Cincinnati Reds – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Reds exec says team will only demand renovation money, threatens to move if fans ask for better players

April 15, 2022 Neil deMause

This has officially been the longest week ever. Scientists agree! And so does the news:

Cincinnati Reds president Phil Castellini said it’s his “opinion” that neither the Reds nor Bengals will demand new stadiums when their leases are up soon, just renovations, and shouldn’t he actually be in a position to say more than just an opinion? Anyway, given that the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens just got $1.2 billion for renovations, maybe Castellini is thinking, hmmm, we can still get hundreds of millions of dollars and not have to spend anything of our own on building from scratch, huh?, so yeah, checks out. Castellini also spent the week telling fans that they shouldn’t complain about the Reds getting rid of all their best players to save money because “what would you do with this team to have it more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exist? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. Be careful what you ask for.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul added another defense of her $1 billion public cash giveaway to the Buffalo Bills owners, saying that people upstate complain about her spending money on the New York City subways, and isn’t that the same thing? Looks like somebody wants to give Crystal Peoples-Stokes a run for her money this year!
Speaking of fire sales and dumb reasons to build things, the San Jose Mercury News has looked at the Oakland A’s ownership’s insistence that only a new stadium can stop them from continually selling off their best players and noted that A’s owner John Fisher isn’t spending on payroll for his San Jose Earthquakes despite a new stadium. Which isn’t quite the same thing thanks to MLS’s single-entity ownership structure, but it’s at least more investigation than most news outlets have done into this argument.
And speaking of baseball teams cheaping-out of player spending, it was revealed this week that the Pittsburgh Pirates bring in enough in ticket sales and concessions alone each year to pay for their entire player payroll. Add in at least $100 million a year in national TV revenue, plus local TV revenue, plus league revenue-sharing, and “not having money” isn’t really an excuse for either not signing free agents or demanding new stadiums. (“Wanting more money” is, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
“Developers and analysts” in Las Vegas aren’t concerned about glutting the market for arenas now that Tim Leiweke’s Oak View Group wants to build one to go along with the 23 others (estimated) that the city already has, because 1) Leiweke “knows what he’s doing” (Vegas convention authority CEO Steve Hill), 2) Leiweke “is following the blueprint that he’s done in the past” (Oak View partner Marc Badain), 3) some performers may prefer a newer arena to an older one (Macquarie Securities gaming analyst Chad Beynon), 4) “we need to make sure that demand matches supply” (Vegas-based advisory firm B Global managing partner Brendan Bussmann), 5) “what a lot of people don’t realize is how many events we actually say no to just because of the lack of availability” (MGM arena manager Dan Quinn). That doesn’t quite add up to “there’s plenty of room for another arena” so much as “if an arena fails due to glut, it probably won’t be the new one that Oak View builds,” but at least Leiweke is talking about using all private money so far, so that’s a relief — at least until one of the other arenas demands public money to compete with the new one.
In that same Nevada Independent article, Gov. Steve Sisolak backed away from his unsourced-reported refusal to provide public money for an Oakland A’s stadium, saying “there are other things that can be done that can help on the funding” such as a tax-kickback district or infrastructure money. How much money? Maybe that would be a good followup questions, Nevada Independent? No? Okay, it’s your paper, I guess.
Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins says Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder doesn’t deserve public funding for a new stadium because he may have illegally cheated fans out of ticket deposits and other NFL owners out of revenue-sharing money. Which, those aren’t good things, certainly, but 1) doing not-good things is already Snyder’s brand, and 2) the contrapositive of this would seem to be that if he weren’t doing anything illegal, Snyder would deserve public funding, which is a dubious corollary to hitch your newspaper column to.
NBC Sports’ Mike Florio says Nashville’s $10-20 million a year in hotel taxes could pay for $700 million worth of Tennessee Titans stadium, which is definitely not how math works, but then understanding how things work has never been Florio’s strong suit.
The Kansas City Royals could use the Atlanta Braves stadium district as a model for a new downtown ballpark, according to … whoa, Kevin Collison, where’s he been since he stopped being the Kansas City Star’s go-to stadium-boosting columnist? Something called CitySceneKC, apparently, guess times are tough all over. Anyway, arguing that a pretend urban neighborhood in the middle of the suburbs could be a model for moving a team from the suburbs to downtown makes no sense, but you keep doing you, Kevin.
The Lerner family is considering selling the Washington Nationals, which normally might bring up fears of a move threat and new stadium demands, but the Nats’ stadium is only … huh, 14 years old already? That still seems a little soon, but as economist Rod Fort memorably said, there’s nothing wrong with demanding a new stadium every year if you can get away with it.
Pawtucket’s $400 million soccer stadium and development project is facing cost overruns thanks to inflation, and nobody knows yet who’ll pay for them, or if the project will be scaled back, or what. Rhode Island is already kicking back $46.2 million in taxes for the project, or, no, WPRI-TV says it’s actually $70 million? If a cost overrun falls in the forest and there’s no one around keeping track, does it count?
Speaking of cost overruns, Durham will now be paying $10.6 million toward upgrades for the Bulls‘ minor-league baseball stadium, double what it was originally expecting but still little enough compared to the numbers being thrown around in other cities as to sound absolutely insignificant. (Note to readers: $10.6 million is still $10.6 million. I checked.)
Here’s a fun one: The Wichita Wind Surge have started adding an 8% “ballpark development fee” to all sales at their new publicly funded ballpark, a surcharge that doesn’t appear anywhere on the pricing until you actually get your receipt. This sounds like a tax, but it’s not, as Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple said it’s the first he’s hearing of it, and suggested that the state attorney general should look into it as “a consumer protection issue.” Sports team owners really do do the craziest things!
Add Hawaii to the list of states momentarily flush with COVID relief cash that have decided now’s a great time to spend on stadiums, as a bill to dump $350 million on a replacement for Aloha Stadium is making its way through the state legislature.
The Seattle Mariners are making $55 million in improvements to their stadium, and actually paying for it themselves, which shouldn’t be cause for celebration or anything since that’s what normal businesses do normally, but we’ll take what we can get these days.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Fresh subsidy plans for Titans and WFT, Flames arena “paused” amid overruns, Boston Globe can’t stop clowning on Pawtucket for not wanting to spend $150m on stadium

April 16, 2021 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! I have a ton of week-ending stadium news to bring you today, or at least there’s a ton of news out there whether I’m bringing it to you or not. What is it about that that is confusing?

Onward:

Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, according to DCist, wants to use “some of” the county’s $1.6 billion in state funding this year to build — wait for it — “infrastructure improvements” for the Washington Football Team‘s stadium that would include “restaurants and places to shop.” It sounds like Alsobrooks is only talking about $17.6 million, maybe, but still this earns a Stupid Infrastructure category tag until proven otherwise.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants to use $2 million a year in state sales tax money (figure roughly $30 million in present value) for upgrades to the Titans‘ stadium, though actually it could end up being more like $10 million a year (figure roughly $150 million in present value) if more development is built around the stadium, plus he wants to give $13.5 million to Knoxville for its Tennessee Smokies stadium. Did Lee call this an “infrastructure” plan? Not that I can find in the Tennessean’s news reporting, but everybody drink anyway.
The Calgary Flames‘ $550 million arena plan, which already includes about $250 million in public subsidies, has run into $70 million in unexpected cost overruns and is now “paused” until the team and city can figure out who’ll cover them. Actually, the report is that the Flames owners are demanding $70 million, and previously the city and team agreed to split overruns 50-50, so maybe it’s really $140 million over budget? Either way, there’s already a petition to scrap the whole deal, though “trim a little from the team’s design and both sides kick in a little more money” seems a far more likely outcome, especially with Mayor Naheed Nenshi declaring it “far better to have these issues sorted out at this stage than to have unexpected cost overruns after construction has begun.” (Are known cost overruns actually better than surprise ones? Discuss.)
The Boston Globe, not satisfied with its glowing report last month on Worcester’s new stadium for the Red Sox Triple-A team (top farm club of the Boston Red Sox, owner of the Boston Globe), ran two separate opinion pieces this week slagging Pawtucket officials for not offering up $150 million in subsidies like Worcester did and thus losing their team: Dan McGowan, the Globe’s Rhode Island politics reporter, wrote, “Imagine what we could have had if our leaders showed even a tiny sense of vision” and “It too often takes only one politician to spoil a really good idea” while condemning “extremists on both sides of the [stadium] debate” who think a thing can be either good or bad (while also calling the Worcester stadium “great”). The very next day, Mike Stanton, a UConn journalism professor who writes occasionally for the Globe, wrote that former Rhode Island House speaker Nicholas Mattiello “rightly deserves blame for his role in killing the PawSox,” though he also blamed WooSox owner Larry Lucchino for “demanding extravagant taxpayer support for a new ballpark” and harming negotiations for, I guess, less extravagant taxpayer support? Anyway, the Globe wants you to know that Worcester has a shiny new baseball stadium and Pawtucket doesn’t, and let’s not speak of what else Worcester could have done with $150 million.
Six Republican Congressfolk — Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Jeff Duncan — have cosponsored legislation seeking to end MLB’s antitrust exemption in response to the league pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia’s new voting-restrictions law. This is part of a long line of proposals to yank the league’s 99-year-old exemption from antitrust laws, which never seem to go anywhere; the last time by my count was when more than 100 Congresspeoples wrote a letter in 2019 threatening to rescind “the long-term support that Congress has always afforded our national pastime” if MLB didn’t back down on its plan to eliminate more than 40 minor-league franchises, a letter that was signed by none of Lee, Cruz, Hawley, Rubio, or Blackburn, all of whom were in office at the time. (SPOILER: MLB didn’t back down, and Congress did.) Waving the antitrust-exemption stick has become the standard way for federal representatives to express their anger at baseball over one thing or another, in other words, but actually using it is apparently beyond the pale, either because of partisanship or lobbyists or both, pick your poison.
Another U.S. representative, Georgia’s Buddy Carter, has introduced legislation — or maybe just drafted legislation and sent it to Fox News, he doesn’t seem to have actually submitted it to Congress — to block MLB from relocating non-regular-season events except in cases of natural disaster or other emergencies, under penalty of allowing local businesses to sue for damages for lost revenue as a result of the move. Which, as Craig Calcaterra notes, would be hilarious because it would put MLB in the position of having to argue in court that its events have no economic impact, which is pretty much the truth: “The evidence — like, all the evidence from multiple studies — would actually be on MLB’s side in such a case! And it’d likely win! And all it would cost MLB is the ability to continue to lie about how big an impact All-Star Games and stadiums and things have on local economies when it suits its interest.”
The Cincinnati Reds are offering discounted tickets to fans who can show they’re fully vaccinated, and Buffalo officials say the Bills and Sabres will be required to limit attendance to the fully vaccinated in the fall, though New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he’ll be the judge of that. Whatever the eventual admittance policies end up being, having going to things like ballgames (or traveling internationally) be less of a hassle if you wave your vaccine card seems likely to be the best way to encourage more people to get their shots, which is the only way to get to herd immunity, which is the only way to prevent lots more deaths and more re-closings of things like ballgames, so this is good news regardless of whether sporting events turn out to be insanely risky or relatively safe.
Finally, I can’t let this week pass without noting that the Buffalo Bisons, who have been temporarily relocated to Trenton to make way for the Toronto Blue Jays, who will be spending the summer in Buffalo thanks to Covid travel restrictions, will be playing their home games as the Trenton Thunder while playing road games as the Bisons. No word yet on how this Frankenstein monster of a franchise will be listed in the (checks revamped minor-league nomenclature) Triple-A East standings, though I wholeheartedly hope the Thunder and Bisons get counted as two different teams, ideally with players forced to wear fake mustaches in New Jersey and go by assumed names. “Marc Rzepczynski? No, he plays for Buffalo, I am of course Shmarc Shmepczynski, would you like my autograph?”

Share this post:

Friday roundup: More Jaguars move threats, more bad convention center spending, time is an endless loop of human folly

December 4, 2020 Neil deMause

It’s Friday again! And December, how did that happen? “Passage of time,” what manner of witchcraft are you speaking of? Time is an eternal, unchanging present of toil and suffering under the grip of unending plagues! Thus has it ever been!

This notwithstanding, there was some news this week, though in keeping with the theme, it looks an awful lot like the news every week:

The Jacksonville city council ignored Mayor Lenny Curry’s pleas to stop thinking about Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s multi-hundred-million-dollar subsidy demand and just vote on it, and instead held another hearing last night on the team’s request for $200 million in public cash toward building a development in one of the stadium parking lots. Jaguars president Mark Lamping picked up the baton, though, and issued an impressive string of non-threat threats that the team would leave town without approval of the subsidy, saying, “We’re doing what we believe is necessary to ensure NFL football is here in Northeast Florida for decades to come,” that the Lot J development and renovations to the team’s stadium are needed to “ensure we stay in Jacksonville,” and “We are doing everything to stay here.” Council president Tommy Hazouri would like to wait to vote on the Lot J subsidy until January, but Jaguars lobbyist Paul Harden warned of “deal fatigue” and called for a vote on Tuesday, and apparently Florida law gives lobbyists equal power to council presidents — who knew? — so that might actually happen. At which point Khan can come back in a couple more years to demand additional stadium renovation money in exchange for a lease extension. It’s good to be king.
Good article in the New York Times this week about how multiple cities (Indianapolis, Savannah, Cleveland, Terre Haute) are pouring money into convention center expansions even as convention centers remain closed and in any case have been facing years of declining attendance nationwide. In fact, convention center operators say this is even more of a reason to throw good money after bad, because with fewer conventions, they have no choice but to spend more to compete for the few that are available, right? “This is a perverse world, where market realities do not affect city decision-making,” University of Texas at San Antonio economist and FoS convention center correspondent Heywood Sanders tells the Times.
When Hamilton County, Ohio passed a 0.5% sales tax hike in 1996 to fund new stadiums for the Cincinnati Bengals and Reds, lawmakers promised county residents that if there was any money left over after paying off the stadiums, it would go to lower their property taxes. That’s only happened in the amount promised back then twice in the last decade, and it’s not going to happen this year either, with the pandemic taking a bite out of sales tax revenues that will leave only enough surplus for 21% of what homeowners were expecting. This has squat-all to do with the stadium deal — it’s more about the county overpromising by making rose-colored projections of how much money the tax hike would bring in — but as I noted when this same thing happened two years ago, at least this time the county didn’t have to sell any hospitals.
The Anaheim Ducks, Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, and Pittsburgh Penguins are all reportedly considering playing their NHL seasons outdoors in order to be allowed to sell tickets, which is a great plan except that California is about to be under new stay-at-home restrictions that almost certainly won’t allow outdoor sports attendance either, and in Boston and Pittsburgh it snows a lot in the winter. Add in the costs of building and operating a temporary hockey rink at, say, Fenway Park, and this doesn’t seem all that likely to happen, but it’s certainly a better idea than hoping to allow attendance at indoor arenas before enough people are vaccinated, which isn’t likely to happen until the 2021-22 season.
Santa Clara’s stadium authority met this week to discuss an audit report of the San Francisco 49ers‘ stadium, and the 49ers responded by telling Santa Clara to fire its auditor. Then the audit showed a couple of million dollars of “discrepancies” in the 49ers’ books, at which point 49ers officials said they wouldn’t cooperate with audits anymore. Is this how rich people behave with the IRS, too? Yeah, pretty much.
I went on Orlando’s Beat of Sports radio show this week to discuss MLB’s self-declared mission to reorganize much of the minors into intern leagues so it can stop paying players while also leveraging cities for more stadium money, and you can listen to it here.
There are new renderings of the under-construction St. Louis S.C. stadium, and frankly they’re kind of boring, though they do have a Ferris wheel in them. They also supposedly show how fans will have a “perfect view” of the Gateway Arch, which I can’t actually spot in any of the images, but then I’m not sure why anyone would buy tickets to a soccer match to see a structure that they can see every day for free.
The Pawtucket Red Sox are no more, and if you want to remember the team’s history by buying some Keith Foulke bobbleheads, knock yourself out.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Another Canadian sports bailout request, and everyone pretends to know when things may or may not reopen

May 1, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy May, everybody! This crisis somehow both feels like it’s speeding into the future and making time crawl — as one friend remarked yesterday, it’s like we’ve all entered an alternate universe where nothing ever happens — and we have to hold on to the smallest glimmers of possible news and the tiniest drips of rewards to keep us going and remind us that today is not actually the same as yesterday. In particular, today is fee-free day on Bandcamp, when 100% of purchase prices goes to artists, and lots of musicians have released new albums and singles and video downloads for the occasion. Between that and historic baseball games on YouTube with no scores listed so you can be surprised at how they turn out, maybe we’ll get through the weekend, at least.

And speaking of week’s end, that’s where we are, and there’s plenty of dribs and drabs of news-like items from the week that just passed, so let’s catch up on what the sports world has been doing while not playing sports:

The Canadian Premier League (that’s soccer) has joined the CFL in asking for a federal government bailout, though in this case it’s only $15 million and only “short-term financing,” which presumably means they’ll pay the money back in the short term, unlike their football siblings who want to “repay” it through things like player personal appearances.
Construction on Seattle’s NHL arena is continuing as an essential activity, and the New York Islanders are hoping to resume construction on their new arena shortly, and F.C. Cincinnati‘s new stadium is also being allowed to continue construction work, and the Las Vegas Raiders‘ stadium is continuing construction even after seven workers tested positive for Covid, and everybody says their buildings will be open as scheduled (this fall for the Raiders, 2021 for everyone else), because of course they’re going to say that, at least until they don’t. The Cincinnati Reds and Bengals did graciously allow Hamilton County to defer $2.1 million of maintenance projects, though, including repainting seats and buying a new snow plow, which maybe should just remind you that for some reason Cincinnati taxpayers are on the hook for providing the Reds and Bengals with a snow plow.
The Little League World Series has been canceled, and MLB might hold spring training in teams’ home stadiums because something about “saving time and money,” and the NHL could push the start of next season back to December to give time to finish this season first, and the NBA could play all its games in Orlando maybe, and Spanish soccer is taking baby steps toward maybe restarting, and German soccer has had even its baby steps pushed back, and the Australian Football League is hoping to start planning a resumption of games even while players threaten to boycott if they can’t bring their families, and all of this (except the Little League World Series) is just pretend until we know more about when restrictions will be lifted, how much viral transmission is likely from various sports being played even without fans, and so on. And speaking of pretend, here’s New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying there could be baseball in New York City this summer, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci saying some sports might have to skip 2020 entirely. In an infinite universe of possible futures, anything is possible.
Here’s an ESPN article projecting that “the sudden disappearance of sports will erase at least $12 billion in revenue and hundreds of thousands of jobs,” based on an analysis done by Washington University sports business professor Patrick Rishe (links to actual study not included in ESPN’s article). If by “erase” they mean from sports leagues’ ledgers, sure, probably, though as usual, for the greater economy there’s some substitution effect to be accounted for: If I’m taking the money I would normally be spending at New York Mets games and instead buying videos of 15-year-old Los Straitjackets shows, that’s not a net zero. (If I have no money to spend because I can’t find work because the journalism industry is collapsing into itself, that’s a different story, obviously.) Also, the sudden disappearance of sports will likely erase billions of dollars of expenses as well, so really you need a more nuanced analysis, but hell with it, just stick a big round number in the headline, that’s all you need to get people to click on it.
I wasn’t going to bother linking to this GoLocalProv piece from last week that’s just me and economist Victor Matheson talking about how it’s dumb for Pawtucket to subsidize a pro soccer stadium during a pandemic and also dumb to subsidize one not during a pandemic, but those are both worthwhile things to be reminded of, I guess, so feel free to check it out.
Are you desperate enough for sports news to watch a guy in a helicopter flying over Dodger Stadium to see how renovations are proceeding? Click to find out!

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Cincy stadiums still gobbling tax money, XFL to use old Rangers stadium, Crew stadium to require $50m+ in public cash

December 7, 2018 Neil deMause

So very very much more stadium and arena news from this week:

There’s a little money left over in Hamilton County’s sales-tax pool after paying off bonds on the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals stadiums, so county property owners will get an $8 million property tax reduction this year. That’s a mere fraction of what county officials promised when they passed the sales-tax hike 20 years ago, but at least this year they won’t have to sell any hospitals.
The XFL says it will restart play in 2020 with teams in eight cities, but the only interesting one (unless you’re a devotee of spring football, in which case more power to you) is Dallas, where the football team will apparently play in the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which will remain standing right next to the Texas Rangers’ new stadium, as well as the Dallas Cowboys‘ stadium. (Apparently football fans don’t care about air conditioning.)
Franklin County, Ohio, says it plans to build a new Columbus Crew arena … somewhere, costing … something, with the county putting up $50 million in cash — part of which would go toward turning the old Crew stadium into a “public sports complex” — plus land and infrastructure worth … something. But Franklin County commissioner Marilyn Brown told the Columbus Dispatch that “it will have mixed-use included, so it’s an economic-development deal that will include apartments, retail along with it. So it will have enormous economic-development benefit,” so it’s all good, because who can put a price tag on enormous?
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says he’s “disappointed” that Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk is backing out of a downtown arena deal, and offered to provide league help in cutting a new deal. Hands up anyone who thinks that means “Leaning on Melnyk to pay for the arena he said he would” and not “Leaning on Ottawa to bail Melnyk out with public dollars”?
Plans for a Portland baseball stadium surrounded by affordable housing may have hit a snag, as two city commissioners say the land targeted for the stadium isn’t zoned for affordable housing. Or for a stadium, unless it can prove it has enough transportation first. These are the kinds of details you’d normally want to resolve before announcing a stadium plan, but then, so would making sure you’re using Euclidean geometry.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Rays set stadium deadlinish thing, D.C. United can’t find the sun in the sky, Inglewood mayor flees lawsuit filing on Clippers arena

June 22, 2018June 23, 2018 Neil deMause

Farewell, Koko and Argentina:

A plot of private land that Portland baseball backers were eyeing for a stadium has been sold to another developer, but they could still sell or lease it for baseball. Portland is definitely at the forefront of not just handing land to the local sports team for whatever price it wants, though of course it doesn’t hurt that there isn’t an actual local sports team in question right now, just the idle thought of one someday.
Tampa Bay Rays chief development officer Melanie Lenz says the team will decide in six to nine months whether an Ybor City stadium will work; I’d think they’d want to know who’s going to pay for it first, but maybe that’s what they need the six to nine months for: bribery. (I typed “lobbying,” right? Pretty sure I did, note to self to go back and check.)
D.C. United is about to open its new stadium with the help of $183 million in public money, and has belatedly noticed that its TV camera angles will be all screwed up because the sun sets in the west. Who could have known something like that?
A group of Inglewood residents is suing to block the proposed Los Angeles Clippers arena project, which is not surprising; more surprising is that they attempted to serve Mayor James Butts with lawsuit papers during Tuesday’s city council meeting, causing the council to abruptly call a halt to the meeting and run away.
The Cincinnati Reds are asking for $88,000 in state tax breaks on bobbleheads, on the grounds that they’re included in the price of ticket packages and not being sold separately, even though the ticket package costs more specifically because it includes a bobblehead. I shoulda been a tax lawyer.
The Philadelphia Phillies are asking for $40 million in hotel tax money from Pinellas County for a new renovations to their spring-training stadium in Clearwater, but the county has run out of hotel tax money because it already spent it on other projects, including the Rays’ Tropicana Field and a spring-training facility for the Toronto Blue Jays, along with a bunch of museums and the like. Opportunity cost!
A Spectrum News Charlotte headline asks the question: “Does Charlotte need a domed stadium? City leaders are trying to figure it out.” I got an answer for you, Spectrum News Charlotte! (Also, Spectrum News Charlotte, the Atlanta Falcons‘ stadium didn’t really involve a “public investment” of only $200 million. Your friends across town the state at Fox 8 got it right, you might wanna talk to them.)

Share this post:

Cincy may lack cash for MLS stadium because it has too many other sports venues to subsidize

September 27, 2017 Neil deMause

About 100 F.C. Cincinnati fans attended a Hamilton County Commission meeting last night to urge the commission to spend $100 million on a new soccer stadium for the USL team, which is hoping to land an MLS expansion franchise. County Commission President Todd Portune, however, told them that “we have more projects than we have money,” with the county facing $1.5 billion in pending capital projects. Like, the county jail is overcrowded and needs expansion, and a new waterfront development project is still mostly undeveloped, and, um:

The city’s two current major league sports teams — the Reds and the Bengals — will eventually come knocking on the county’s door for a new deal. The Bengals stadium lease with the county expires in 2026 with the Reds’ lease expiring a few years after. Combined, the two stadiums could need more than $200 million in upgrades within the next decade.

“While no one is talking about demoing these stadiums, we know there will be substantial maintenance (needs),” [Hamilton County Administrator Jeff] Alutto said.

Those leases running out are worth planning ahead for, I suppose, but it’s still a little worrisome that Hamilton County is already budgeting for stadium renovation “needs” that the teams haven’t even asked for yet. Apparently either somebody hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s okay to demand that taxpayers not take a bath on stadium projects, or else Hamilton County leaders think that Cincinnati has less leverage to keep its teams without bribing them to stay, which, okay, maybe.

That said, the rest of the county’s wish list includes a $230 million convention center expansion and a $342 million rebuild of the city’s arena, neither of which exactly seems like a “need” per se. If the only choice for Hamilton County is which dumb project for private profit to sink public money into, I can sort of see why soccer fans would feel justified in saying, “Us first!” Too bad overcrowded prisoners don’t have fan clubs.

Share this post:

Hamilton County spending $1.3m to buy Reds new seats, because they broke all the old ones

December 17, 2014 Neil deMause

Hamilton County’s sweetheart deals with its sports teams doesn’t stop at having to build a new scoreboard for the Cincinnati Bengals: The county also has to replace all the seats at the Reds‘ stadium, just 11 years after it opened, because the old ones all broke and they were out of warranty. (Yes, apparently Hamilton County couldn’t even buy seats that were guaranteed to last a decade. Yes, apparently Hamilton County around the turn of the millennium had the worst contract negotiators ever.)

This will all cost county taxpayers $1.3 million, but on the bright side I guess at least it’ll create some decent local jobs for seat installers—

County officials say they saved more than $3 million by hiring a local company to design new seats and hiring former jail inmates – participants in a county work re-entry program – to install them.

Pay for this seat installation work? $10 an hour. Okay, so Hamilton County knows how to play hardball with some people — just not so much sports team owners.

Share this post:

Cincinnati gets $5m bill for stadium upgrades to go with 2015 All-Star Game

August 5, 2013August 5, 2013 Neil deMause

One of the perks of building a new MLB stadium is that your city can get in line to host an All-Star Game: Of the last 17 All-Star Games, all but two have been held in recently built stadiums (three if you count Miami’s Pro Player Stadium, which opened in 1987 and had to wait until 2004 for its day in the spotlight) [correction: ignore the parenthetical, I apparently can’t read]. And with it comes … a request for an extra $5 million in public money?

“We want to make the ballpark shine,” said Hamilton County’s stadium Director Joe Feldkamp. Many of the fixes on the list, he said, were being planned anyway and are just being sped up. Reds Chief Operating Officer Phil Castellini said the improvements are needed to “allow our community to be viewed in the best possible light when we have the honor of hosting the All-Star Game in 2015,” he wrote in an email to the Enquirer.

Actually, $5 million isn’t all that much to spend on stadium upgrades, especially since Hamilton County is already on the hook for all capital maintenance costs for the Reds. (And the Bengals, who are demanding $21.8 million of their own improvements to Paul Brown Stadium.) But it is a reminder of why signing a lease that commits taxpayers to pay for future improvements is a terrible, terrible idea. And with Hamilton County already having sold off a public hospital in 2011 and raised property taxes in 2012 to pay for past stadium debts, it’s going to be interesting to see what they turn to next. No, probably not that.

Share this post:

Cincy still seeking stadium funds, Sacramento’s Olympic dreams, and other stadium news

March 12, 2012 Neil deMause

There was literally a ton of stadium and arena news over the weekend, so it’s time to deal with most of them via bullet points:

Remember how Hamilton County filled next year’s gap in funding for the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals stadiums by selling off a public hospital? Apparently they haven’t yet, and the deadline for payment is just three weeks away. Also, part of the plan involved cutting costs and holding more events at the stadiums, but that’s not “practical or dependable,” according to the county’s tax expert. If they manage to get this straightened out, they can do it all over again with next year’s funding gap!
Sacramento Bee columnist Ailene Voisin notes that the lieutenant governor of Nevada tells her (via cellphone) that if the Kings‘ new arena gets built, it could host hockey and curling during the 2022 Winter Olympics if Reno-Tahoe is chosen to host. Which tells us three important things: Reno and Tahoe think they can host the Winter Olympics; Nevada has a lieutenant governor; and it lets him have his own cellphone.
There’s a new plan for that D.C. United stadium at Buzzard Point … okay, it’s actually a plan from 2010. And the main upshot is that five different property owners have pieces of the site, making a deal tough to accomplish. Also that the plan marks one part of the site as “Future Velodrome.” Presumably this means a velodrome to be built later, but I prefer to think that it means a place for racing these.
The Miami Marlins‘ fans may be cranky about parking, but it hasn’t stopped them from snapping up tickets: ever-quotable team president David Samson claims that the team has gone from “No. 125 — counting minor league teams” in season-ticket sales to the top third in MLB, with close to 15,000 season seats sold. Of course, even these guys had strong ticket sales their first year in a new place; the trick will be to see if the Marlins can keep drawing fans past the honeymoon phase, and into Jose Reyes’ first extended trip to the DL.
Ray Ratto has summed up the Giants–A’s territorial rights dustup in one act. Key quote: “If I could convince Mom and Dad to stop feeding you so you would die and I could bury you in the backyard, I would.”

Share this post: