Imagine that you are making massive changes to your house. Your contractor says that it will cost $800,000 to make the changes that you are asking for. You then announce to the contractor that you are willing to pay for just $100,000 of the proposed changes. The rest? Well, the city and state can pay for it. Does that make much sense? Then why do I see it happening all over sports news? Considering that these sports owners make virtually every dollar of revenue from their venues, I still struggle to understand how anyone could give these owners so much taxpayer money. They already pay almost nothing in taxes across the board. Remember, the reason the teams don’t own the land where their venue sits is strictly down to saving money on property taxes.
However, Minnesota fans should count themselves lucky that at least this owner is willing to spend some of his own money. Owners like Jerry Reinsdorf demand that taxpayers pay for every dollar needed to build and/or upgrade his sports venues. It wasn’t but a few months ago that he was pushing for local officials to fully pay for yet another ballpark for his White Sox. Cost to taxpayers? Just $1.2 billion or more. I say yet another because his current ballpark was paid for by taxpayers after Reinsdorf pulled a “full-out extortion” on local officials. This allowed Reinsdorf to secure an extraordinary deal where he was able to keep “all income from tickets, parking, concessions, and merchandise”.
David Tepper, the Carolina Panthers owner, is another who crossed my mind with this subject. He is one of the richest men in the world who happens to own an NFL team thanks to his net worth being over $21B dollars. Why did he recently demand $650 million dollars from Charlotte officials for upgrades to his stadium? Is it any wonder why one local poll showed 85% of the public being against this deal? Again, one of the richest men in the world AND he gets almost every dollar collected in and around the stadium both on and off game day. Oh, did I mention he is arguably one of the worst owners, too? Let’s just hope he doesn’t get criminally investigated again for misuse of public funds, as he did in 2022. Some owners love to act as if they are paying for a lot of the building or upgrading of a venue. Several months ago, the Chicago Bears released their plans for a $5B dollar stadium and entertainment district. The Bears would even pay for $2B of it all! What about that $3B hole? The Bears will get back to you. Did the Bears happen to mention how they intend to help the city with $500M dollar debt from stadium renovations done in 2002 that are still on the city books?
In Utah, the Smith Entertainment Group (SEG) owns the local NBA and NHL teams. In order for this group to get almost a billion dollars from taxpayers to pay for upgrades to the current arena, SEG pledged to pay $3B dollars of their own money on upgrading the arena and renovations outside the venue. Only problem? Nobody knows any details about this pledge to pay $3B dollars. Can he walk away from this? Is it in writing? Is it just something he may not want to do in a few years? Who knows?
As the local newspaper wrote, details on this pledge “remained murky”. Everything about this plan is murky. At least SEG can tell us how they intend to use taxpayer money, right? “It remains unclear, however, how exactly SEG plans to spend those taxpayer funds.” After a city official asked an actual question about taxpayer money going to arena upgrades, SEG “couldn’t pinpoint a figure for the public contribution to those upgrades”. Thank goodness, SEG must issue a report on how they will spend taxpayer money before the agreement is official. Oh wait, they don’t? This will end well.
But here is my favorite part of SEG. Even though virtually all the major project plans are still unknown, SEG has been going through several city commissions to get approval to construct the types of buildings that they want to design near the stadium. For example, SEG intends to build the tallest building in the state near the stadium. But when Salt Lake City’s planning commission unanimously denied SEG’s requests due to being “light on details”, SEG went around the commission and got approval by the city. Oh, and SEG “asked that the planning commission be kept out of future proposals”. SEG sounds like quite the mature group. You dare tell us that our plans are light on details? Be gone with you! Just in case anyone was wondering, these unknown, non-detailed plans are “swiftly advancing” through the city and state governing bodies. Screw the details!