Happy Friday! Ready for a heaping helping of news about America’s elected officials and business leaders working together to ensure smart investments of public dollars that will build a better tomorrow? If so, I am sorry to inform you that you have accidentally clicked on the wrong website, but if you stick around you may be rewarded with some grim laughs, or at least some links to old comic strips.
- Front Office Sports reports that the Oakland city council passed a resolution this week calling for the WNBA to grant their city an expansion team, which is toothless and not all that interesting, then also mentions that the $180 million federal subsidy request Oakland has pending with the federal government for an A’s stadium is through the Department of Transportation’s RAISE program, which is supposed to “build and repair critical pieces of our freight and passenger transportation networks,” judging projects “on their merits to help ensure that taxpayers are getting the highest value for every dollar invested.” Oakland “is not expecting to receive the full amount,” Front Office Sports writes, which is either a euphemism for the city getting a lower amount or for the city getting a polite rejection letter.
- Norfolk city officials want to build a new arena for no team in particular — you may recall nearby Virginia Beach proposing an arena to lure an NBA team a few years back, then bailing when its financing plans repeatedly collapsed — and city manager Chip Filer says he “anticipates” other cities in the region chipping in (see what I did there) to help pay for it. The city managers of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake immediately replied that “no active discussions are taking place,” but can’t get if you don’t ask, I guess, though you can still get derisively made fun of.
- Arlington Heights officials rejected a petition from the Koch brothers–connected Americans for Prosperity to ban public subsidies for a new Chicago Bears stadium (or any other businesses) on the grounds that it didn’t have enough valid signatures, though the group can always go back and get more and resubmit. The Chicago Tribune’s article on this also includes a new rendering that I hadn’t seen before of featuring young people in generic fall clothing ambling past a stadium while a couple of them carry enormous “BEAR DOWN” flags, seriously has anyone involved in sports stadium renderings ever actually been to a sporting event even?
- Hawaii Gov. David Ige has called a halt to work on building a $350 million replacement for Aloha Stadium in order to speed up construction by no longer using any private money at all, just state money. No, you’re right, none of that makes any sense, but nothing about this project has made sense from the start, so why change things up now?
- Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson wants voters to increase hotel taxes in order to tear down and rebuild the city’s convention center and use the site for a baseball or soccer stadium for a new team — yes, Dallas already has the Texas Rangers and F.C. Dallas, but those teams actually play in Arlington and Frisco, and surely MLB and MLS would approve new teams playing just one city over once they saw how cool a new city-funded stadium in Dallas was, right? (That’s your cue for the grim laughter.)
- Washington, D.C., is going to give the Washington Nationals stadium a one-year certificate of occupancy extension after all, which means the team won’t be evicted in the midst of going for a team-record 104 losses, so much for cities playing hardball.
- The Center for Economic Accountability, the people with those excellent stadium stickers, put out a report last week revealing that local elected officials proposed nine separate billion-dollar-or-more corporate subsidy deals in 2022, the most in any one year in history. That includes New York state’s $1 billion for the Buffalo Bills and Maryland’s $1.2 billion for the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, but also $2.1 billion from Ohio for an Intel computer chip plant and $1.8 billion from Georgia for a Hyundai electric car plant. And that doesn’t even count ongoing subsidies like Georgia’s annual underwriting of 30% of the costs of filming all those Marvel (and other) movies in their state, which the legislature briefly considered capping at $900 million a year but decided to let soar beyond that number in order to be “cautious.” In short, it’s a good time to be a rich person in America, though that’s been true for a while now.
