins says team execs still haven’t decided whether to demand a new stadium or a renovated one, but “we’re not far from having those conversations.” Note to Denver: The Browns’ stadium is two years older than the Broncos’.
  • Forbes reports that the value of the Oakland Raiders jumped by $1.5 billion to $2.9 billion after announcing their move to Las Vegas, which is an indication that either there’s something wrong with Forbes’ franchise valuation estimates or there’s something wrong with how much rich people are willing to spend to buy sports teams, or both. Even with the state of Nevada kicking in $750 million, the team will still be on the hook for more than $1 billion in stadium construction costs, which is going to soak up most of the team’s new stadium revenue even if their plan to sell tickets mostly to tourists and visiting fans works out.
  • The Anaheim city council is still squabbling over who knew when that when they voted on a Los Angeles Angels lease extension back in January, they were actually giving team owner Arte Moreno the right to stay through 2029 if he wanted, not just until 2020. (The team owner got a one-year extension of his opt-out clause as well, but the lease is now back in place to its original expiration date set before Moreno opted out the first time last year.) One thing that’s for sure is that this was a major gift to Moreno as stadium renovation talks continue, because “the best friend of a sports team owner is time,” says, uh, me.
  • A bill making it easier for Oakland to create tax districts at Howard Terminal to help raise money for infrastructure for a new A’s stadium passed the California state legislature this week; it’s still unclear exactly how much tax money would be spent on infrastructure, or exactly what “infrastructure” would mean, or even if the stadium will be built at Howard Terminal at all, but that’s one more skid greased, anyway.
  • The new Long Island Railroad station outside the new New York Islanders arena is set to be open by 2022, which only about 90 years faster than these things usually go in New York. It helps to have friends in high places!

 

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Friday roundup: The Case of the Dead Beer-Tap Inventor, and Other Stories

access_time personNeil deMause

This was the week that was:

  • The Denver Broncos are finding it slow going getting a new naming rights sponsor for their stadium because a used stadium name loses lots of its value, thanks to everyone still calling it by the old name. Yes, this is yet another reason why teams demand new stadiums when the old ones are barely out of the cellophane.
  • Here’s a Los Angeles Times article arguing that if rich sports team owners are granted permission to evade environmental review laws, small business owners should be too. I am not entirely sure this is the best lesson to take from this, guys.
  • Pennsylvania is preparing to legalize sports gambling, and the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates think it would be great if the state imposed a gambling fee and gave some of the money to them, the only surprising part here being that they actually said this out loud.
  • F.C. Cincinnati‘s ownership group is preparing upgrades to Nippert Stadium as the team’s temporary home while a new stadium is built, and “isn’t concerned by the cost,” according to WCPO. Yes, these are the same owners who said they couldn’t possibly build a new stadium without $63.8 million in public money. Also who said Nippert Stadium couldn’t possibly be made acceptable as an MLS venue. I’m done now.
  • Fredericksburg, Virginia has scheduled a July 10 vote on whether to build a new $35 million stadium for the single-A Potomac Nationals, and paying off the city’s costs by siphoning off property, admissions, sales, meal, personal property, and business license taxes paid at the stadium and handing them over to the team. I guess that would make it a PASMPPBLTIF?
  • And finally, a man found dead in a walk-in beer cooler in the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium turns out to have been there to install a revolutionary new fast-pour beer tap he’d invented, and no one yet knows how he died. This is going to be the best season of True Detective yet! (No, seriously, this is a tragedy for the man and his family, and I hope that everyone involved soon finds closure, at least, by determining the true facts of what happened. But also, no, I’m not going to go back and delete the joke. If this makes me a monster, at least I’m an appropriately social-media-driven monster.)
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Friday roundup: Why Pistons fans can’t bear to watch, Broncos land grab move, Donald Trump could win Morocco the World Cup, and more!

access_time personNeil deMause

All evidence to the contrary, spring (and the spring end-of-legislative-session season) must be getting nearer, because the stack of weekly roundup news items in my Instapaper is getting longer and longer each week. Better get down to it:

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Former Denver mayor proposes pot ads to fund Broncos’ stealth $650m stadium reno demand

access_time personNeil deMause

Former Denver mayor Wellington Webb has issued a letter suggesting ways to pay for $650 million in upgrades to the Denver Broncos‘ stadium over the next 20 years — phone photo of crumply paper version here — that includes selling ads to marijuana companies on folding seat bottoms (so they’ll be visible to fans but not on TV) and getting fans to chip in by buying shares in exchange for “good will” and … hold up, did he just say $650 million?

I understand there’s an estimated $650 million in stadium improvements wanted over 20 years

Apologies for previously missing this news, which appears to have been revealed in a statement by Broncos execs buried deep in a boring naming-rights article from last September. Sure, sports venues need maintenance, but $650 million in work over 20 years for a 17-year-old stadium is insane, and is better described as “Broncos owners want to tear down their nearly new stadium and build a new one in place over the next two decades, but want somebody else to pay for it.”

Under the Broncos’ lease, naming-rights money goes toward maintenance and upgrade costs, but the last naming-rights sponsor went bankrupt two years ago, and realistically there’s no way on earth they’re going to get anything close to $32.5 million a year for the name of a stadium that’s already had two corporate names, and which everyone will just call “Mile High” anyway. So while Webb’s idea may or may not be the best — though obviously ads reading “[Marijuana Company Here] Brings You Mile High” would be a no-brainer — the bigger concern is that the Broncos appear to have levied a demand for $650 million and gotten everyone to swallow it as perfectly cromulent, which stops here, as far as I’m concerned. Whoever actually owns the Broncos now, you crazy!

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Friday roundup: Naming-rights woes, Austin update, and the World’s Largest Chest of Drawers

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday already? Seems like we were just doing this, but the pile of stories in my Instapaper queue says otherwise, so away we go:

  • The Florida state house has again passed a bill that would ban building or renovating private sports facilities on public land, which would potentially affect the Tampa Bay Rays, among others. This is kind of a dumb idea, as we discussed back in October, since there’s nothing wrong per se with putting stadiums on public land so long as the public gets a good deal for it; a far better plan would be a Seattle-style bill to require that local governments get a return on their investment in any sports lease project. But then, this bill already passed the Florida house last year and died in the senate, so probably not worth getting worked up over too much just yet.
  • Sports Authority agreed in 2011 to pay $6 million a year for 25 years for the naming rights to the Denver Broncos stadium, and now Sports Authority is bankrupt, and Metropolitan State University of Denver marketing professor Darrin Duber-Smith is saying I told you so: “My big warning was, ‘I’m not sure Sports Authority is a big enough or healthy enough company to commit that much money from their marketing budget each year.’ And I was right.” The Broncos are now looking for another company to pay $10 million a year for naming rights, and haven’t found any takers yet, hmm, I wonder why?
  • Chelsea F.C. will get to move ahead with its new-stadium plans after the town council used a compulsory purchase order — like eminent domain, surely you’ll remember it from that Kinks song — to clear an injunction that a nearby family had gotten on the grounds that the new stadium would block their sunlight. The purchase order isn’t actually seizing their home, but the land next to it, which is enough to invalidate the injunction; not that this doesn’t raise all kinds of interesting questions about the use of state power for private interests, I’m sure, but man, don’t you wish this were the only kind of stadium controversy we had to put up with in North America? League monopoly power over who gets a franchise is a bad, bad thing.
  • High Point, North Carolina is spending $35 million on a stadium to bring an indie minor-league Atlantic League baseball team to town, and City Manager Greg Demko says this will help the city’s commercial tax base recover, because “the construction of a stadium is like an anchor for the revitalization and development of a downtown.” Demko is going to be so disappointed, but at least he got mention of his city in a Bloomberg article as “home to the World’s Largest Chest of Drawers,” and you can’t buy publicity like that.
  • New Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan says that while it’s “a longshot,” it wouldn’t be impossible for Chris Hansen to build his Sodo arena while OVG renovates KeyArena at the same time. I’m going to interpret the tea leaves here as “Hey, if you want to spend your money to try to compete with another arena across town, be my guest,” but stranger things have happened, maybe?
  • The city of Austin has issued a report on eight possible sites for a stadium for a relocated Columbus Crew, and are now waiting on Crew owner Anthony Precourt to tell them which, if any, he likes. A consultant for Precourt has since ruled out a site or two, but it looks like nothing might be ready for the city council to vote on February 15 as planned; Austin MLS lobbyist Richard Suttle says the problem is “between the holidays, flu season and winter storms, it’s been slow going.” It’s not quite helping to spark women’s suffrage, but the flu still reminds us who’s boss from time to time.
  • Now that Amazon has announced its short list of cities that will get to bid on its new second headquarters, it’s time for another look at how to stop corporations from launching interstate bidding wars to be their homes, which once again leads us to David Minge’s 1999 bill for a federal excise tax on public subsidies. “Of all those offers [made to Amazon] there’s one obvious one that should have been made and it should have come from Congress,” University of Minnesota economist and former Minneapolis Federal Reserve research director Arthur Rolnick, who helped Minge concoct that bill, tells CityLab. “Now if that offer were on the table it would end it, it would end the bidding war. Then Amazon would simply base its decision on where location is best for business.” It’d work for sports leagues, too!
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Broncos stadium name contract goes up for auction, no one bids even one dollar

access_time personNeil deMause

Man, I hate when I get all excited about a news story and then it turns out to be a big ball of nothing. That appears to be the case with Friday’s news that the naming rights to the Denver Broncos stadium had gone up for sale, and nobody even bothered to bid:

The stadium in Denver is called Sports Authority Field at Mile High Stadium, named after the eponymous sporting goods retailer in 2011. However, Sports Authority filed for bankruptcy in March and put the naming rights up for sale as part of a court-supervised auction.

No bidders for the rights came forward at an auction of the retailer’s assets held this week, Matt Sugar, the director of stadium affairs at the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, which is the owner of the stadium, said on Friday. Discussions are underway about launching a new auction for the naming rights.

Wow, really, nobody? I’ve argued before that naming rights for existing stadiums aren’t worth much, in part because after a couple of name changes everybody just gives up and calls it whatever it was called in the first place — and with “Mile High” stuck there in the name, that gives fans a great option to ignore whatever new corporate moniker got slapped on ahead of it. But you’d think somebody — some publicity-desperate tech startup, Peeple, anybody — would throw a token $1 at the bankruptcy auction, no?

Except then there’s this:

The contract for the naming rights up for grabs extends until 2021, and comes with a $3.6 million payment obligation due Aug. 1.

And there’s the catch: Sports Authority isn’t really auctioning off the rights to the Broncos stadium name — it’s auctioning off its contract to put a name on the Broncos stadium. And since the stadium name is almost certainly worth less than the $6 million a year the company agreed to pay back in 2011, the rights to take on those payments probably have a negative value, which is why nobody bothered to bid.

The more likely scenario now is that no one bids for the rights, Sports Authority misses that August 1 payment, and the Denver Metropolitan Football Stadium District gets to re-sell the rights to the highest bidder, of which there will no doubt be some, even if they won’t be offering $6 million a year. The Broncos and the district split the proceeds from naming rights, so Sports Authority’s bankruptcy could end up costing both the team owners and the public some money — though not as much as the naming-rights deal cost Sports Authority, since the move may have helped push the company into bankruptcy. You think maybe everyone might have thought this through better in the first place?

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Denver spending about $15m on Broncos stadium upgrades for 2013

access_time personNeil deMause

Man, did everybody try to get in on the “least news coverage of the year” day thing or what?

When the Super Bowl committee looks at Denver as a possible host for the NFL championship game, the Broncos will have something new for the committee to consider.

About $30 million in improvements will be made to Sports Authority Field at Mile High in time for the 2013 season.

Most of the money will be allocated to updating the stadium’s video boards.

Only part of the money will be paid for by Denver, and it will come out of a previously established stadium upgrade fund, so on one level it’s public money already spent, or at least already allocated. But still, just to be on the safe side, best to announce it on pre-Christmas Friday afternoon, so nobody notices.
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