Friday roundup: Browns move forward on moving forward on making plans for getting money for Brook Park dome

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to 2025! (Looks around.) Hey!

  • The Cleveland Browns owners took a major step forward toward moving to a new stadium in Brook Park by issuing a statement that they have “officially execut[ed] a clause” that will allow them to “tak[e] steps forward” to buy the land for the site. As if that’s not an indication of a promise of an intention enough, Jimmy and Dee Haslam are also planning to work with “our public partners on the project” to cover the remaining funding gap of $1.2 billion, a mere detail!
  • The Baltimore Banner has ideas for how the Orioles should spend the $600 million (plus!) in renovation money the team was gifted by the state of Maryland, and one of them is “Make Eutaw Street a year-round destination,” but it turns out Eutaw Street — the public street that is now effectively owned by the Orioles — is already open year-round, just nobody goes there. Also, maybe the Banner could have suggested its list of proposals when the state actually could have made it a condition of the taxpayer funding? Ah well, next time.
  • Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi points out that spending $91 million in public money on upgrading a public soccer field for BOS Nation F.C., while claiming it’s really to benefit city schoolkids who will get to play there when the team is on the road, is maybe a little disingenuous when nearby Lowell recently renovated its high school soccer field for just $8 million.
  • Been wishing you could read an article portraying city staffers who worked nights and weekends to get the Jacksonville Jaguars $775 million renovation subsidy done as “the real heroes” while calling it “a local government version of a two-minute drill in football” and “a hurry-up offense” and important because if hadn’t gotten done in the summer, the team’s terrible record this fall might have reduced support for the plan? The Jacksonville Daily Record has got you covered!
  • If you would like to serve on Las Vegas’ new Baseball Stadium Community Oversight Committee to oversee the Athletics stadium’s community benefits agreement, assuming the Athletics stadium is ever built and there ends up being a community benefits agreement, applications are open!
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Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”

There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:

All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.

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Cleveland mayor says he’ll enforce Modell Law over Browns’ proposed Brook Park move, let the lawyering begin!

access_time personNeil deMause

Two months after the Cleveland city council declared it was considering employing Ohio’s “Art Modell law” to block the Browns from moving to suburban Brook Park, Mayor Justin Bibb sent a letter to Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam saying, yup, he intends to do that thing:

Bibb wrote that the team has not provided an opportunity for the city or others to purchase the team, which is required by law. Bibb went on to say if the opportunity becomes available, the city plans to assemble a group of buyers or a single buyer from the area to purchase the team to prevent them from moving out of downtown.

Bibb ended the letter with a deadline, saying the team had until Jan. 9, 2025, to respond to the letter. If the Browns don’t respond or the team states that it doesn’t plan to comply with the law, the city will take “appropriate legal action.”

The Haslams have already sued in federal court to have the Modell law declared an unconstitutional violation of the federal Commerce Clause, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has filed to intervene in the Haslams’ suit on the side of enforcing the law. It’s not immediately clear what “appropriate legal action” Bibb intends to take, but clearly this is upping the legal ante here.

According to Bibb’s own letter, the Modell law applies to any “owner of a professional sports team that uses a tax-supported facility for most of its home games and receives financial assistance from the state or a political subdivision thereof,” which clearly covers the Browns, and prohibits them from “playing most of its home games elsewhere” without providing the six-month notice, which … does the six-month clock start relative to when the team announces it’s moving, or once it starts negotiating to move, or figures out where on earth to get the money for its proposed $2.4 billion stadium, or what?

Haslam Sports Group spokesperson Peter John-Baptiste issued a statement saying the team was “reviewing the correspondence from Mayor Bibb” and asserting that the Modell law and the city’s actions “create uncertainty and do not serve the interest of Greater Cleveland,” which is not exactly a legal argument. There’s going to be a lot to hash out in court, certainly.

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A’s-to-Vegas big bad Dave Kaval exits, pursued by an albatross

access_time personNeil deMause

So, Dave Kaval resigned on Friday. The team president of the then-Oakland A’s was most notable for being owner John Fisher’s move threat czar, first spending months tweeting excitedly from events in Las Vegas and then declaring that the team was “focusing our efforts” there in a statement that, intentionally or not, stuck a fork in talks between team execs and the city of Oakland about a new stadium there.

Now, Kaval is gone, to spend more time with his family. No, wait, the other one:

The Athletics announced Friday that team president Dave Kaval, a major architect behind the team’s departure from Oakland, is resigning so that he can “pursue new business opportunities in California,” according to a news release.

And:

“I will be staying in California to explore new opportunities at the crossroads of business and government. I am grateful to A’s ownership for the opportunities they have given me,” Kaval said in the statement.

This isn’t entirely unexpected: Kaval has been pretty much invisible since early summer, with the new public face of the team being board member Sandy Dean, who will now take over Kaval’s job as president on an interim basis. There’s bound to be tons of speculation on whether Kaval jumped or was pushed — he was certainly a liability for Fisher given that he was universally reviled as the guy who took the A’s out of Oakland, but also he may not have wanted to continue on at the wheel of the A’s Oakland-to-Sacramento-to-maybe-Las-Vegas-maybe-not road trip that he helped set in motion. Either scenario makes sense, really — hopefully we’ll eventually get a giant ESPN article breaking down Kaval’s departure.

As for what it means for the [no-city-name-here] Athletics, it’s certainly not a great look for Fisher as he tried to sell a slice of his team for an inflated price on the basis of “Look, we signed a pitcher somebody has actually heard of!” The real test will be to see if Fisher really stages a Vegas groundbreaking in the spring — though I suppose it’s possible he could still put down his required initial $100 million, collect $390 million from the state of Nevada to start construction, and then later back out or threaten to in order to get the state to sweeten the pot. That’s just how sports team owners do, after all.

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Friday roundup: 2024 was the year cities said “no” to stadium subsidies, and team owners said “actually, yes”

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the last weekly roundup of 2024! It was a bit of a slow week thanks to the holiday, when even team execs and elected officials (though not always journalists) tend to take a break from stadium and arena shenanigans and focus on eating overpriced peppermint bark or whatever.

It was a weird year in the sports subsidy world: Kansas City voters rejected a sales tax hike to fund stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs, only to have the team owners get the state of Kansas to approve $1.4 billion or more in public bonds for new stadiums there, though they haven’t yet committed to taking the offer; the Virginia legislature rejected a $1 billion–plus subsidy for a new Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, only to have Washington, D.C. provide more than half a billion in renovation money; Illinois state officials said repeatedly that they weren’t interested in funding a new Chicago Bears stadium, only to have team execs keep coming back with even more proposals for new stadiums; Florida elected officials rejected an already-approved Tampa Bay Rays stadium before later unrejecting it. Or maybe it’s not such a weird year, given that the two constants since the whole great stadium swindle started back in the 1980s have been the populace being steamed about huge piles of their tax money going to wealthy sports owners and the wealthy sports owners coming back with “we’re sorry to hear that, but we would still like the huge piles of money.” They will fight eternally.

But let’s look forwards, not backwards! Time to clear away the remaining news items and get ready for 2025:

  • The city of Boston signed a lease with the NWSL club BOS Nation FC to play at the city-owned White Stadium, which will be rebuilt at a cost of around $200 million, of which taxpayers will cover $91 million or more. According to Boston Business Journal, the team will “keep the bulk of revenue from matches” aside from 10% of in-stadium advertising revenues and 3% of concessions revenue, while paying $400,000 a year in rent (rising by 3% each year) and a $1-per-ticket surcharge. (The renovated stadium will also be available for use by Boston public school teams on days when BOS Nation FC doesn’t need it, though presumably they won’t need things like the restaurant and beer garden being planned for the pro team.) There is no possible way taxpayers won’t take a bath on this unless every single soccer ticket buyer spends around $1,000 on concessions, which seems a bit ambitious.
  • WJLA-TV interviewed businesses near the current Washington Commanders stadium — well, a cashier at one brunch restaurant — to find out what they think of the team maybe moving to a new stadium in D.C., and she replied: “We’re busy on Sundays. I think the Commanders fans, they bleed into our Sundays. They’re in the areas. These are popular shopping areas. Definitely probably going to see an increase post- or before the games.” Definitely probably! No need to interview anyone else, slot that in for the 6 pm news.
  • George Petak died. You know, this guy. Out of respect for his family and friends, I will not make any jokes about potential efforts to recall him from heaven.

That’s all she wrote! See you back here on Monday.

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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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RFK land bill sets up bidding war for Commanders, this can’t be good

access_time personNeil deMause

The budget bill that passed Congress late Friday night and forestalled a government shutdown did not include a provision handing over the RFK Stadium site to Washington, D.C., but a separate measure passed early Saturday morning, and everybody is excited! The Washington Post called it “a stunning win” and “a political miracle,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said the bill was important to “get control of this land so that we can make it productive,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (yes, that guy) called it a “historic moment for our nation’s capital,” and even Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said the bill means his state “is going to be better in the future than what it is right now” because of promises from Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris to pay for the demolition of the team’s old stadium and contribute to redevelopment of its site.

Not mentioned in any of this, of course, is who would pay how much for a new Commanders stadium, on the RFK site or elsewhere, and that’s where things get potentially dicey. Moore has said he’s looking forward to competing to keep the Commanders, and Harris is still considering sites in Virginia as well. That spells bidding war, and the last time we saw one of those in the D.C. area, it didn’t end well: Even after Virginia lawmakers turned down the Wizards and Capitals‘ demands for a billion dollars for an arena in Alexandria, D.C. officials still approved more than half a billion dollars for renovations to their current arena, apparently just out of happiness to be allowed to spend anything at all. Bowser already indicated that she’s provided unspecified concessions to Maryland politicians to get the land transfer through — could be trading an air national guard squadron, could be something else, nobody’s saying — and it’s anyone’s guess what could be offered to Harris, especially when Bowser has clown consultants claiming a Commanders stadium would be worth as much as $1.26 billion in LOLeconomic output.

None of which has anything to do with whether the RFK Stadium site makes more sense for being centrally located and easy for fans from all regions to get to, or less sense for being centrally located and a waste of valuable public land, or anything else separate from the potential subsidies, because these deals are almost invariably all about the potential subsidies. More to be revealed in the 2025 legislative sessions, no doubt.

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Friday roundup: Sixers arena OKed after protests, RFK site transfer KOed by Elon Musk

access_time personNeil deMause

Weekly news roundup, special abbreviated travel edition:

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County approves bond sale for Rays’ original $1B stadium subsidy, team execs say they want more

access_time personNeil deMause

The Pinellas County Commission, which voted 6-1 in October to hold off on selling $312.5 million in bonds for a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium following damage to the area from Hurricane Milton, and voted 6-1 in November to hold off again after team officials threatened to back out of the deal, voted 5-2 yesterday to approve the bond sale after all. As expected, two commissioners who were really for the deal all along but just voted last month to kick the can down the road because they knew they didn’t have the votes to win voted yes; in addition, commissioners Dave Eggers and Chris Latvala, who had voted against the stadium deal back in July and had hinted at wanting more concessions from the team, ended up switching their votes in exchange for absolutely nothing, thanks to … the rhetorical gifts of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred?

Latvala is now a yes. Apparently Rob Manfred worked his magic on him! Says he is voting yes because he trusts Manfred and his commitment to this region, but doesn't trust the penny-pinching Sternberg. Friends, have you ever heard anyone say nice things about Rob Manfred?

— DRaysBay (@draysbay.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T22:43:52.157Z

So with both the city and county signing off on bonds, the Rays’ stadium deal, which includes $1 billion in public cash, tax breaks, and land discounts, is back on, right? Hahahahaha, that would be far too easy:

“As we have made clear, the county’s delay has caused the ballpark’s completion to slide into 2029,” Rays President Matt Silverman said in a written statement. “As a result, the cost of the project has increased significantly, and we cannot absorb this increase alone. When the county and city wish to engage, we remain ready to solve this funding gap together.”

Yes, Rays management responded to news of the approval of a $1 billion taxpayer subsidy by saying well that’s nice and all, but now our costs have gone up, so the public has to help pay for that. Those of you with online dictionary subscription will soon notice an update to the image accompanying the entry for “chutzpah.”

What happens next is really anyone’s guess. SBNation’s DRaysBay, which has been one of the better sites covering this story, summed it up as that “the Rays still sound angry and sour and if their goal is to rebuild bridges with local government they have an odd way of doing it. They sound to me like someone who is trying to be so mean and unpleasant that their partner breaks up with them, so they can get out of the relationship without bearing the costs of instigating the breakup.”

Which sure is how they sound, but is Stu Sternberg really prepared to walk away from a $1 billion check just because he’s upset about two months of inflation in construction costs? (The language about the “county’s delay” pushing any stadium opening back a year neatly elides the fact that the county couldn’t have actually sold bonds by now anyway, since the Rays haven’t yet finished all the paperwork on their end of the deal.) Or is this just a gambit to see if he can guilt the city and county into sweetening the pot even more, like trying to demanding one more prospect in a salary-dump trade? It’s anybody’s guess here — it’s not even clear right now whose court the ball is in, but hopefully we’ll get some clarification from someone, someday.

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Pinellas County asks Rays owner to be more like John Fisher, this plot has jumped the shark

access_time personNeil deMause

We have finally hit that part of the season where the A and B plots converge, and it is predictably zany: Pinellas County commissioners, trying to decide what to demand in exchange for approving Tampa Bay Rays stadium bonds at their next meeting tomorrow, have landed on “How about one of those toothless letters like John Fisher gave to Nevada about the Athletics stadium?”

“We have a congruent comparable right now happening in Nevada, in Las Vegas,” Commissioner Vince Nowicki said…

Before that vote on Dec. 5, A’s owner John Fisher provided the board with documents showing his financing is in place.

Letters include a review of his finances, bank loan commitments and a pledge from Fisher and his family to cover $1.1 billion of the total cost.

“Why can’t we get that same treatment from our owner?” Nowicki questioned. “I don’t think it’s asking a lot for the Rays to be able to show, ‘Hey, we have the money to do this if they’re serious about staying here.'”

That is literally the least that the commission could ask, given that Fisher’s “pledge” just amounts to “yes, my family has $1.1 billion if we want to spend it.” He’s still trying to shop around a one-quarter share of the team for $500 million, which is a crazy valuation when the Baltimore Orioles just sold for $1.725 billion — even if Fisher is trying to assemble some vaguely recognizable names like Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs, that’s unlikely to make anyone confuse the A’s with one of the best young teams in baseball.

Sternberg, in fact, already has to provide documents guaranteeing his end of the deal before the bonds can be sold, something county commissioner Chris Scherer noted in saying he wanted to see the Rays “provide us with assurances that they can meet their 11 conditions.” This is a very weird thing to go to the mat over, given that if Sternberg doesn’t come up with his share of the money by March, he has to back out of the deal himself — especially since if he does back out of the deal, he doesn’t really have any other good options that don’t mean playing in a minor-league stadium for four or more years — but apparently that’s where things have landed.

Tomorrow’s commission meeting starts at 6 pm ET [CORRECTION: I’m now told it will be part of the 2 pm ET session] and can be watched online here. I’m going to skip liveblogging this one, but will report back on Wednesday with the denouement.

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