Category: Carolina Hurricanes

North Carolina approves $300m in public cash for Hurricanes arena, in exchange for reply hazy, ask again later

access_time personNeil deMause

The North Carolina-run Centennial Authority yesterday met in a room decorated with Carolina Hurricanes jerseys to approve $300 million in spending on renovations to the Hurricanes’ 24-year-old arena. In exchange, team owner Tom Dundon will extend his lease until 2044, and promise to spend $800 million over the next 20 years to build a private mixed-use development around the arena, which will include some affordable housing.

But wait, someone out there is probably saying, didn’t North Carolina already approve $81 million in spending four years ago in exchange for a lease extension through 2029? Yes, but this deal supersedes that one, tacking on an extra 15 years of lease while eliminating clauses that would have let Dundon buy his way out of the lease, replacing them with one where the team can only relocate starting in 2039 if the owner and the state fail to “confer in good faith” on the “future of PNC Arena or a replacement arena.” The mixed-use development is also new, as is a provision for the Hurricanes to pay $4.5 million in rent starting in 2029. (The team currently pays no rent, and gets almost $2 million in operating subsidies.)

Because of all the weird moving parts, it’s almost impossible to figure out just how big a public subsidy this is without having answers to more questions: Is $4.5 million a year a reasonable fair-market rent for the 80 acres of state land that Dundon plans to build his mixed-use development on? What happens if the state spends its $300 million on arena upgrades and then Dundon dawdles on spending his $800 million or providing the affordable housing? (In Brooklyn, the answer was nothing much.) And is this really a lease extension until 2044, or just until 2039 when the state will need to “confer” on an agreement to spend even more money down the road on more upgrades or a new arena?

Some of this could be answered by getting a look at the actual lease agreement, but the local papers didn’t bother to include any links, and the Centennial Authority has a “public announcement” page that is entirely blank. I would check Twitter, but Elon Musk just shut down the free version of TweetDeck, making the site even more impossible to use — if anyone out there knows where I might find the actual documents, throw a brick through my window or something. And to the many people who regularly ask me where they can find a listing of how much public money is being spent on stadium and arena deals: I hope you see now why you shouldn’t hold your breath.

 

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Friday roundup: Raleigh to spend $625m on arena and convention center upgrades because reasons, and other news

access_time personNeil deMause

Here is video of the Beths playing last night in front of a giant inflatable fish! You’re welcome!

On to the news:

  • Raleigh and Wake County “need to make some big renovations” to the Carolina Hurricanes arena and the city’s convention center to lure more events, reports WTVD-TV, but how will the estimated $625 million in costs be paid for? (North Carolina approved $81 million last year, but now is preparing to spend a whole lot more.) An even better question: What kind of events would be worth spending $625 million in upgrades to lure them? Those curious about the answer will not find it at WTVD, which interviewed all of three people for its story: a county commissioner trying to raise the funds, the head of the state authority that runs the arena, and the manager of the convention center, hmm, wonder why none of them are questioning the need for that level of spending?
  • I’m not exactly sure what the best rhetorical strategy is when going into negotiations with your local NBA team for signing a new lease, but I’m pretty sure going on about how small your city is and how “cities who want to retain their status as TOP tier American cities have obligations” is not it, yes I’m looking at you, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt. Of course, if we look at this less as Holt bargaining with the Thunder owners and more him bargaining with city residents for why he needs to use their tax money to build a new arena just 21 years after building the last one, it starts to make a bit more sense…
  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to give $455 million to the operators of Belmont Park racetrack for upgrades and let them pay it back with future state subsidies, and here’s an interview with the consultant who wrote the report saying this is a good idea somehow. Highlight: “Are there other tracks that have reversed declining attendance numbers by renovating their facilities?” “I don’t know the answer to that.” Worth every penny, this guy.
  • MLB Players Association president Tony Clark says that owners asked for the right to unilaterally reduce the size of the minor leagues even further in bargaining over the minors’ first-ever union contract, and Clark informed them that this was a “non-starter.” It’s not clear whether the leagues’ owners already have another contraction plan in the works or are just looking to reserve the right to axe more teams if they so decide, but given how great the last downsizing has worked for letting them shake down cities for stadium money, it’s no real surprise they’re at least thinking about it in their downtime from lobbying Florida to exempt minor-leaguers from minimum-wage laws.
  • More than 60% of Jacksonville residents don’t want to see the city spending $750 million in their money on renovations to the Jaguars stadium, which should be unsurprising, frankly. Also, 48% reported “they had shouted ‘DUUUVAL’ in the past year,” which makes me a little concerned about the people who are writing these poll questions.
  • The latest Buffalo Bills stadium renderings aren’t nearly as hilarious as the last ones, but I do wonder why the scoreboard during the game depicted appears to be showing footage of an entirely different game where the Bills are wearing different uniforms.
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Friday roundup: The minor-league stadium shakedown will continue unabated into our glorious future (plus: FIRE!)

access_time personNeil deMause

This was a short week but it felt long to me, though at least nobody interrogated my cat about whether I would be resigning, so there’s that. Anyway, we have a big stack of Other News ahead of us, so let’s dive in:

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North Carolina approves $81m Hurricanes arena subsidy, prepares to offer even more because inflation or something

access_time personNeil deMause

So it turns out that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s gripe that the Carolina Hurricanes‘ arena isn’t up to “today’s standards” was timed to precede a vote by North Carolina’s Centennial Authority on whether to go ahead with a $200 million renovation — paid for in part by $81 million in city and county food and hotel tax kickbacks — that was proposed in 2019 and approved last year but put on hold by the pandemic. The authority voted unanimously on Thursday to go ahead with the deal, so really this is just the final shoe dropping on a subsidy we’ve already accounted for, not anything new that would cost —

The authority, the government-appointed board that oversees the arena on behalf of Raleigh, Wake County and the state, will ask HOK and Ratio to update the arena enhancement plan prepared in 2019 for current arena trends and construction costs and prepare a menu of possible upgrades at various cost levels for the city and county to approve at some point next year. Three years ago, the authority was looking at a $200 million package of upgrades; that price will certainly be higher now.

Sorry, say what, now? Isn’t the $81 million tax subsidy what Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon agreed to in exchange for extending his team’ lease through 2029? Why offer him more money now just because Russia invaded Ukraine and sent oil prices soaring?

Whatever package of enhancements the authority, city and county choose will be predicated on a longer-term lease, and the team’s interest in that will be predicated on Dundon’s ability to develop the land.

Ah, okay: So that first $81 million and five-year lease extension was just an amuse-bouche for Dundon, who has his eyes set on getting more public cash in exchange for committing to stay put in Raleigh for a few more years beyond that. He has truly learned the Indiana Pacers lesson well.

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Gary Bettman can’t stop demanding new NHL arenas, he’s out of control, run for your lives

access_time personNeil deMause

The job of a North American sports league commissioner is first and foremost to help the league’s owners make moar money, mostly by rattling whatever sabers he has handy, and NHL commish Gary Bettman knows this chapter and verse. So with Calgary Flames owner Murray Edwards still looking for a lucrative arena deal after backing out of their old one — oh, did you forget that Edwards still wanted a new arena just because he hasn’t mentioned it lately, you silly person! — Bettman stepped in Tuesday and fired the threat cannons:

“If we’re going to hold any league events here, there needs to be a new building,” he said.

“I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anybody.”

Perhaps it would come as more of a surprise if Bettman indicated what he meant by “league events”? Is that, like, the All-Star Game? Or … are there any other events the NHL holds other than the All-Star Game and regular league games? It’s not like the Stanley Cup is held at a neutral site, so they can’t withhold that like the Super Bowl. What the crap, man? (Here’s a Global News video of Bettman saying the above. “Ressurected” is, uh, a Canadian spelling?)

Bettman went on to say:

“I think it’s a priority for the City of Calgary, I think it’s a priority for the Flames, I think it’s a priority for the people that live in Calgary and want concerts and family shows in addition to NHL hockey.”

Does the NHL produce concerts now? I am so confused. Here’s another article, maybe this shines more light on it:

The Hurricanes’ PNC Arena is “no longer up to modern NHL standards, nor is the area around it,” according to Luke DeCock of the Raleigh NEWS & OBSERVER. Bettman said, “We like being here and I know [Hurricanes Owner] Tom [Dundon] likes being here and wants to be here. But obviously there’s work to be done to make sure that the team and the community have something that is today’s standards.”

Wait — that’s not even about the Flames, though it’s from the same day! It’s about the Carolina Hurricanes, whose owner Tom Dundon just got $81 million in exchange for extending his lease by five years until 2029, though he also has an out clause where he can leave early by paying way less than $81 million, and anyway Dundon wants the area around the arena to become a “hub of a new commercial district with offices and residences and restaurants and a sports book and an outdoor concert venue and space laser cannons” and okay I made one of those up but anyway 2029 is right around the corner, get Bettman on the case! The commissioner must have some time after his 3 o’clock press call shaking down Calgary to shake down Raleigh, right? Look, just put in on his calendar, I’m sure he’ll come up with something to say off the cuff, he’s been doing this for long enough. Thanks, we’ll send him a nice gift basket for his trouble.

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Friday roundup: Raleigh to pay Hurricanes $81m to stay put, Calgary arena blows budget, plus sports owners’ 70-year-old tax dodge

access_time personNeil deMause

Hi, all! I’ll be traveling next week to one of the parts of the globe where things happen a bit later in the day (because of time zones, not because everyone sleeps in — but wouldn’t that be a great place?), so anticipate posts to be a bit tardier and possibly more sporadic. I’ll be back in plenty of time for that big Oakland A’s stadium hearing on the 20th, though, so expect a report on that one bright and early. (Unless you live in, say, Europe, in which case you’re already taking an afternoon siesta by the time FoS wakes up, lucky you.)

But enough about living on a spherical planet, let’s get to this week’s news:

  • That five-year lease extension that Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon supposedly signed more than a year ago actually just got finalized by the state-run Centennial Authority yesterday, and we now have some more details on the terms: In exchange for agreeing to stay put from 2024-29, Dundon, a billionaire subprime auto loan baron who just completed his purchase of 100% of the hockey team, will pay zero rent starting this year, plus will get paid $9 million a year in City of Raleigh and Wake County food and hotel tax money through 2029 to cover both operating costs and arena upgrades. There’s also an out clause in the lease where the ‘Canes owner can pay a termination fee and leave early anyway, starting at $31 million in 2024, and sinking to $3 million in 2028. Authority board member and resume-padding yacht salesman Randy Ramsey worried aloud that “I can see us getting to about 2029 and the Hurricanes, or whomever our partners are at that point, saying the building is dilapidated” and needs to be replaced — and Ramsey was one of the board members voting for the lease extension. This is hardly the first case of a team getting paid to play games in its home arena — it’s practically an annual tradition in, say, Indiana — but it’s still a pretty egregious one, especially since North Carolina taxpayers will end up sending enough money Dundon’s way to pay any relocation fee for him, which isn’t quite what a lease guarantee is supposed to do.
  • The Calgary Flames arena project is now $50-60 million over budget, and the CBC reports that “adjustments are now being made to control the costs, which include interior finishings and parts of the building’s exterior.” That seems like an awful lot of money to try to save just by eliminating some sconces, but more power to them if they can do it without value-engineering the place right out of working for hockey. (In case you’re wondering, it would take a two-thirds vote of the Calgary council to approve more money beyond the $250 million-ish already approved.)
  • ProPublica yesterday ran a long article (the only kind it ever runs) about the special tax dodges that sports team owners use to cut their tax bills, in particular the ability to depreciate the value of your players as if they were machine parts that wear out. (ProPublica, as some of you may know, is currently my day job, but I had no involvement with this story.) This is an old, old dodge in sports circles, having been first invented, as ProPublica notes, by then-Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck in the late 1940s; here’s a good Sports Illustrated article about it from 1978. I first read about it in (checks Field of Schemes endnotes, I knew there was a reason we included those) Andrew Zimbalist’s 1992 book Baseball and Billions, and then later talked with sports economist Rod Fort about how he and fellow economist Roger Noll had exposed how then-Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig had assigned 94% of the value of his team to the player contracts he’d bought along with the rest of the Seattle Pilots franchise in 1970, thus allowing him to take almost the entire $10.8 million purchase price as a double-dip deduction — only to be told by a judge, in Fort’s recollection, that “well, that’s a good piece of work, but I can see no reason that Selig’s choice violates the accepted rules of accounting in Major League Baseball.” (ProPublica also didn’t mention that the depreciation tax break only really works when the capital-gains tax rate is lower than the income tax rate, as it is now, or else you end up paying the same taxes anyway when you sell the team, something that helped keep Veeck from ever taking advantage of the tax dodge he concocted — but I think this bullet point has already exceeded its maximum allowable parentheticals, so you’ll have to look that one up yourself.)
  • Tokyo has finally given in to reality and barred spectators from the upcoming Olympics, in the face of a virus surge there. (Japan’s vaccination rate is surprisingly crappy, thanks to slow vaccine approvals and something about not allowing pharmacists to give shots but allowing dentists to.) If there’s good news, it’s that once Japan barred foreign fans from attending, spending billions of dollars to host the Olympics looked like an even worse deal once locals wouldn’t even get tourists’ filthy lucre; though I guess now they’re still spending the money and not getting either filthy lucre or the chance to watch Greco-Roman wrestling in person, so maybe there is no good news at all. (For anybody, anywhere.)
  • Looks like the Reading city council is down with giving $3 million to the Fightin Phils for stadium renovations. Now all they need is $3 million from the county and $7.5 million from the state of Pennsylvania, and they’ll be all set, at least until the next time the Fightin Phils owners — which would be the Philadelphia Phillies owners, who are demanding upgrades as necessary thanks to new MLB rules on minor-league facility minimum standards that they themselves voted to impose — decide their stadium is obsolete because their weight room isn’t roomy enough.
  • The … the Phoenix … Suns are in the NBA Finals, so of course someone’s going to write an article about how great this is for the Arizona economy. Two Arizona economists say so, arguing that people might see images of Phoenix on TV during the finals and decide to move there. Or, you know, decide that Arizona on the fast track to being an uninhabitable hellscape. Definitely one of those two!
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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

access_time personNeil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

  • A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
  • Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
  • Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
  • The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
  • Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
  • While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
  • Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
  • Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
  • Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
  • Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
  • Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
  • If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.
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Friday roundup: Return to some pretense of normalcy (for now, depending) edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Morning, everybody! We’re coming up on halfway through June, and the sports world is beginning to awake from its pandemic-inspired slumber: Spain’s La Liga soccer league held its first restarted games yesterday, with fake crowd noise and CGI fans (I’m watching via DVR right now: the fans disappear periodically and are replaced by ads, something I’m sure league broadcasters wish they could do in normal times); England’s Premier League is set to begin games next Wednesday. Japan’s J League is set to restart on July 4, with fans possibly returning at reduced capacity a week later. Germany’s Bundesliga, meanwhile, is several weeks into its restart and going full speed ahead despite occasional players testing positive and going into quarantine.

Over in the U.S. — currently 7th worldwide in new Covid deaths per day, behind Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, and the UK — the NBA is planning to finish its season and then play the playoffs entirely at Disney World starting July 30, though it’s not certain that all players will show up given they’d be isolated from their families for seven weeks at minimum. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has promised “100 percent” that there will be a 2020 season of some kind, though again, it’s always possible lots of players will just stay home rather than risk their health to get less than a third of their regular salaries in exchange for a month-long preseason plus a month and a half of games. MLS is relaunching with a World Cup–style tournament at Disney World, to be followed by a season as yet to be determined. The NHL is shooting for a playoff tournament starting in August, maybe, depending. The NFL is still insisting it will be able to play its regular season as usual in September with full stadiums, though individual teams are planning otherwise.

In short, the grand sports epidemiological experiment has begun, and we’re just going to have to keep checking back week to week to see how it’s turning out. Playing fan-free games in regions with low current infection rates seems to be working out okay — at least if you don’t mind that players will occasionally keep turning up infected and have to be quarantined, which is fine enough on public health grounds even if it might leave players antsy — but how that translates into fans in seats, or a world where a second wave kicks in starting in September just as leagues are in full swing, remains a work in progress. The best bet remains not to plan anything more than a few weeks in advance, which is understandably hard when you’re trying to steer an aircraft carrier of an institution like a sports league, but for individual fans we can just enjoy whatever’s on TV this week while we wait for our ticket refunds to trickle in one month at a time.

Anyway, on to the week’s stadium and arena news:

  • To the confusing lack of firm information about the Carolina Hurricanes‘ new arena lease, add the news that Hurricanes owner Thomas Dundon has “termination rights” and the executive director of the local sports authority is mumbling about how maybe it’s time for a downtown arena. This still looks to be in the long-game phase — if you’re not playing the long game during a hopefully temporary global health crisis, you’re pretty dumb, not that sports team owners can’t be dumb when necessary — but it’s worth keeping an eye on, because we know well that sports team owners and elected officials love nothing more than to meet behind closed doors to plot things while waiting for the money to return.
  • Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi is defending spending tons of city money on a new Flames arena and other big development projects as the smart thing to do during an economic downturn, and he has a point in terms of government spending being a smart thing to do when the cost of borrowing is cheap and people need jobs so they’ll start spending again. Whether it’s a smart thing to spend that money on a new hockey arena when the city is in the middle of slashing school budgets is another question.
  • Henderson, Nevada has issued some renderings of its planned arena for the Silver Knights (what the Vegas Golden Knights‘ farm team will apparently be called, which, okay), and I gotta say, they are seriously lacking in batshittery. Long-distance images of generic fans, with no lens flare or fireworks or Mitch Moreland? Okay, there’s a giant statue of a knight and one fan raising his hands in the air in the parking lot for no particular reason, but step up your game, Henderson, America needs entertainment, or else we’ll have to start pretending that our game consoles are hockey arenas!
  • Speaking of long-term vs. short-term thinking, people who want to own major-league (or minor-league) sports teams are lobbing plenty of lowball offers, but aren’t getting many takers.
  • Here’s an article about how college football teams will only let you into games if you’re old or rich, which seems about right for America.
  • Wait, there was a baseball stadium named after Marge Schott? Who ever thought that was a good idea?
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Friday roundup: Ohio could cut stadium funds, A’s could delay stadium plans, sports could return, world could end, anything’s possible

access_time personNeil deMause

A little distracted this morning with a new work project and the usual pandemic stuff and the not-so-usual riots on TV, but there’s a passel of stadium and arena news I didn’t get to, so let’s get to ’em:

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Friday roundup: Stadium construction continues despite sick workers, drained city budgets may not slow subsidy demands, and other news from our continuing hellscape

access_time personNeil deMause

How did everyone do during Week Whatever (depending on where you live) of the new weirdness? I finished another jigsaw puzzle, spent way more time than I thought possible trying to understand the new unemployment insurance rules, had the best idea ever, and wrote another article about how the media should stop feeding the troll. (Here’s the previous one, if I neglected to post a link to it before, which I probably did.) And, of course, continued to write this site, even if the subject matter, like all subject matter everywhere, has taken a decided turn for the microbial. Hopefully it’s helping to inform or at least distract you, because it looks like we may be here a while.

Anyway, it’s Friday again, so let’s celebrate getting another week closer to the end of this unknowably long tunnel with some stadium and arena news:

  • Construction is now shut down on the Worcester Red Sox stadium, but continues on the in-progress stadiums for the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Texas Rangers, even after workers on the latter two projects tested positive for COVID-19, and despite it being pretty much impossible to do construction while maintaining a six-foot distance from your fellow workers. The USA Today article reporting all this cites continued construction as a “boost to the economy,” which is slightly weird in that 1) pretty much all economic activity is a boost to the economy, but everyone has kind of decided now that keeping millions of people from dying is more important (okay, almost everyone), and 2) given that these stadiums will all have to be finished eventually regardless, shutting down construction would only push the economic activity a few weeks into the future, to a time when construction workers would actually have stores and restaurants open where they could spend their salary. It really would be nice if journalists writing about economics talked to an economist every once in a while.
  • Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin says she’s preparing for a “recession budget” that could require cutting back on planned projects including “a planned renovation of the PNC Arena, an expansion of the Raleigh Convention Center, an addition to the Marbles Kids Museum, a proposed soccer stadium in south Raleigh and a recreational complex at Brier Creek,” reports the News & Observer. Since every local government in the U.S. if not the world is about to see its tax revenues plummet, could this mean a temporary lull in stadium and arena demands while teams have to wait for treasuries to refill? Or will team owners just do like during the Great Recession and pivot from “times are good, now is when you should spend your surplus on giving us new sports venues” to “times are tough, now is when you should be spending to promote any development jobs you can get”? Hawaii officials say the latter, and they don’t even have a team owner lobbying them, so I think you know where I’d be laying my bets.
  • A new poll shows that sports fans believe they’ll be less likely to go to live sporting events once they’ve been “deemed safe,” mostly over fears that they won’t actually be safe. (Nearly two-thirds said they’d be concerned about “health safety,” and more said they’d avoid indoor events than outdoor ones.) There’s presumably some push-poll effect here — if someone asks you if you’re going to be concerned about your health at large events, that’s going to get you thinking about how you maybe should be concerned — but still it’s at least one data point suggesting that game attendance could suffer for a while despite pent-up hunger for live sports.
  • Meanwhile, ratings have plummeted for pro wrestling events before empty venues, which could be a sign that a big part of watching televised sports is enjoying the roar of the crowd, or that pro wrestling isn’t really a sport, take your pick. Where are those New Jersey Nets sound operators when you need them?
  • Don’t count on getting back your “sports fee” on your cable bill even if there’s no sports to watch, though maybe if your TV provider can recoup some fees they’re paying to sports leagues, they’ll consider sharing some of the savings with you.
  • A study by an “advertising intelligence and sales enablement platform” that is no doubt really annoyed right now that this press release didn’t get me to use their name and promote their brand projects that ad spending on sporting events will drop by $1 billion this year. And will that cost sports teams, or the cable and broadcast networks that are contracted to carry them? Sorry, didn’t study that part, we figured Forbes would report on this even without that info, and we were right!
  • Speaking of dumb Forbes articles, here’s one about how baseball should make up for lost revenue by expanding, which overlooks both that this is undoubtedly the worst time imaginable to get the highest expansion fee possible, and that MLB teams are all owned by billionaires so really the issue isn’t having cash on hand, it’s getting yearly income back up, and diluting your share of national revenues by one-fifteenth (if two new teams were added) is no way to do that.
  • But hey, at least stadiums come in handy for herding homeless people into en masse to keep them from getting sick, that’s neither disturbingly dystopian nor terrible social distancing policy, right? What’s that you say? You’re right, let’s instead spend some time revisiting cab-hailing purse woman, that’s a much more soothing start to the weekend.
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