Friday roundup: More Rays scuttlebutt, Sixers arena advances, nobody’s buying pricey Bills PSLs

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been three whole days since we checked in on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation! Do you feel bereft? Do Rays execs and Tampa Bay–area elected officials feel bereft? If a press statement falls in a forest and there’s no one around to aggregate it, does it make a sound?

None of this, and more, will be answered in this week’s news roundup:

  • The Tampa Bay Times sports desk has certainly been chiming in on the Rays situation, with columnist John Romano, who first reported on Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s threats to move the team if he didn’t get stadium bonds approved ASAP, declaring that what is needed is “a hero” or “a savior” or “a fairy-tale knight” to “step up and purchase a large hunk of the franchise and pay for a stadium, or at least provide a stadium financing plan that does not involve more than a half-billion in public dollars.” Why a half-billion? Who knows! Where does Romano think Sternberg will go if no buyer steps in? Dunno, though he predicts the team will “be on the move, at least temporarily, when 2026 rolls around and Tropicana is still not fixed and the Rays do not want to be stuck in an 11,000-seat spring training stadium.” (The number of cities that could have significantly larger stadiums ready to go by 2026 is zero, or maybe one if neither the Athletics nor San Francisco Giants have territorial rights to Oakland.) The most logical short-term solution is for Sternberg and local electeds to get together and agree to pay the $55 million it would cost to repair Tropicana Field for the short term, with Sternberg agreeing to extend his lease a few years in exchange; it would take a lot of pride-swallowing, especially on Sternberg’s part, so it probably won’t happen, but the alternative looks like it’ll be a whole lot of baseball seasons in minor-league parks somewhere.
  • The group that wants to bring an MLB team to Orlando — formerly led by former Magic executive Pat Williams before his death this summer — also chimed in, saying that while they would never interfere in the business of St. Petersburg, if the Rays did want to move to Orlando, they’re confident that Orange County political leaders “can provide an attractive public/private partnership stadium financing structure that benefits all stakeholders involved.” The last time they brought this up, the “public” part involved $975 million in hotel tax money, one of the same revenue sources that St. Petersburg had been looking to use on its new Rays stadium. (Though it’s often said that Florida counties can spend this on tourism promotion and building things like stadiums and convention centers, it can also use some of it for zoos and beaches and river cleanup and even transportation and sewer infrastructure, something lots of Floridians would like to see counties do.) The Orange County Commission has passed on this idea in the past; we’ll see if it goes over any better with the Rays as a potential target.
  • The Philadelphia city council voted 10-3 to approve creating a tax-kickback district for a new 76ers arena and a new “arena district” to manage neighborhood impacts, which are expected to be extensive. More arena votes are scheduled for the next council meeting on Tuesday.
  • Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are each being asked for $20 million for Guardians and Cavaliers stadium and arena repairs, with another $30 million ask on the table right behind that. If there’s a small silver lining, it’s that this is money the city and county already agreed to spend, it’s just that the cigarette and alcohol taxes that were supposed to fund it are coming up short, so now taxpayers will have to dig into another public pocket.
  • How are those super-pricey Buffalo Bills PSLs selling? Extremely poorly: Only 10% have sold so far, and the rate of purchases is slowing. If they don’t sell out, the Bills owners are on the hook for coming up with the money elsewhere, at least, so at least it won’t be an additional public disaster like the 1990s Oakland Raiders PSLs were.
  • The Chicago Bears owners and Arlington Heights have finally agreed on a property tax valuation for the land the team wants to build a stadium on in that Chicago suburb, but also they say they still really want to build a stadium in Chicago, raising the question, as the Chicago Sun-Times puts it, of “whether the Bears’ latest announcement is [just] a push for leverage in stadium negotiations that have now stretched over three years.”
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D.C. approves $200m or more in spending on Nats stadium upgrades, calls this “no new cost” to taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the day when the United States celebrates the ancestors of some of its ruling class accepting lavish gifts from local residents, while famously providing in exchange smallpox and pain and degradation.

In completely unrelated news, the Washington, D.C. council voted yesterday to approve $515 million in upgrades for the Capitals and Wizards arena that we’ve known about since April, and while doing so they also approved funneling a large but unspecified amount (more on that momentarily) of tax money to the Nationals for upgrades to their stadium, in exchange for the team continuing to play in D.C. for an additional 13 seasons:

On Tuesday, the D.C. Council passed legislation to create a dedicated stream of revenue that the Nationals could use for upgrades and maintenance at Nationals Park, with no new costs to D.C. …

“We’re talking about a site that is generating 150 events per year,” [councilmember Charles] Allen said of the ballpark. “That type of return on investment is what we want, the same way the arena is a place where 250-plus events is creating the investment and the return that comes back on that. It’s a bit ironic we’re voting on both these things on the same day — we don’t want to find ourselves in a position like we did last year.”

Allen did not mention that although the district paid to build the stadium and owns it, Nats owner Mark Lerner gets to keep all the revenue from those 150 events a year. D.C. does get $5.5 million a year in rent from the team, plus whatever sliver of sales tax money it gets from those events that would not be spent in the city otherwise, but that’s nowhere near enough to cover the roughly $30 million a year D.C. is on the hook for in stadium debt. The rest is covered by district business and additional sales taxes that are being diverted to pay off stadium bonds.

Those bonds will paid off soon, though, thanks to tax proceeds coming in — and going back out to pay for the stadium — faster than expected. Which means those tax streams will soon be available to D.C. to pay for other public needs. Or would be, if Lerner weren’t angling to get it for future stadium upgrades instead. As a previous Washington Post article from January noted:

[D.C. Council Chair Phil] Mendelson’s legislation would create the Ballpark Maintenance Fund, ensuring a steady stream of dedicated money — with no new costs to D.C. — that could go toward repairs and improvements that the Nationals had been asking for under the terms of the team’s lease at the ballpark with the city….

“We made a commitment to the team we would build the stadium and we would maintain it, and we just don’t need these stories about deferred maintenance and failing scoreboards,” he said. “So let’s provide a certain path that we’re going to maintain our facility and maintain it as a very attractive ballpark in the major leagues.”

That’s two separate Post articles saying the new funding would be at “no new costs to D.C.,” which is wrong on two counts: 1) D.C. already shelled out the money it promised the Nats owners to pay for stadium construction, so handing over any leftover tax money as well is absolutely a new cost, and 2) the Mendelson legislation would continue to kick back stadium sales tax proceeds and Nats rent payments after the team’s current lease expires in 2037, which is even more a new cost.

How much in new public subsidies this would add up to is unclear: Ol’ “Democracy Dies in Darkness” didn’t bother to calculate a figure, and the D.C. council website doesn’t appear to have entered the bill into the record yet. But if we assume it would amount to at least 13 more years of the same $5.5 million a year in rent and roughly $12.5 million in sales tax money, plus whatever is left over in the current stadium account … let’s estimate the total at upwards of $200 million and leave it at that, though it obviously could end up much more. Lerner still has to okay a lease extension through 2050 to cash his check; one hopes that the D.C. council will post any new lease terms for the public to read, but one probably shouldn’t hope too hard.

This kind of last-minute-before-holiday-weekend stadium renovations approval is going around: Harris County, Texas just approved $35 million in fresh spending on new scoreboards for the Houston Texans to avoid “an embarrassing, unrecoverable failure mid-season.” (No, it wasn’t explained what kind of scoreboard failure would be “embarrassing [and] unrecoverable”; they just can’t get spare parts for the old displays, so presumably we’re not talking about something like this.) And that’s only part of potentially $264 million in upgrades the county is looking at making over 20 years, quintuple its current operating budget for repairs. The grift that keeps on giving is a nice benefit, if you can convince the natives to cough it up.

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County to Rays: If you’re going to kill the stadium deal, do so by Sunday or face our wrath

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays stadium news comes at you fast: When we last left off on Friday, team execs and government officials were in a standoff over who, if anyone, was going to pull the plug on the deal, even as the Rays’ two co-presidents (it’s going around) declared that the plan had “effectively died” and both the Pinellas County Commission and St. Petersburg city council showed no interest in moving ahead with selling bonds for a stadium, or even fixing the old one. Yesterday, county commission chair Kathleen Peters sent an open letter to the Rays presidents giving them until Sunday to “declare your intention regarding this Agreement and whether you intend to see it come to fruition”:

[Rays co-president Brian Auld] went on to complain to the Commissioner that the Rays’ revenue was down and that anticipated project costs going up were putting the project in jeopardy. This, again, on the day before the Commission met to vote on issuing the bonds. Therefore, the notion that it was the County that “killed the deal” is categorically false based on the Rays President’s own statements prior to the county’s action…

The November 19, 2024 letter approaches being an inelegantly stated notice of termination pursuant to Section 3.6(a)(ii) of the Agreement. The County is scheduled to move forward to consider legislatively adopting the supplemental bond resolution on December 17, 2024. The County can be in a position to offer its bonds for sale pursuant to the Agreement weeks (and potentially months) before the Rays’s deadline to meet its conditions precedent to such offering. As your November 19 letter makes several statements that are demonstrably false as reflected by the terms of the Agreement itself and as explained in this letter, and as President Auld made public comments in other settings that the Agreement is “dead”, that action by the Board on December 17 appears to be futile.

The Rays (StadCo.) must either indicate in writing that they intend to move forward under the Agreement as executed, or provide a clearer Notice of Termination pursuant to section 3.6(a)(ii) of the Agreement by no later than December 1, 2024.

If all this feels needlessly performative — who cares who killed the stadium deal so long as everyone agrees that it’s dead? — there’s likely more to it than just wanting the Rays to take the political heat. If you recall, county officials testified last week that if the city or county pulls the plug on the deal, Rays owner Stu Sternberg can still go ahead with taking possession of the land around Tropicana Field and redeveloping it, with or without a stadium; if it’s Sternberg who walks, then the rest of the development is canceled as well. (I’m still going through the contracts to try to find this clause — will post an update here if it turns up.) [SMALL UPDATE: If you want to play along at home by digging through the contract language, I’ve put a bunch of the documents here.)

Peters didn’t say what would happen if Rays leadership ignores her December 1 deadline, and it’s not clear she has much leverage beyond the threat to viciously subtweet (subskeet?) them if they don’t comply. Still, it’s pretty harsh wording from someone who as recently as last Tuesday was arguing that the stadium bonds should be approved because her sons love baseball, and probably a strong sign that the deal is unlikely to come back from the dead after the Rays execs’ nastygram. “Torching bridges” isn’t a legal term, though, so until one side or another agrees to formally terminate the plan, it’s going to continue to survive in a zombified state, neither alive nor dead. At least we’ll always have the vaportecture.

Still no word, meanwhile, on what the Rays’ fallback plans are for playing games beyond 2025 if St. Petersburg goes ahead with refusing to fix the Tropicana Field roof. MLB shuffled some home games around for next year to keep the Rays from having to play quite so many outdoors in the summer heat, with the result that the team will play 47 of its first 59 games at home. Maybe the schedule makers could arrange it so the Rays play all of 2026 and 2027 on an extended road trip? It’s been envisioned before.

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Oregon officials mull upping state tax kickbacks to lure the Rays (or somebody) to Portland

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Tampa Bay Rays‘ new stadium plans dead or mostly dead or pining for the fjords or whatever pop culture reference you prefer, it’s time to speculate wildly on other cities that might want to take St. Petersburg’s place to offer up a steaming pile of money for a new stadium. Up first: Portland, Oregon, where would-be team owners the Portland Diamond Project (led by retired not-even-close-to-billionaire Nike executive Craig Cheek) want to revisit the $150 million in player-income-tax kickbacks that were approved two decades ago to try to lure the Montreal Expos, and invited over a ton of city and state elected officials, as one does, to discuss upping that dollar amount for bring an expansion or existing team to town. How’d that go over?

  • State Sen. Lew Frederick: “How would people respond? The present state treasurer and the incoming treasurer were there—she [Elizabeth Steiner] will have a lot of say. If there’s a bill, the argument will be the same as it was in the past. Could we be leveraging the tax money for something else other than baseball?”
  • Incoming state treasurer Elizabeth Steiner: “Selling bonds backed by the new salaries—that’s revenue we wouldn’t get if we didn’t get the team. In principle, I’m supportive but I’m not willing to commit until I see all the details.”
  • State Sen. Mark Meek “I can’t wait.”

Feel the excitement! The initial $150 million cap on stadium bonds was in 2003 dollars, to be fair, so expanding it would make a kind of sense in that player salaries have gone up since then; on the other hand, state budget analysts at the time said player income taxes would only be enough to pay off about half of a $150 million bond, so maybe it wouldn’t actually make sense at all. A lot of the “revenue we wouldn’t get if we didn’t get the team” calculation would depend on whether the entire roster could be encouraged to live in Oregon and pay its 9.9% state income tax rate or if the state would only be able to charge income tax for days when the team was playing at home.

Plus, as always, there’s the substitution effect problem: How much of that income would be earned, and have taxes paid on it, somewhere else in the state if MLB never arrived? Part of players’ salaries are paid from out-of-state sources like national TV contracts, obviously, but part comes from local fan spending. If even some Oregonians fund their baseball ticket purchases by cutting back on other sporting events, or going out to eat as much, or some other local entertainment option, then the state loses income tax proceeds from Trailblazers players or sous chefs or pumpkin boat mechanics, which has to be factored in.

All this math will need to be hashed out in the state legislature, and even then it needs to be seen how much money a stadium would cost and how much of the tab Cheek and company would pick up themselves. The proposed site, the Zidell Yards south of downtown, is in a tax increment financing district, so it could get potentially get property tax kickbacks as well. (Here are some images of what the stadium could look like, or at least could have looked like when it was slated for an entirely different site in 2018.)

Portland mayor-elect Keith Wilson, at least, is apparently unworried about where to find a billion dollars or so, and already thinks his city is neck-and-neck at the finish line:

“I’d say this is as close as we’ve come. We feel confident it’s down to us and one other city. And we’re making a solid play.”

One other city? Give us a hint — does it rhyme with Schmeensboro?

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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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Worcester’s stadium fund is in debt to the city, but that’s not the worst of it

access_time personNeil deMause

The Great Worcester Andy Zimbalist Throwdown was so involved that I ended up writing a whole article about it elsewhere, but it ultimately came down to: Zimbalist, the former stadium subsidy skeptic who had started giving testimony-for-hire on both sides of the issue, insisted that Worcester would recoup its expense on a Red Sox Triple-A stadium via taxes generated by new housing that would spring up around it; and pretty much every other economist said it doesn’t usually work that way. “There’s a list a mile long of cities where it hasn’t worked. And there’s a really short list where it has,” said University of San Francisco economist Nola Agha at the time. “Is this development guaranteed? Is it going to happen regardless of if there’s a stock market crash or interest rates go up?”

So how’s that going, you ask, in the three-plus years since the Worcester stadium opened? Welp:

Following news that tax revenues for the independent Polar Park financing account fell short last fiscal year, with the account owing the city general fund $792,000, city councilors had harsh words Tuesday for a developer who appears to be falling short on his obligations to the ballpark district…

“They’ve gotten away with a lot and they’ve put us as a city in a pretty bad position at this point,” District 2 City Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson said.

The city’s stadium fund is supposed to collect property taxes, sales taxes, and building permit fees from development around the stadium, and use it to repay the city’s $146 million in stadium bonds. (It was supposed to be $106 million at the time Zimbalist endorsed the plan, but overruns happen.) But development has lagged as the result of rising inflation — which was largely thanks to Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia and Bill Clinton’s deregulation of financial derivatives, if you’re keeping score — to the point where developers are now turning down the offer of tax breaks so they can walk away from properties entirely.

The good news, if Worcester city manager Eric Batista is to be believed, is that “we remain confident that the DIF will return significant funds to the municipality’s coffers as new development occurs and certain tax agreements expire.” The bad news is: Even that wouldn’t necessarily help ensure that Worcester taxpayers don’t lose their shirts on this deal. If some of the new housing construction that eventually arrives would have happened with or without the stadium; or if it cannibalizes housing construction that might have gone elsewhere in the city if not for the stadium; or if the cost of building schools for all those new residents adds more to the city expense budget than the new taxes add to receipts, then this could still be a money pit even if all the buildings around the stadium are eventually built, just like other TIF districts elsewhere.

The question now: Will the Worcester Telegram issue a retraction for the anonymous chamber-of-commerce-penned op-ed it ran last year (without fact-checking) claiming that Worcester will be different, because reasons? Your guess is as good as mine, and you can probably guess what my guess is.

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Bills stadium price tag clears $2.1B, public still only paying for $1B of it, yay?

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tampa Bay Rays stadium fiasco is dominating the headlines right now, but I don’t want to ignore the news out of Buffalo, where the Bills‘ $1.5 billion stadium is now going to cost at least $2.1 billion, because the economy or something:

Bills president Pete Guelli said he was not surprised by the amount, given how the numbers have been tracking up since construction began 16 months ago. And he said the projected total represents the commitment the Pegulas have to the community because they are sticking to their vision for the facility without cutting corners to reduce costs.

Previous reports cited “increased labor and material costs” for the rising price tag — Guelli didn’t explain why it’s since gone up even more, or indicate whether the pending deportation of a large chunk of the construction workforce has been factored in. Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula remain on the hook for all cost overruns beyond the $1 billion committed by the state and county, leading to this hilarious moment:

Love the fact that the Erie County exec said that the cost overruns are actually good news because it makes the county's $250M giveaway to the richest family in upstate NY a smaller percentage of the total stadium cost. apnews.com/article/bill…

— Victor Matheson (@victor-matheson.bsky.social) 2024-11-19T16:09:55.662Z

Props to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Erie County executive Mark Polancarz, I guess, for making sure the Pegulas would be responsible for any costs over the initial $1.4 billion. Significantly fewer props for putting up $1 billion in public money in the first place without allowing any public or legislative debate, as one does, but Hochul in particular needs all the Ws she can get right now.

 

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County delays Rays bond vote another four weeks after team execs’ threat to “suspend” stadium project

access_time personNeil deMause

If you were following along yesterday’s liveblog on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium hearing and wondered how the cliffhanger ending turned out: The Pinellas County Commission voted 6-1 to wait another four weeks to make any decision, scheduling its next vote for December 17.

To anyone who watched the whole hearing, though, those six votes were clearly cast for a couple of different reasons. Four members — Chris Latvala and Dave Eggers, who voted no on the stadium deal back in July, and Vince Nowicki and Chris Scherer, who were newly elected this month — were strongly opposed to the county going ahead with selling $312.5 million in stadium bonds at all, arguing that it’s a “bad deal” for the Rays to only pay $1 million a year in rent on a new stadium when they’re paying $15 million to play in a minor-league stadium in Tampa for a year (Nowicki) and that the entire thing is an “egregious demand” by Rays owner Stu Sternberg when he could just go to a damn bank and borrow the money (Scherer). With seven members on the commission, that was enough to block the bond sale.

Commissioners Kathleen Peters and Brian Scott, meanwhile, voted for a delay in the bond vote only because they didn’t want it to fail entirely — as Scott said, “I’ll freely admit I was never the best at math, but I can count to four.” Only Rene Flowers, whose district the stadium would be built in, voted no on the delay, arguing that further debate is pointless and the commission may as well decide and move on.

This puts the ball firmly in the Rays’ court, and so far they’re not talking. Team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman attended the meeting but did not speak, instead letting their letter saying they had “suspended work on the entire project” stand for itself. The other theme of the day was that that letter went over very badly — even Peters and Scott called it out during the meeting, with Scott terming it “totally ridiculous” — and the commission members are not about to be rushed into making a decision on bonds that the July deal itself said don’t need to be approved until next March at the earliest.

What looks to have happened here is that the destruction wrought in the Tampa Bay region in October, coupled with uncertainty about where the Rays would play while the roof on its current stadium was repaired, led Peters, Scott, Flowers, and the since-departed Janet Long to join Latvala and Eggers in pressing pause on the bond sale. Then, a week later, election results tipped the balance on the commission, adding stadium deal critics Nowicki and Scherer, and suddenly it’s too late for Peters, Scott, and Flowers to unpause the bonds, even though they would now like to.

It will now be down to those three, plus Rays execs, to peel off one of the four no votes by December 17, and it looks like that won’t be a trivial task: None of the four diehards focused on whether the Rays will play games temporarily in Pinellas, for example, instead focusing in on wanting to renegotiate the entire deal so taxpayers don’t foot as much of the bill. That’s not to say it won’t happen — horses are born to be traded — but none of the core four proposed an easy path to winning them over. If they continue to hold out, Sternberg could be back at square one in his years-long stadium campaign — only now without even a major-league facility to play in in the interim, and with his fellow owners breathing down his neck to get something done in Tampa Bay so they can focus on exploiting cities like Nashville and Charlotte for expansion fees rather than leaving them open as Rays move threat targets.

Oh yeah, and the St. Petersburg council has its own votes coming up tomorrow, including one on whether to go ahead with repairing Tropicana Field’s roof. St. Pete administrator Rob Gerdes said at yesterday’s county hearing that the city fully intends to go ahead with roof repairs, but of course Gerdes doesn’t have a vote on that (though his nephew does). The city council meeting starts at 1:30 tomorrow and can be viewed here; I don’t plan on doing another liveblog, but feel free to chime in in the comments, or on Bluesky, or wherever your heart desires.

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Let’s liveblog the crap out of the Pinellas County meeting on the Rays bonds!

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s meeting of the Pinellas County Commission that is supposed to vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium bonds (or not!) is finally almost through its first batch of agenda items, it was all about debris removal and floodplain insurance, don’t the commissioners know that there’s a baseball team owner waiting to find out if he’ll get a billion dollars? I mean, priorities!

Anyway, item 22, “Pinellas County adoption of a Tourist Development Tax Revenue Supplemental Bond Resolution Supplementing Resolution No. 24-42 adopted on July 30, 2024, and approval of the documents to support funding for the design and construction of a new stadium in St. Petersburg to be the new home of the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball franchise,” let’s do this:

3:30 pm ET: Rays management released a letter saying “we will not be answering questions” (though they’re at the hearing) and the bond issuance was supposed to be a “formality” and now that it didn’t happen in October this “ended the ability for a 2028 delivery of the ballpark” and “decades of work [and] more than $50 million” invested by the Rays has been “jeopardized by the county’s failure to live up to its agreement.” So why didn’t the stadium agreement require bond issuance to happen before March if — oh, sorry, that’s a question, my bad.

3:44 pm ET: The commission just moved on item 35 to item 2, then skipped immediately to item 18. If you’re scoring at home, please do yourself a favor and stop now.

3:51 pm ET: “We are going to the long-awaited item 22.” Here we go!

4:05 pm ET: The public has sent lots of emails, says commission chair Kathleen Peters! The two new commissioners didn’t get them, which is a shame, because they tell a beautiful story that cannot be summarized! Anyway, on with the public testimony!

“Are we dealing with stupid Stu or are we dealing with sly Stu?” “Now is the time to move forward with our legally bound requirements!” “What would it tell other businesses in the future if we said at the 11th hour that we are going to pull the rug out from under the Rays?” “We have seven times the amount of vacant units as we do homeless people!” “This is not about opposing baseball; it is about prioritizing what truly matters for the future of Pinellas County.” (I have sat through a lot of public testimony in my day, and I gotta say: It’s not working. You can almost hear the commissioners actively not listening.)

4:14 pm ET: “Look at Oakland, who lost all of their sports teams! No longer a thriving city!” If you were still wondering why MLB owners approved John Fisher’s move to Las Vegas: It may end up a catastrophe, but at least it gives his fellow owners a handy cautionary tale.

4:19 pm ET: Oh hey, can I embed the hearing video here? Let’s see if this works:

4:22 pm ET: There are some okay enough arguments being made here and there — one guy noted that if St. Petersburg holds off on stadium bonds while the Rays go play in Tampa for two years, that’ll provide some useful data points about how important the team is to the city economy — but I swear, the first person who chooses to forgo reading from a stilted two-page essay and instead submits their testimony in the form of a freestyle rap will get a standing ovation, or at least encourage the attendees to lift their heads from their desks.

4:31 pm ET: Down to the final public speaker. The rhetorical lines for the public testimony have been pretty clear: “Just because you voted in July to do something dumb doesn’t mean you have to go ahead with it” vs. “No backsies!” Time to find out which one the elected officials agree with!

4:44 pm ET: Chris Latvala is first up, leading off by confirming that he doesn’t have to recuse himself from voting just because the Phillies and Rays both donated to the campaign fund of a family member of his. (So many questions.) He takes issue with the idea put forward by Rays owner Stu Sternberg that the delay in approving the bonds “upended” the stadium process, noting that there was, you know, a hurricane, and the Rays took their sweet time finalizing the agreement in the first place, so don’t start with me about delays!

Latvala asks if there’s a possibility that the Rays will never return to the Trop, and instead play in Tampa until a new stadium is ready. St. Pete city administrator Rob Gerdes takes the podium and says it could happen, but he doesn’t expect it. Latvala asks if the Rays could sue the city if it doesn’t repair the Trop; Gerdes says the city intends to repair it, so that’s not an issue.

4:57 pm: Dave Eggers: “I am not going to feel rushed by the statements that are made by the Rays.” Also: “I’m not an anti-stadium person. I just want to make sure we get a deal done and it’s fair.”

Then he asks if the stadium deal and development deal are separate in that the one can go forward without the other? Chief assistant county attorney Don Crowell says, “The answer to that is a very lawyerly answer of: It depends.” Not issuing the bonds today, Crowell says, doesn’t kill anything. If the Rays fail to meet their requirements, then there’s a provision that would prevent them pursuing the greater development, but not if the county is the one balking.

5:12 pm ET: Rene Flowers is asking questions of the county administrator, but it’s unclear where she’s going with them. The stadium and the greater development “are somewhat intertwined,” she says, and this appears to be an opportunity for the community to benefit from construction and other jobs, okay, got it, don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of getting at least something. If she’s mentioned the amount of money the county and city would be paying for that something and whether that’s a reasonable return, I didn’t hear it.

Flowers says she understands why the Rays wouldn’t want to play in Pinellas County, because she’s been to Al Lang Field for Rowdies games — “I don’t know much about soccer, I just cheer when the ball go in the goal” — and anyway, if the Rays owners say that and the Phillies stadium in Clearwater aren’t good enough for them, that’s good enough for her.

Definitely going in a pro-stadium-bonds direction here, but then, she’s not one of the four strongest opposition votes on the commission, one of whom needs to be flipped to get the bonds passed — that’d be Latvala, Eggers, Nowicki, and Scherer.

5:14 pm ET: The county’s bond counsel pops up to quickly confirm that the county isn’t on the hook yet for any delays in issuing bonds. “That cost us a lot of money, I’m sure,” quips someone, sparking the first laughter of the afternoon.

5:20 pm ET: Vince Nowicki asks county administrator Barry Burton how come the Rays are set to pay the Yankees $15 million a year to rent their Tampa stadium while they’ll only be paying $1 million a year in rent: “To me that’s a bad deal, no?” “Not at all,” says Burton, because the Rays will be taking on the risk of future improvements to the stadium in exchange for getting all the revenue (and not paying much in rent). He’s not wrong, per se — evaluating any deal means looking at the costs and benefits — but he also doesn’t explain how he calculated that this deal is better than in other cities, let alone good.

5:28 pm ET: Nowicki cites a figure that only 3% of local tourists go to Rays games: “Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze?”

He asks Crowell what happens if the bonds aren’t passed. His answer, in lawyerly words: Dunno — the agreement doesn’t say.

Nowicki: “We’re hearing a lot about the Rays, but not from the Rays.” Would kill for the camera to cut away to Rays co-president Brian Auld right now.

Scherer, the final strong “no” vote, is up. “I’m very disappointed that the Rays are forcing this issue today,” he says. “I don’t see that it’s required, it’s not a condition of our contract. I don’t even see that it’s needed … why do we even need to float bonds? I don’t know that we do. … This is an egregious demand, and it reeks of corporate selfishness. .. I have a lot of questions about the feasibility of financing a new stadium and our infrastructure needs. … If I’m going to make an error, I’m going to err on the side of caution.”

This is sounding an awful lot like it’s headed to a 4-3 vote in favor of holding off on the bonds and — maybe? — trying to renegotiate the deal, but we’ll know soon enough, hopefully.

5:41 pm ET: Brian Scott says he has no questions (yay), only comments (groan). These come down to: We spent a long time negotiating this deal, and if we reopen the deal we could end up with something worse. Then he also gripes about Sternberg’s letter, saying sayig a three-week delay kills the deal is a “totally ridiculous statement” — if the Rays owner doesn’t win this vote via his 11th-hour threat gambit, he certainly didn’t win any friends with it.

He also says that Auld surprised him by saying that the Rays were worried the numbers were no longer looking good on their end. “This is the first indication I had that the Rays were having second thoughts,” he said. “At this point you can only conclude one of a couple of things: Either Sternberg wants out of the deal, he wants to renegotiate the deal, and he wants to hang the failure on the county commission, particularly our newest members, who I think he’s counting on the vote no, personally.” Bold reverse psychology move: Voting no on the stadium bonds is exactly what Sternberg wants, don’t give it to him!

5:44 pm ET: Peters is last up, and argues that the St. Pete city council president was for the Rays stadium deal and was re-elected, so clearly people in St. Pete like the deal! This is not how polling or elections work, but she’s on a roll, let her have her moment.

5:50 pm ET: Now she’s on to arguing that people from Pennsylvania move to Clearwater because the Phillies play spring training there. And if Tampa Bay loses the Rays, it won’t get major league soccer! And her sons love baseball! The defense rests.

6:00 pm ET: A twist! Peters says she supports kicking the can down the road so everyone can think on this, and especially so the new members can learn more about it. (Again, wish the camera would cut to Nowicki and Scherer to see how they feel about being called clueless newbies.) This wouldn’t really decide much — there’s no real deadline for issuing the bonds, apparently — but would give Sternberg more time to try another tack that’s not “You guys ruined everything, maybe I’ll just take my team and leave.”

And I, unfortunately, have to go afk and can’t see this through to the final vote, or decision not to vote, or whatever it ends up being. Feel free to continue to discussion in comments, and we’ll reconvene for a full recap and reaction tomorrow morning.

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Cincinnati totally needs to spend $500m on new arena, say companies that build arenas

access_time personNeil deMause

We spend a lot of time here looking at ways wealthy sports team owners lobby for public spending on new stadiums and arenas to make themselves richer, or at least give them fancier places to entertain their friends and make their competitors jealous, as one does. But then there are the cases where the sports-industrial complex takes on a mind of its own and demands subsidies for buildings that no team in particular stands to benefit from, on the general principle that all the other kids are doing it, so it must make sense.

One can usually depend on local chambers of commerce to lead the charge for public money to be used for this kind of thing, and sure enough, that’s who’s pushing for Cincinnati to spend around half a billion dollars on a new arena:

“What became clear through our work is that our region is an epicenter of cultural vibrancy, music, art, and sports in the Midwest,” said Brendon Cull, President & CEO of the Cincinnati Regional Chamber. ” In terms of assets, we are missing one key component: a modern arena. Our study makes clear that the opportunity before us is more concerts, more sporting events, more family entertainment, and more comedians that contribute to growth in population, the economy, and cultural vibrancy in our region.”…

“The results of this study mark a significant advancement in the ongoing conversation about the necessity for a state-of-the-art modern arena for Greater Cincinnati,” said Bill Baker, Vice President & Managing Partner of MSA Sport. “By being located in Cincinnati’s vibrant urban core, a new arena will attract more visitors and events, spur additional investment in the city, and further enhance our great region.”

Okay, there’s not no self-interest at work here: MSA Sport would be in line to design and build a new arena, so clearly they have their own reasons to want to drum up business. Other names on the study are the Machete Group, Turner Construction, and Populous, all big names in the sports construction world. (They say they consulted with the owners of the Cincinnati Cyclones minor-league hockey team, who have “expressed a willingness” to partner on the project if the city brings its checkbook; FC Cincinnati owner Jeff Berding has been hot for a new arena for years now as well, though it’s not clear if he thinks he could get operating rights to one or what.) The report’s authors argue that if the city puts up 70% of the money toward a $675 million–$800 million arena project, it could reap $829,000 a year in new tax revenues, which would only amount to a $30 million a year or so annual loss — hey, nobody said they were big names in math.

The study also includes a list of musical acts that toured nearby in recent years but skipped Cincinnati, with the clear implication that it’s because their arena is a dump:

Build a new arena, and Elton John will come! Or, well, maybe not, but somebody will, and who can put a price on that? Sure, pointy-headed economists probably, but who wants to listen to them when there are arena contractors with such nice clear plastic binders?

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