While the threat of franchise relocation may be cooling, some cities looking to keep their teams haven't shown an aversion to throwing tons of public money a team's way.
Take the Yanks and Mets deals. Both will rely on the issuance of public, tax-free bonds to finance both ballparks. No taxes are being raised to pay for either project, but both teams will pay off the debt using PILOTs, or "Payments-In-Lieu-Of-Taxes." In this case, the taxes would be property taxes that would be levied on the land improvements. The use of government-issued bonds may be illegal, so the IRS is going to take a look at it.
The Twins are using the typical playbook in bypassing a referendum for their sales tax hike. Yesterday the Minnesota House passed the Twins' stadium bill. The state Senate is expected to be more baseball-friendly than the House. All signs point to the Twins staying put.
Closer to home, Sacramento pols are trying to put together a public financing plan for a new Kings arena. To accomplish this, they're attempting to circumvent the 2/3 voter approval required for a specific-use sales tax hike. If this sounds familiar, Santa Clara County is doing the same thing with their Measure A "BART tax." If you're wondering, there's no mention of the A's anywhere in that article, which should be a clear indicator of where Sac's focus is - not on the A's.
Tonight is the last San Jose ballpark EIR outreach meeting (City Hall, 14th floor, Room 1446, 6 p.m.). Thank you, SJRA, for scheduling it earlier - preventing a conflict with Sharks-Preds Game 4. I attended Tuesday night's game, and the Tank really did hit 113 dB after the first Marleau goal. Marc Morris's traffic-related comments document is available if you're interested. I didn't come away from the previous meetings overly convinced that the expanded traffic study (area and time) would take place. Hopefully the continually applied pressure will make it happen.
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5 comments:
God, the Yankees and Mets stadiums are gonna be amazing. $1 Billion wow, yet from the design models the Yankee stadium looks like a classier version of the old one. Wouldn't it be great if they moved to Mets to the westside of Manhatten, a ballpark amongst the towers. I guess more big name players are goin to NY to play in those castles.
I agree that a stadium in Manhattan would be pretty cool but the price of land alone would pretty much make that prohibitively expensive. I think the cost of the proposed Jets/Olympic stadium would have been over $1 billion on it's own.
I've never been to Flushing Meadows (other than seeing Homer Simpson run through the field of toilets on that one episode) but from TV Shea Stadium looks like it's in the middle of a parking lot, which would make the Ebbets Field style park they have planned seem kind of out of place. Nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Kinda lame, but then again if they plunked down a replica of Shibe Park in the Coliseum parking lot I guess I'd take it.
Jim
The Jets stadium is going to be so expensive because its going to be huge. The last thing I read was that it was being called "Xanadu" and will house the Jets and Giants. As well as an indoor water park, hotels and i think a ski attraction of some type. Its going to be insane. Naming rights alone are going to worth 20 mill plus.
All quiet on the stadium front. Shouldn't we be expecting some news regarding the ownership of the land at Pacific Commons site soon?
Not really. The deal is actually pretty complex and could go a number of ways, especially if it involves multiple municipalities or government entities. I'd be very surprised if we heard anything official soon.
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