Field of Schemes
@fieldofschemes
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Sports stadium and arena news by Neil deMause ( @neildemause ), co-author of the book Field of Schemes.
Brooklyn, NY
Joined April 2009
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With Nevada legislators now saying they won't consider a Vegas stadium bill this summer, the only thing for sure is that A's owner John Fisher's attempt to rush through a bill with only one public hearing in the final week of the session came up empty.
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The MLB national TV schedule means all A's Sunday home games in Sacramento will have to start at 1 pm local time, plus the limitations set by the Pacific Coast League schedule means it'll be even harder than usual to avoid weekday games on "getaway days."
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John Fisher has delayed publicly releasing fresh Vegas A's renderings for 29 days and counting, and still hasn't said a word about where he's going to find another billion-dollars-plus in stadium money to go with the $600m he got from the state last June.
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"If you don't send this unlikeable billionaire a whole of money, his billionaire pals won't either!" isn't exactly how threats work, I don't think?
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At this point, it's about seeing what A's owner John Fisher does with the car now that he's caught it: Spending around $1B of his own money to build a 30,000-seat stadium in the nation's 40th-largest media market is not necessarily a recipe for success.
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It's way too easy for MLB owners to cook the books, whether by charging a consulting fee for negotiating your own cable deal or fancy depreciation tricks. So while the A's may show a $39m loss, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a *loss* loss.
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A design team won't be picked until November, and no one knows how much building the stadium will actually cost until then. “We told the groups, ‘You saw renderings in the newspaper, but wad those up for now,’” A’s director of design Brad Schrock said.
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A's owner John Fisher's strategy seems to be to flood the zone with renderings and spreadsheets and paid consultants, hoping to limit the remaining time for examining questions like "Why are we being asked for half a billion dollars in tax money exactly?"
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Your regular reminder that A's "economist" Jeremy Aguero's degree is actually in hotel administration:
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58-42% is pretty definitive. It's going to be fascinating to see what the Royals and Chiefs owners do next, because it's not like they have a ton of great other options that involve receiving large government checks for doing nothing.
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Poll of Austin voters finds they want soccer stadium to pay property taxes and rent and share revenue; poll of Crew owner finds he don't wanna pay none of that:
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John Fisher's $70m/year cable deal will vanish if the A's play next year in Sacramento or Kuala Lumpur or even Las Vegas. That's a sizable chunk of change, and for Oakland to ask for a large cut of it seems like a no-brainer.
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I do like that these Vegas stadium renderings have no scoreboard, to spare A's fans unnecessary pain and suffering.
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How the A's stadium engineering would work, where a/c ducts would go, and how to fit it on a 9-acre site are all excellent questions. All of this is very on brand for Bjarke Ingels, whose style is architectural shock and awe and figure out the rest later.
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Reasons not to approve the A's Vegas move are piling up pretty fast, and there's not a ton of glory in this move for MLB owners aside from Fisher, who seemingly isn't all that much more popular with his fellow owners than with his former relief pitchers.
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The Vegas site is 9 acres; despite reports the Rangers stadium "sits on 13 acres," it's really 18 counting room to open the roof. (Globe Life Field is also reviled as butt-ugly; one writer called it "what would happen if a Costco and a barn had a baby.")
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Steve Hill is chair of Las Vegas' stadium authority, CEO of its convention authority, and has been a main advocate for A's owner John Fisher. And now he's hiring his own agency at $600,000/ year to oversee stadium construction plans, which is, uh.
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Jacksonville residents voted for a sales tax hike to pay for pension costs, but the city decided to raid that fund to pay for $600m in Jaguars stadium upgrades, so now it will have to either cut services or raise taxes again to cover its pension debt.
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For some context, Aguero is not an economist. He's a lawyer with a bachelor's degree in hotel management.
The first presenter is Jeremy Aguero, an economist whose firm is considered one of the state’s leading financial advisors. For some context, Aguero helped write the legislation that led to the development of Las Vegas' $1.9 billion Allegiant Stadium.
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If there's been one common theme to John Fisher's entire A's relocation saga, it's been pushing on ahead regardless of whether he seems to know how he plans to proceed or why he's doing it.
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If the A's don't stop changing their stadium plan every day, I may need to spin them off into their own website.
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The A's would have to produce perpetual sellouts *and* have half their tourist fans come to Vegas specifically to see baseball for their numbers to make any sense at all.
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If John Fisher can find either a bank or a bunch of rich suckers who he can talk into believing his Vegas dream, he can maybe pull this off. If not, he needs a Plan B, and at that point it's likely either hunker down in Sacramento or sell the team.
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Sure, Rob, let's point to a stadium project that is currently on hold where the public has put up $600m and the owner has put up bupkis as an example of how successful public-private partnerships can be.
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The total public cost will almost certainly be well over the $375m figure previously claimed by the team and state officials. And any state legislative vote is set to take place before a final price tag is agreed on, which is not great at all.
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Allowing team owners to duck questions for months or years and then rushing to let them say whatever they want in a safe, controlled environment with no rebuttal or fact-checking isn't journalism — that's stenography.
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There's still no legislation for a Vegas stadium, meaning no way of assessing the total subsidy A's owner John Fisher is looking for. Any bill must be introduced by Friday; this wouldn't leave much time for public debate, but that's a feature, not a bug.
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"After 15 years of this, owners are on Rob [Manfred]," an MLB source said. "They want to know, 'What's happening in Oakland? Let's go, it's time to s--- or get off the pot.'" Fisher, clearly, went with Door
#1
.
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A poll found voters in Las Vegas oppose the stadium funding plan by a 52-32% margin, and while this vote would be statewide, that certainly bodes well for the petition effort and an ultimate repeal campaign — assuming there's time to conduct them.
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Playing home games outside Vegas won't affect stadium bonds: If taxes fall short, the county pays out of its general fund. Yes, the A's fake economist did promise new stadium spending would make the project pay for itself, but that was always nonsense.
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Before Fisher can move the A's to Vegas, he has to clear hurdles both trivial — applying to MLB — and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — finding $1.1B in his own money, figuring how to build on a tiny 9-acre site, and evading the referendum NV teachers want to throw at him.
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The $1.2B projection is from Jeremy Aguero, who previously provided economic impact numbers on an Oakland A's move to Vegas while working for the A's as a lobbyist. Aguero is not an economist, but a lawyer with a bachelor's degree in hotel management.
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"I hope future errors you make are met with more kindness than some of the responses I received," tweeted Danielle Gallant, presumably inviting those among you who haven't accidentally given $600m to a billionaire sports owner to cast the first stone.
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Stadium proponents have argued the Vegas A's stadium is irreversible once there's a binding development deal, but Schools Over Stadiums says the referendum would block tax money from being used to pay off stadium bonds, making the bonds unsellable.
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The Vegas stadium has been reported as costing the public $500m, but given the only source is an A's consultant, we have three tax kickbacks with no firm figures, and nobody has made public a concrete proposal, let's stick with "at least $500m" for now.
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The Vegas stadium would "exude" an "outdoor feel" with a roof with "five overlapping layers" that is "inspired by traditional baseball pennants" but wouldn't actually retract, except for an opening to "allow for natural light." Plus a really big window.
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How this would solve the Rays' attendance woes if the problem is fans hate domed stadiums and St. Pete is too long a drive from Tampa, and the new stadium would be a dome in the same place as the old stadium, is unclear.
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The total Tampa Bay Rays subsidy comes to somewhere between $989m and $1.389B — all to move the team from a domed stadium in a location nobody likes to a different domed stadium right next door.
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Fisher plans to come up with at least $550m in his own cash (or his Gap-heir brothers'), and the rest by selling shares to people excited to own a piece of the Las Vegas A's and their $1.1B stadium debt? That should be an interesting prospectus to read.
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Team president Mark Lamping held a press conference on owner Shad Khan's personal yacht — you absolutely cannot make this stuff up — to declare that a taxpayer-renovated stadium is actually cheap compared a new stadium.
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A temp Sacramento move might allow Fisher to hold on to his lucrative TV deal, which could be alluring to an owner who has pretty much given up on the whole "put a viable team on the field and try to sell tickets to watch them" thing as a business model.
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John Fisher just has to provide documentation that he's good for his share of A's stadium costs by the Effective Date, defined as "[_________], 202[_]." So, no actual details on where the money is coming from yet, or when we'll know where it's coming from.
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MLB threats didn't sway Milwaukee County, which voted against public money for the Brewers: "Not saying it's not something that's needed, but something that's needed for people to get to work, to get to school ... we don't have the funding for even that."
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A securities analyst notes: "The last piece of the [A's Vegas stadium] puzzle was private financing ... for the remaining cost of the stadium. Chatter suggests this may have hit a roadblock.” Nothing new there, but looks like the banks are taking notice.
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"In the 1960s and 1970s cities regularly stumped up 100% of the money for new stadiums." Yes, but cities also got much of that back in rent. That came to a halt in the 1980s, as team owners demanded the public cover costs while getting nothing in return.
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Gov. Lombardo called for the legislature to reconvene today at 10 am Pacific time to consider the bill to help fund a Las Vegas stadium for the Oakland A's. Check this post throughout the day for further updates.
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Can't wait to see the math on this one. To pay off $850m in public costs, every single Bills fan would have to generate more than $100 in state and county taxes *per game*, which is beyond bonkers.
The economic and tax impacts generated from the team will support more than 100 percent of the public share of the new stadium cost, according to the state
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Among the highlights: Sen. Rochelle Nguyen asked, “Can you explain to me why we need to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for a billionaire team to come to the Las Vegas Strip ... if we can’t provide funding for critical resources?”
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After a year where Nashville set a new $1.2B subsidy record and Virginia and St. Pete proposed smashing that with $1.5B deals, here's wishing for a 2024 that involves delivering fewer sacks of tax money to billionaires, though I wouldn't get your hopes up.
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After Brewers owner Bud Selig got a huge pile of public money by hinting he'd move in the '90s, current owner Mark Attanasio is getting a huge pile of money by hinting he'd move. Go ahead and pencil in another huge pile of money for the 2040s sometime.
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Austin councilmember says Crew stadium "massive giveaway," team owner acting like "used-car salesman":
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Rep. Brooks thinks that the mere presence of the Brewers is worth $200 million in advertising for the city of Milwaukee? On those grounds, the city of Milwaukee should have coughed up several hundred million dollars to keep Laverne & Shirley on the air.
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How much will Fisher pay to lease Sacramento's stadium? Will its 10,000-seat capacity be expanded? Is this a binding agreement, or could A's owner John Fisher back out of it if he finds what he thinks is a better option? Does the MLBPA has any say in this?
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Spending $85m on land you don't want and can't do anything with without partnering with the city you're abandoning seems idiotic, but Fisher could certainly do it either 1) as a game of chicken with Oakland to get what he wants or 2) because he's an idiot.
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The average sports venue with property tax breaks gets about $171m in public money from that source alone. And of the leagues-wide total of $18B in property tax breaks, Propheter calculates that $7.5B comes straight out of money for K-12 education.
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It sounds a lot less noble than optimizing “fan experiences,” but it would be more honest to say: We’ve decided only to sell tickets to rich people, and everyone else can either watch at home or pay to watch in our sports bars.
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How much this would cost Nevadans is anybody's guess: You can draw TIF districts any size you want, so if revenue from the stadium itself isn't enough to fund the A's plans, just include a few more blocks to claim as "stadium-related" tax money.
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Tl;dr: Now that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt (net worth $2B, family net worth $24.8B) isn't getting $250m in tax money from Jackson County, he has to think about the best way to get some other money from someone else.
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Las Vegas Stadium Authority chair Steve Hill insists A's owner John Fisher "has the ability" to fund the rest of his stadium out of his own pocket, but keep in mind Hill works on behalf of the A's project in his spare time, so big grains of salt apply.
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A's fans have to commit to season tickets for the "duration" of the team's stay in Sacramento, for $185-$250 a game. At least players won't have to get used to crowds bigger than the ones they've had since owner John Fisher alienated all his Oakland fans.
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NFL claims $600m in Super Bowl economic impact. Economists say it's closer to $0. Guess who's right?
http://t.co/ZnoNApbQSx
(by me)
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None of it really answers why Fisher and Kaval are looking at trying to build a $1.5 billion domed stadium on a nine-acre Vegas parcel that almost certainly cannot fit a domed stadium and doesn't even have any giant cranes to climb.
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At least Oakland got something for its unused property, and got out of paying $495m in property tax kickbacks for Howard Terminal. Sure, the city loses the A's, but it also gets rid of John Fisher, so that has to be considered at least a win-win-lose-win.
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Really gotta love the chutzpah of saying "Our business model requires somebody building us a $900m stadium. Any takers?"
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Well, that's intriguing. Will be interesting to see if these are substantive changes that reduce the size of the subsidy, or more along the lines of "10% off all large fountain drinks for Vegas residents during the first two innings."
Yesterday, Democratic senators said they expected to see amendments to the
#nvleg
stadium bill addressing issues lawmakers raised during the regular session.
Sources this morning are indicating that senators are seeing amendments for the first time today.
More details to come.
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Losing while outspending the opposition $1.2m to $35,000 has got to sting, and is another data point in why team owners would rather deal directly with elected officials, who can be more easily, let's go with "influenced" by dropping cash on lobbyists.
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Cobb County spent all its money on Braves stadium, doesn't have enough left for public parks
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Houston has needed new dams for decades, built stadiums instead:
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A's move to Las Vegas: +312
A's stay in Oakland: +137
A's move somewhere else: +711
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It's not entirely clear whether "set forth the sources of financing" means A's owner Fisher actually showing where he plans to get the stadium money or just saying "I'll cover that billion dollars or so, don't worry, I'm good for it."
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The Nevada legislature is holding its first public hearing on the A's stadium bill at 4 pm PT on Memorial Day, because of course it is. Supposedly it'll be viewable here, though there's no preview link yet:
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Louisville arena bleeding even more public money than before, could go bankrupt:
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This screen is officially burned into my eyeballs now.
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Amazon just walked away with maybe $4B in public cash for doing what it was going to anyway:
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An interstate bidding war makes sense for the team owners, as it's their only leverage without threatening to move to Greensboro or San Antonio or wherever. But winning the war would mean Kansas owing hundreds of millions of tax dollars with little gain.
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Though Jeremy Aguero's degree is in hotel management, he did complete "a special course of study focused on economics and finance" under Shannon Bybee, who got his economics knowhow by working as a deputy sheriff, a law clerk, and a casino executive.
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Flames say their arena plan was fair, because paying taxes is like putting in money, right?:
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This casts the "A's public subsidy would go down from $500 million to $395 million" argument in a new light, since Fisher would get back at least part of the difference via his fresh tax break on the stadium land.
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Charlotte will spend $650m on a stadium it didn't build and doesn't own; in exchange, David Tepper commits to keeping the Panthers in town through 2039, making this at $43.3m a year the most expensive per-year lease extension deal in sports history.
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Sports economist J.C. Bradbury on last night's Nashville election results: "It's a lesson for elected reps everywhere being told by lobbyists that voters want a stadium. They don't."
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"Aguero’s firm, Applied Analysis, serves as staff to the Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which will negotiate agreements with the A’s," wait, what? Isn't Aguero a paid A's consultant? Perhaps the Fox Guarding the Henhouse Act of 2022 might need updating.
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Are any of these opinions right? Who can say! That would require some sort of research about the actual finances of Fisher's Vegas plan and whether he can make enough money from it to pay off its costs, and we don't get that.
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Fisher still has lots of hoops to jump through before he can move the A's — the referendum, the lawsuit, the finding another $1B. Reporter Howard Stutz warns the next year won't be "much other than public meetings," so enjoy the dogs and ponies for now.
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While A's revenue sharing is worth about $50m over the next two years, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the $1B Fisher is currently trying to find under sofa cushions — but dispensing with it reduces the pressure to actually finalize a stadium deal.
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Mets buy minor-league team from community owners, immediately demand $25m in stadium cash from community:
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Questions: How much will the A's pay to lease Sacramento's 10,000-seat park for three years, will seating be expanded, will the team keep its NBC Sports California TV deal, what happens if the Vegas stadium isn't open by 2028, where will the River Cats play in the interim?
Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento will host the A's for the 2025-27 seasons - ahead of the team's move to Vegas in 2028.
0
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Paying for a stadium via a stadium district tax surcharge is about the clearest possible example of taxpayers paying for a stadium, but I guess if you say "no taxpayer money" loud enough, you can pretend it's true even when it's patently not.
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Mayor Adams wants to take city land, do maybe $300m of work to improve it, give it to a soccer team owned by oil billionaires who wouldn't pay taxes, and collect $30m in rent in exchange. There's no math by which this anything but blows for city taxpayers.
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If A's owner John Fisher tries to change sites, he would have to go back to the legislature for a new vote, so that likely won't happen. But it's still a known unknown — as is the fact that MLB doesn't have a schedule yet for an owner vote on relocation.
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Travis County says Austin never consulted it on Precourt tax exemption, threatens to sue to block it:
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Sure, there may be no way taxpayers will recoup costs from a stadium that pays no taxes, and a team with 200 employees won't create thousands of jobs in Vegas. But once facts melt away, only horse trading remains, and A's lobbyists can manage that.
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Should everyone consider just moving the Chargers back to San Diego already?
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Building a fixed roof would save A's owner John Fisher a ton of money, and also save space, which is at a premium given the proposed 9-acre site in Vegas, but still probably doesn't 100% resolve either issue.
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Brewers owner Mark Attanasio would get at least $620m to upgrade a 22-year-old stadium, $520m of it coming from taxpayers. At $26m in public outlay per year of additional lease, this would be one of the most expensive sports lease extensions in history.
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"oh no the baseball team we stole needs a place to play baseball": an excellent A's-to-Vegas recap from the excellent Marc Normandin
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100% this. The number of stadium deals that get announced is something like 5x the number that eventually get built.
I am seeing people reporting on recent stadium proposals as if they are done deals. They are not. I'm not even sure the Las Vegas deal will go through. Keep in mind that these "deals" are often tentative and floated to the media as done as a bargaining tactic. Don't fall for it.
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It looks like the A's move to Vegas is going to end up being a race against various different clocks, though given that John Fisher's stadium progress appears to be going backwards if anything, it's a race that maybe nobody can win.
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Friends don't let friends sink tax money into building sports stadiums.
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It's an announcement of plans to make an announcement, mostly serving to circle the wagons and show who's on board, which doesn't bode great for Nevada taxpayers or legislators finding out exactly how much the public would be on the hook for this plan.
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A potential Chiefs/Royals re-vote shows why it's so hard to get any lasting wins in the now nearly four-decade-old battle against public stadium subsidies: Team owners can absorb as many defeats as they have to, so long as they eventually get one victory.
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