Category: Brooklyn Nets

Friday roundup: It was the best of summers for team owners demanding stadiums, it was the worst of summers for the rest of us

access_time personNeil deMause

The calendar on my screen says it’s September, which means we made it through another summer. (Not technically until the equinox on September 23, I guess, but if Labor Day weekend doesn’t mark the end of summer, I don’t want to be a part of your arbitrary seasonal delineation scheme.) And quite a summer it was, kicking off with Oakland A’s owner John Fisher fighting for (and getting) $600 million in public money for a new stadium in Las Vegas, then proceeding with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman ramping up talk about a new $2 billion stadium project either in downtown K.C. or in the next county over, the mayor of Oklahoma City saying the Thunder need a new arena because their 22-year-old one “will keep getting older,” the San Antonio Spurs owners exploring a new arena to replace the one that they just had renovated for them a few years back, many anonymous people claiming that the Milwaukee Brewers will move somewhere without $400 million in publicly funded upgrades to their 22-year-old stadium, and of course the great New York City cricket stadium fiasco, which just gets more fiascoey by the day.  Plus the Chicago Bears are still shopping themselves around to every possible Chicago suburb, the Arizona Coyotes owners are doing the same with every town in the Phoenix area, and the mayor of San Francisco wants to build a soccer stadium without even knowing for what soccer team for some reason.

There are a bunch of possible reasons why we’re seeing this flurry of new sports subsidy demands: lots of stadiums built in the ’90s getting to a point where team owners aren’t embarrassed to ask for new ones, flush state budgets and the promise of federal infrastructure spending getting owners salivating, a rush particularly in MLB to secure new stadium deals before expansion maybe takes some cities off the potential move threat table. Or, you know, this is just the sort of hellscape we’re doomed to live in after our government decided to give all the money to the rich people and then let them spend it on buying elections. Either way, this site’s work clearly isn’t going to be done for a while yet, so I better get started on some fresh tchotchkes to keep you all interested in helping to support it.

And if you prefer news items to tchotchkes, we got you covered there too:

  • Lease extension talks between the state of Maryland and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos might still be going nowhere fast, but Gov. Wes Moore (pictured here wearing an Orioles uniform and here doing it again, because that’s how he rolls) says he’s confident of “being able to not just get the lease done, but also making sure that getting the lease done includes all the other lenses that I think are going to be important in this long-term deal.” “Lenses” here apparently means a plan to redevelop the area around Camden Yards, which Moore painted as a win-win for the city and state, and surely not just a giveaway of $300 million in state money plus public land to Angelos so that he can profit from the redevelopment, heaven forfend.
  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is still trying to get the city of Anaheim to pay him $5 million for costs associated with “processing the illegal cash sale of Angel Stadium,” as the Voice of OC puts it. That’s pretty ballsy, but keep in mind this is a guy who’s also trying to get out of paying MLB luxury tax by cutting all the players he just traded for in July and hoping someone else signs them, not to mention tried to push through an illegal stadium land purchase to begin with, so ballsy is pretty much par for his course.
  • Two New York City council committees have voted to give Madison Square Garden just a five-year extension on its operating permit, half the length of its previous permit and infinitely smaller than the perpetual permit that the owner of the Knicks and Rangers was seeking. While this could raise hopes of seeing the city’s Padlock Unit chain up the arena gates, more likely it’s just the council kicking the can down the road again; especially since, as the New York Times notes in classic Timesian we’re-not-saying-we’re-just-saying style, “the Dolan family has shown itself adept at bending the will of the government to advance its own interests, particularly when the various branches of government are not on the same page.”
  • The kerfuffle over the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ terrible “community info sessions” on their new Chinatown arena plans continues, with the first public Zoom meeting held in Mandarin criticized as “garbled” and lacking proper translation; no word yet on how this Tuesday’s meeting in Cantonese went.
  • The Charlotte Observer sent questionnaires to city council candidates asking how much the city should be contributing to upgrades on the Carolina Panthers‘ stadium, and if “any answer would be premature” is the kind of response you were hoping for, then you will be very pleased by the efficacy of candidate questionnaires. (To be fair, it is kind of dumb to ask about how much should be spent without taking into consideration things like whether the team owners would pay additional rent, say; to also be fair to the Observer, it really does sound like the candidates mostly used this argument as an excuse to duck the question entirely.)
  • Construction has finally begun on Inter Miami‘s cursed new permanent stadium! Or at least “earthwork and site work” has begun, according to a team press release, jeez, Miami Herald, you couldn’t even be bothered to drive over and confirm it? The stadium is now scheduled to open sometime in 2025, but we’ve been hearing similar predictions for, good lord, has it been five years already? At this rate Lionel Messi’s kids are more likely to play at a new Inter Miami stadium than he is.
  • If you thought what Congress needed was a Historic Stadium Caucus to work on ways to upgrade older college football stadiums, including possibly with federal infrastructure money, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves has some great news for you.
  • The promised housing construction that was supposed to be built as part of the Brooklyn Nets arena is set to miss a May 2025 deadline, and New York state is considering greasing the skids by restoring a tax break that expired last year, because of course it is.
  • There might be worse ways to frame a story about how the owners of the San Antonio Missions are trying to get city money for a new minor-league baseball stadium and city officials haven’t been returning their phone calls until the next day than “Missions can’t get to first base on downtown baseball stadium,” but between the what’s the holdup with approving subsidies? and the terrible baseball play on words, it’s hard to imagine one.
  • The company that owns the Boston Red Sox is buying the company that owns the TV rights to Pittsburgh Pirates games, which Marc Normandin points out means that going forward it’ll be easier for the Red Sox to outspend the Pirates if the Pirates make more TV money. Normandin calls this “just a weird sentence to type”; me, I’m reminded of syndicate ball, which was a fun time.
  • What do “Spring training season brought $418M to state’s economy in 2023” and “Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour has a huge economic impact” have in common? If you guessed “They’re both as big a load of BS as that time people insisted LeBron James leaving the Cavs destroyed Cleveland’s economy,” you’re a winner!
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NYC is handing out $377m a year in tax breaks to its pro sports teams

access_time personNeil deMause

The New York City Independent Budget Office, an agency created in 1989 as an independent check on city governance that has provided a ton of good economic analysis over the years throwing cold numerical water on various elected officials’ pet projects, has a report out on city subsidies for Madison Square Garden and the city’s three most recently built sports venues, for the Yankees, Mets, and Brooklyn Nets. And while it includes no overall subsidy numbers — “because the subsidy structures for each are different, cross-comparisons are difficult to make,” writes the IBO — there is this breakdown of property tax breaks alone:

As of February 2023, the DOF assessed fair market values for Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and Barclays Center are $2.6 billion, $3.2 billion, and $2.6 billion respectively, and the property tax amounts would be $115 million, $121 million, and $99 million, respectively.

That’s foregone property tax amounts per year, mind you. Add in the complete tax break for Madison Square Garden, and the city is currently granting Hal Steinbrenner, Steve Cohen, Joe Tsai, and James Dolan $377 million a year in tax breaks. (The Yanks, Mets, and Nets technically pay a smaller amount of “payments in lieu of taxes,” but as the IBO notes, these are redirected to pay off the teams’ own construction costs, so the city treasury is still getting bupkis.) Even without taking into account that property values are certain to rise, that would amount to more than $5 billion in present value over the next 30 years, assuming all these sports facilities last 30 years, or at least that the tax exemptions do.

This is on top of more than $1.1 billion in other subsidies for the Yanks and Mets stadiums alone. (The Nets arena financing is so complex, being all intertwined with housing development and its attendant subsidies, that it’s nearly impossible to put a number on its public costs.) That brings the total to more than $6 billion, which could build 15,000 units of affordable housing, or an entire new train line linking Brooklyn and Queens, or lots of other things costing $5 billion. (A free 99-cent pizza slice for every city resident every day for a year and a half?) It’s a bunch of money, but “a bunch of money” doesn’t make headlines, numbers like “$377 million a year” and “more than $6 billion” do, so feel free to bandy those about on the socials as you see fit.

[NOTE: This post initially had lower numbers because I typoed “$277 million” for “$377 million.” My fingers regret the error.]

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Friday roundup: Thunder owner wants 20-year-old arena replaced, Nevadans hate idea of A’s stadium subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry for the relative paucity of posts this week — I’ve been a little under the weather (not Covid, or so the test strips say), and the stadium news cycle was taking a bit of a summer break, anyway. But things have started picking up again toward the end of the week, and nothing will stop me from my appointed Friday rounds, so away we go:

  • We start off with the latest news, which just broke late yesterday: Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett, who is in the middle of spending $115 million in taxpayer money on upgrading his 20-year-old arena with new restaurants and video boards and the like, has put the project on hold because he might just want a whole new arena instead. “Obviously we want a long-term relationship with professional sports in this city,” said Mayor David Holt in yesterday’s State of the City address. “And to do that, you have to have facilities that are current and competitive.” Being built in 2002 doesn’t count as “current” anymore, apparently, even with three rounds of renovations that were costing $214 million total, because the arena doesn’t have enough “room for all the other elements of user experience” that aren’t watching basketball, though isn’t that what adding new adjoining buildings with new restaurants was supposed to be about? Anyway, even with the Thunder signing a new lease extension until 2026, Holt says the city needs to get cracking on a new arena, because “we have non-NBA cities checking our pulse every morning” and “if we want to be a top 20 city, we have to act like it” — he didn’t say whether Bennett would move the Thunder back to Seattle or what if he didn’t get what he wanted, but sometimes the most effective threats are the ones that leave the details to listeners’ imagination.
  • Clark County residents oppose “allocating taxpayer money in the budget for new sports stadiums similar to what was done to fund the Allegiant Stadium for the Las Vegas Raiders” by a 62-17% margin, yup, they’ll do that. Maybe the Oakland A’s aren’t getting a new stadium in Las Vegas so fast after all if their Oakland plans fall through — sure, elected officials can and do ignore the public will all the time, but given that public statements from Nevada officials about luring the A’s with a stadium have been lukewarm at best, this really does start to smell like savvy negotiators seeking leverage.
  • Knoxville’s $74.3 million Tennessee Smokies stadium subsidy may be getting held up as a model compared to the $79.4 million the Chattanooga Lookouts owners are demanding, but it turns out that $74.3 million figure may not be the final one: Rising interest rates and supply chain issues have the price tag soaring to “not yet been determined,” which means that Smokies owner Randy Boyd’s promise not to ask for any additional public funds may go by the wayside. Neither Boyd nor the government entities involved in the stadium have actually signed any of the stadium agreements yet; both sides say they plan to come up with a plan to cover cost overruns by a July 26 meeting of Knoxville’s sports authority, but would it be crazy to suggest that “Getting too rich for our blood, let’s call the whole thing off?” be at least considered as an option?
  • Speaking of the Lookouts, a Hamilton County commissioner wants to adjust the county’s spending plan to have the team owner front the money and the county repay him with tax money instead of having the county cover costs directly, because at least that would protect the public in case tax increment financing revenues fell short. This is not a terrible idea, though “don’t use tax increment financing at all, it’s almost always a terrible idea” might be an even better idea.
  • New Orleans is set to get a new USL franchise, because pretty much every city is, which will play in oh, someplace. No talk yet of how much a theoretical stadium would cost or who would pay for it, plenty of time for that once soccer fever has taken hold beyond the pages of Nola.com.
  • Some Brooklyn elected officials want New York City to impose a $10 million fine on the developers of the Pacific Park project (which used to be called Atlantic Yards, and which originally included the Nets arena though later those two elements were split between two different developers, really you don’t want to know all the details) because they failed to build a contractually promised “urban room” community space — one of the politicians called this a “field of schemes,” which, you know, it’s always nice to be part of the conversation, even if unintentionally.
  • The Portland Trail Blazers owners may or may not be trying to get a new arena to replace its (gasp!) 27-year-old one, but in the meantime they’re getting about a $1.5 million a year property tax discount thanks to a generous reassessment of the value of the old arena after they went to court to demand one, it really does pay to be able to afford the best lawyers.
  • Oh, did I forget to mention that the Chicago Bears owners’ response to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposal last week to put a dome on Soldier Field was “Nuh-uh, we only have eyes for Arlington Heights, at least right now?” Well, it was, but that happened all the way back last Friday after last week’s roundup was published — I may just need to place a moratorium on things happening after 9 a.m. on Fridays, don’t make me do it.
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Friday roundup: When stadium CBAs go sour, Zimbalist explains why he takes team money, and Rob Manfred doesn’t understand how road games work

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! Before we get to the new stadium news, here’s some hot-off-the-presses old stadium news from me for City Limits magazine, for which I took a hard look at the enforcement problems around the community benefits agreements surrounding the Brooklyn Nets and New York Yankees development deals. The nut graf, as we say in the biz:

One big problem with CBAs: They’re not laws, but rather private contracts between a developer and community groups—in the case of the arena project, groups that were not only hand-picked by the developer but in some cases funded by him. And if those groups aren’t around to hold a developer accountable—or the developer isn’t around and there’s no successor clause—there’s little anyone else can do to enforce an agreement.

That was certainly the problem with the Nets deal, where most of the signatories to the CBA are now long-defunct. And for the Yankees deal, it was even worse: The only people to sign the agreement were elected officials who are now long out of office, and promised regular reports on the community fund’s spending have been withheld from the public on the grounds that no one is authorized to see them — though the fund’s initial administrator says there’s a simpler reason for why no reports have been issued: “During my time, no reports were written.”

Well, lesson learned! Or not, given that the rest of the nation seems intent on repeating the same mistakes over and over and over and…

  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said for the umpteenth time this weekend regarding the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays stadium demands that “we need a solution in both those markets and the time has come for that solution,” which is both some of his typical awkward-as-possible wording and also an excellent example of how sports team owners love to define their not-as-high-as-they’d-like profits as a problem in need of a solution, preferably with someone else’s money. Manfred added re the Rays: “We are getting to the point where wherever it is in the region that has an interest in having 162 baseball games, they need to get to it, get with the club.” Um, the region has 162 baseball games now (really 81, but let’s not bother Manfred with concepts like “road games”), and the Rays don’t exactly have an offer on the table from another city with a stadium, or even the promise of a stadium, so it’s not like if their lease expired today they would be gone. But when you’ve got one move and it’s vague threats, you’ve got to make the most of it, I suppose.
  • Sports economist Andy Zimbalist has fired back at critics of his criticism of sports economist J.C. Bradbury’s study of the Atlanta Braves stadium deal in an interview with Sportico (which didn’t bother to interview Bradbury that I can tell [CORRECTION: it did, it just didn’t quote him much]), saying among other things that getting paid by a team owner to conduct a study of the team’s nine-figure stadium subsidy isn’t a conflict of interest because “If I didn’t get paid there is an element in it that says I am not a professional, I am doing it for some other reasons. The payment thing is, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’” I am pretty sure that phrase does not mean what you think it means, Andy.
  • Speaking of paid consultants, Nashville Mayor John Cooper and the metro area council are considering hiring one to analyze whether it would really cost taxpayers $1.8 billion to maintain and upgrade the Tennessee Titans‘ stadium for the six-year remainder of the team’s lease, a key cog in the team’s argument that the public should just build a new stadium instead. This is an excellent idea, but may I just suggest that one particular person not be hired for the job?
  • And speaking of Bradbury, he has an excellent rundown in Global Sport Matters (for which I also write) of what every city should know before publicly funding a stadium or arena deal, which pretty much comes down to “don’t.”
  • NYC F.C. fan site The Outfield, which has done an excellent job following the bouncing ball of the MLS team’s never-ending search for a site on which to build a stadium of its own, reports that the club’s owners are reopening talks on building at a site on railyards along the Harlem River, completing a memorandum of understanding with the state Department of Transportation to lease the site. This is still likely just kicking-the-tires stage — The Outfield also notes that “NYCFC still seems to be engaged to a degree in feeling out development in Willets Point,” across the street from the New York Mets‘ stadium — but as a reminder, here are some pictures of what the Harlem River Yards stadium was supposed to look like in 2018, and here’s a projection from the time of how the deal would involve possibly $400 million in state land subsidies, and here’s the team itself backing away from the plan at the time as fast as possible.
  • If Anaheim tries to sell Angel Stadium land to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno again after the stench of the bribe-solicitation scandal that forced the resignation of the old mayor wears off, a new bill in the California state legislature is seeking to require that the city open it up to competitive bidding first. This is another excellent idea, if only to find out what the land is actually worth, which has been a bit of a point of contention.
  • “Arizona Coyotes plan to privately finance new arena, entertainment district, team president/CEO says” reads the ESPN headline, but the story itself reports that Coyotes CEO Xavier Gutierrez actually said, “It’s going to be privately financed. … And then we have made a request to have the city issue bonds whose sole collateral would only be the land and the real estate, so the taxpayers would never be at risk.” Which is not how “privately financed” or “not at risk” actually work — regardless of the collateral, Tempe taxpayers would be out at least $200 million — but “[person with a fancy title] says” allows for a lot of non-reporting by news outlets like ESPN, the better to move on to writing the next six posts of the day. (An even better time saver: Just make quotes up! Those articles about McDonald’s employees leaping out drive-through windows to save people choking on chicken nuggets aren’t going to write themselves!)
  • And speaking of journalism with room for improvement, here’s GOPHNX reporter Craig Morgan’s opening sentences in his article this week on the arena plans: “Before the special Tempe City Council meeting on June 2, there was genuine concern about the fate of the Coyotes’ proposed arena and entertainment district along the south bank of the Salt River. Some insiders worried that the opposition was too strong, that the issues were too numerous and that the council was lacking the votes necessary to push the project forward.” Or, you know, some people, that aforementioned opposition, did not “worry” those things but presumably “hoped” them. Can someone please tell Craig that there’s no cheering in the press box?
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NYC will hand out $344m in tax breaks to the Nets, Knicks, Rangers, Mets, and Yanks in 2022 alone

access_time personNeil deMause

The hits keep on coming from the new NYC news site Hell Gate, which I wrote for last week about how Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $1 billion Buffalo Bills subsidy was eased by the fact that New York state hates letting voters have input into actual budget decisions. On Monday, it was Doug Turetsky, former chief of staff of the city Independent Budget Office and a journalist before that, reporting on how much money New York City’s sports teams saved last year via not having to pay property taxes on their teams’ homes. How much, you ask? How much:

Take Barclays Center. The arena hasn’t paid property taxes since it opened in 2012. It’s a tax expenditure that will cost the city $85 million this year alone, according to the City’s Department of Finance Annual Tax Expenditure Report…

Madison Square Garden, the home of the Knicks and the Rangers, which are each estimated to be the most valuable teams in their respective leagues, benefits from politicians’ largesse too. MSG’s tax break is worth about $42 million this year, according to the Finance Department report…

The city will forgo about $111 million for Yankee Stadium this year and $106 million for the Mets’ Citi Field, according to the tax expenditure report.

That’s a total of $344 million that the Nets, Knicks, Rangers, Mets, and Yankees would normally be paying to the city in 2022, but aren’t because they don’t wanna. For the Knicks and Rangers, it’s because Mayor Ed Koch accidentally (he swore) gave them a special tax break in 1982 with no end date; for the Nets, Mets, and Yankees, it’s because they arranged to build on city- or state-owned land, then arranged to direct all payments in lieu of property taxes back into their own pockets to pay off their own construction costs, a gambit that helped them qualify for tax-exempt bonds that privately funded stadiums normally aren’t eligible for. (The IRS later closed that loophole, but not before the three NYC teams walked through it.)

None of this is unusual — as Turetsky points out, each and every year New York City forgoes about $7 billion in tax revenue via various and sundry tax breaks. Three years ago, I reported for Gothamist on a pair of 20-year-old tax breaks that the IBO had found to be utterly useless at creating jobs or reducing office vacancies, costing the city $400 million over that time. The two programs, the Commercial Revitalization Program and the Commercial Expansion Program, had been launched in 1995 and 2000 with exactly the sort of public oversight you would imagine:

“I have asked, ‘Show me one study, one survey that will prove or at least indicate that if we put this amount of money into commercial modernization and residential conversion that we’re actually going to create the jobs that are being claimed, that we’re going to get a good return for the public investment,'” [state senator Franz] Leichter said during the brief senate debate over the bill. “You know what? There isn’t one survey. They haven’t made one market study.”

True, no studies had been done, admitted bill sponsor Martin Connor. But, he asserted, none were needed.

“Senator Leichter says, ‘Where is the study?’ Well, we’ve all seen studies and reports and false promises in paper. The people in this business, in this real estate market, got together with their consultants and devised this because they believe it works, and they are the people that have to go out and sell. They’re the people who have to go out and sign those leases, sign up those tenants with these employees, and they believe it will work, and I say give them a chance.”

In 2019, I wrote that thanks to a newly attentive city council and that IBO report, “all signs are that [the CRP and CEP] will soon be gone.” Hey, how’s that going, anyway? Doug?

Together, [the Commercial Revitalization and Commercial Expansion Programs will] cost about $22 million in lost revenue this year…

So where’s Mayor [Eric] Adams on reviewing the dozens of tax expenditures made by the city? The executive budget he released last month reiterates the need for “staying focused on the efficient use of government resources.”…

The mayor’s press office did not respond to a request for comments on the administration’s plans for evaluating the array of city tax breaks.

Always remember: Only the little people pay taxes.

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Cuomo allows sports venues to reopen on February 23, because money

access_time personNeil deMause

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared yesterday that sports and music venues that hold more than 10,000 people — both outdoor stadiums and indoor arenas — will be allowed to reopen to fans at 10% capacity starting February 23. Each building will first have to have its ventilation systems approved by the state department of health, but once that’s complete, the New York Knicks, Brooklyn Nets, New York Rangers, Buffalo Sabres, New York Mets, and New York Yankees could all soon be playing before paying crowds.

The announcement came as a bit of a surprise in a state that, even with falling coronavirus rates, still has the fifth-highest positive test rate in the country, as new more transmissible variants threaten to create a renewed surge in coming weeks. But Cuomo said that with reduced capacities, improved ventilation, requiring mask wearing, and requiring a negative test result in the previous 72 hours, he could “get this economy open intelligently and in a balanced way.”

All that is well enough — if you’re going to start putting fans back in seats, it’s clear, keeping them masked and distanced is key. But the negative test certification — which Cuomo called “the key” to reopening — is what begins to paint this as hygiene theater: As we learned last year during the Miami Marlins fiasco, 40% of people will still test negative four days after being exposed to the virus, and 20% will test negative even three days after symptoms have started. Plus there’s the problem of people who get tested on a Monday and then contract the virus by Thursday. As one infectious disease expert put it to the New York Times:

“A test 72 hours prior to a game will help identify some cases, but that’s also three days in which an individual can become infectious,” [Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist from George Mason University,] wrote in an email.

Coming just one week after Cuomo announced that restaurants would be allowed to open to indoor dining, something that can’t be done while masked until chefs develop food that can be absorbed through diners’ skin, the sports reopening is a clear signal that New York state is prioritizing “getting the economy open” over actual safety concerns. As the Times editorial board wrote just hours before Cuomo’s sports announcement:

Too many leaders — not just Mr. Cuomo — are ignoring that call. Massachusetts and New Jersey are allowing businesses, including restaurants, to expand capacity for indoor services, and Iowa just lifted its mask mandate. The impulse behind these moves is understandable. Restaurants and the people who earn their living through them are in dire straits because they have not received sufficient government assistance. State and local economies are hanging by a thread, and everyone is exhausted by restrictions and desperate to return to some semblance of normal life.

But the number of people who get sick or die from Covid-19 in the coming year will depend on the outcome of a desperate race that’s underway, between human vaccination and viral mutation. … By relaxing restrictions now, state and local leaders are undermining their own vaccination efforts. To get a sense of what this looks like to scientists and public health experts, imagine a military general leading the fight against a foreign enemy — and then selling that enemy deadly weapons on the side.

Meanwhile, food critic Ryan Sutton of Eater came out against the restaurant reopening, noting that choosing Valentine’s Day weekend to resume indoor dining “feels chosen less for any health milestones and more for the fact that it is historically one of the biggest nights for restaurants.” While restaurant workers will soon be allowed to sign up for vaccinations, the slow pace of vaccine production means they could be waiting for appointments well into the spring or summer. (Cuomo didn’t say whether stadium and arena workers will be added to the vaccine priority list.)

Speaking as a New Yorker and a Mets fan eager to see how the team will screw up its winter of big-name acquisitions, I’m dying to get to a ballgame as much as anyone. But “dying” only metaphorically: If allowing a couple thousand lucky fans to witness the Knicks and Nets firsthand leads to an uptick in cases that allows new viral variants to take off, sickening and killing people across the city who have no interest in basketball, Cuomo’s sports reopening move could go down as one of the most poorly timed decisions in governmental history. And even if we get lucky and limited-capacity indoor sports turn out not to become superspreader events, seeking a “balanced” reopening — presumably between the full reopening many businesses would want and the continued shutdown of indoor activities that scientists recommend, meaning between profits and deaths — is, let’s just say, a telling reminder of how most elected officials see where their bread is buttered.

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NYC Mayor de Blasio: Sure, wealthy sports owners should pay their taxes, I guess

access_time personNeil deMause

As I mentioned in my Gothamist article last week, a group of New York city councilmembers have called on Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo to start making the city’s sports teams pay property taxes on their stadiums and arenas, which none of them currently do. (The Yankees and Mets and Brooklyn Nets all pay “payments in lieu of taxes” that are really their own construction debt payments, funneled through the city as a tax dodge; the Knicks and Rangers don’t pay taxes on Madison Square Garden because somebody accidentally gave them an eternal tax break in 1982 and no one can be bothered to repeal it.) And the campaign got a boost yesterday when de Blasio sorta kinda endorsed its call for team owners to pay their fair tax share:

De Blasio, a Democrat, was asked at his daily press briefing to respond to a letter last month from nine lawmakers on the New York City Council who called for the Garden, Yankee Stadium, the Barclays Center and Citi Field to pay property taxes. The mayor said he hasn’t seen the letter and was unfamiliar with the legal specifics, but supported the concept of requiring New York’s local teams to increase their contributions.

“Let’s be clear – sports franchises have gained incredible value over the years,” de Blasio said. “They clearly have the resources. I think the history in this city and pretty much all over the country was stadium deals were not good deals for the public, by and large. Some of the more recent ones have been better, but mostly they haven’t been that good. Everything should be reevaluated especially at a point when the city is going to need resources for our recovery.”

That phrasing puts the “blah” in de Blasio, but “everything should be reevaluated” is fightin’ words compared to the usual approach to sports tax breaks, which is for elected officials to shrug their shoulders and say whatchagonnado? And the mayor also responded to a call by 161st Street Business Improvement Director Cary Goodman that the Yankees be forced to pay property taxes just as other businesses in the neighborhood do:

“We all hope and pray that next year baseball will resume in person at some point in the year and the fans will come back and the businesses will thrive, but of course the Yankees should help them through and I assure you they have the money.”

Okay, so none of this is exactly laying down the law, and de Blasio has previously called for Madison Square Garden to pay taxes before shrugging his shoulders and saying whatchagonnado? But it’s still more than we’ve seen before, and is certain to encourage both the councilmembers and Goodman and his South Bronx business owners. The latter has a rally outside Yankee Stadium coming up this Thursday at noon, plus a Change.org petition, and with that and a long enough lever you never know what can happen.

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Friday roundup: CFL calls its owners “philanthropists” who need bailout, plus actual sport with actual fans takes place in actual stadium!

access_time personNeil deMause

And how is everyone out there? Going stir-crazy? Waking up early to watch Korean baseball? Starving to death? All good options!

I personally have been watching this 1988 game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos (spoiler: Randy Johnson is, as the announcers keep noting, very tall), while continuing to keep tabs on what passes for sports stadium and subsidy news these days. Let’s get to it — the news, I mean, not the Phils-Expos game, I have that paused:

 

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Friday roundup: Nashville and Miami stadiums still on hold, cable bubble may finally be bursting, minor-league contraction war heats up

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Scottish Independence Day! And now for the rest of the news:

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Friday roundup: Saints’ $300m subsidy moves ahead, St. Louis MLS announcement on tap, Richmond council votes no on democracy

access_time personNeil deMause

Sometimes I feel lucky to cover a topic with so many constant absurdities, and then this happens, and I realize that constant absurdities are just the new normal. Anyway, I did get to edit this this week, which is an excellent look at how this week’s absurdity is having potentially catastrophic impacts on people’s lives, so go read it!

But not before you read these:

  • The Louisiana State Bond Commission has approved selling $450 million worth of state bonds to fund renovations to the Superdome, in exchange for the New Orleans Saints signing a 15-year lease extension. As covered back in May, Saints owner Gayle Benson would cover one-third of the bond cost, leaving Louisiana to pay off $300 million, bringing the Saints’ five-decide subsidy total to a cool $1.442 billion. In exchange, the Saints will sign a 15-year lease extension — with another 15-year option, but there’s no way they’re going to extend their lease again without more subsidies the way this gravy train is rolling — which comes to state taxpayers ponying up $20 million a year for the presence of an NFL team, which is a hell of a lot of money, though not as much as Indiana pays the Pacers, because Indiana.
  • The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this week that St. Louis will be announced next Tuesday as the next MLS expansion city, bringing the number of teams in the league to a cool 154. (I think it’s actually 28, but honestly the number changes so fast it’s hard to keep track.) Deadspin read the announcement that there would be no public subsidies for the as-yet-unnamed team’s stadium and excitedly reported that the deal “might not completely fleece the city”; sadly, it will actually involve about $60 million in public subsidies, but since about half of that is coming from the state, not the city, that Deadspin headline is still technically correct, right?
  • The Richmond city council has voted 5-3 against allowing a referendum on the city’s proposed new $350 million city-subsidized arena on the November ballot, because voting is for elected officials, not regular folks. Though regular folks do still get to vote on electing elected officials, something that referendum sponsor Reva Trammell clearly had in mind when she said following the no-voting vote: “I hope the citizens hold their feet to the fire. Every damn one of them that voted against it.”
  • Two-plus years after the arrival of the Hartford Yard Goats in exchange for $63 million in public stadium cash — plus a couple million dollars every year in operating losses — the Hartford Courant has noticed that stadium jobs are usually part-time and poorly paid. Not included in the article: any analysis of how many full-time jobs could have been created by spending $63 million on just about anything else.
  • New Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo said he intends to keep the NHL team in Arizona, but that keeping it in Glendale is a “difficult situation,” at which point a Glendale spokesperson said that city officials would meet with Meruelo “to see how we can help him achieve his goals of success.” Which is all fine and due diligence and all, but given that helping Meruelo “achieve his goals” is likely to mean paying him money to play in Glendale like the city used to do, it’s not exactly promising; if nothing else, Glendale officials would do well to remember that Meruelo currently has exactly zero better arena options elsewhere in the state, so he’s not exactly negotiating from a position of strength.
  • Joe Tsai, who was already set to buy the Brooklyn Nets from Mikhail Prokhorov, has officially exercised his option to purchase the team, plus the Barclays Center arena to boot, for a reported $3.5 billion. Given that the arena is currently losing about $21 million a year, this seems like an awful lot of money even if the team does employ whatever’s left of Kevin Durant. Since Tsai already owns the New York Liberty, though, maybe it at least means that WNBA franchise will finally return to the city from its exile in the suburbs.
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