NFL Merry-Go-Round: Relocation Roundelay

[STL FANATIC]

I don't know why you're suspicious of the NFL - they seem to be more committed to your city than most leagues would be in this situation. They have certainly given St. Louis every possible chance so far to keep the team.

The public vote bill seems interesting. I agree that it would be a good thing from a civics perspective, although it's hard to sort out from a presumed desire to kill the stadium altogether.

Let's forget this particular situation and think of the NFL in general. That's why I'm suspicious.

Also, St. Louis is the first team in a long time to get just one year to solve it's stadium issue. (You can tell me—as you have—that they've had longer than that, but even the Rams have shot that theory down.)

More news:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/stadium-financing-revealed-city-to-pay-million-plus-rebate-some/article_692b29a4-f2b6-52ed-8664-7ac04a28b7c7.html

Financing plans are leaking, although the bill that will be presented to the Alderman still hasn't been finalized.

Basically, the city would continue to make $6 million bond payments for 30 years. This will raise about $70 million. The city would be committing to $150 million, though. To meet that gap, the Regional Stadium Authority will borrow against the naming rights contract that was signed. However, since the NFL will ultimately want that naming rights money, tax revenue generated but he stadium will then pay back the naming rights money.

What this means is no new bonds (helps the credit rating) and no new taxes (helps keep promises) but a loss of revenue. Studies have shown the Rams generated about $4.5 million in taxes to the city ever year meaning the city ends up about $1.5 million in the red each year. If you value football even intangibly, that's not too bad.

But now they'll be losing a significant cut of that $4.5 million to pay back the naming rights money. How much matters, but I don't think we have that answer yet.

[Gothamite]

I would love for cities to start getting the benefit of those naming rights monies. It's insane to me, the way we do it.

St. Louis is the first team in a long time to get just one year to solve it's stadium issue. (You can tell meas you havethat they've had longer than that, but even the Rams have shot that theory down.)

Do you honestly expect Kroenke to rip the city, county and state a new one?

The Rams are being politic and saying the right things about their host city. That doesn't change the reality that this issue has been simmering for nearly a decade for anyone paying attention, and has been actively engulfed in flames since arbitration. Which is coming up on three years ago. More than "just one year".

[STL FANATIC]

Got my pass to the hearing. I don't have any intention of speaking necessarily, but I'll be there.

[Gothamite]

Congrats! Can't wait to hear what you think.

[buzzcut]

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13956421/san-diego-chargers-mark-fabiani-says-team-file-relocation-losangeles-january

I think the link speaks for itself.

[CubsFanBudMan]

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13956421/san-diego-chargers-mark-fabiani-says-team-file-relocation-losangeles-january

I think the link speaks for itself.

The link says nothing but ESPN and "angeles-january" to me, but the headline after clicking does:

"Mark Fabiani says Chargers will file for relocation to Los Angeles in January"

...and he doubled-down on the "25 percent of business" line...

"As you know, 25 percent of our season-ticket business comes from those markets. So we have to be able to protect those markets. That's why as a last resort we went out and created the certain option we now have in Los Angeles. And if everything is moving ahead, we're not going to be standing on the sidelines and watching everything go by. We've got to stay in the game to protect the future of the franchise."

[Cosmic]

"To protect that vitally important 25% of our business, we're going to royally piss off 75% of our business."

Sounds great.

[bosrs1]

"To protect that vitally important 25% of our business, we're going to royally piss off 75% of our business."

Sounds great.

Typical Spanos family logic. Cut off your nose to spite your face...

[STL FANATIC]

The NFL hasn't seen the most recent financing plan for the stadium (they saw something else earlier this week), but Grubman made some general comments, and HOLY CRAP. I hate this league. It's just disgusting.

Generally, the NFL considers naming rights and even game-day taxes — on tickets, hot dogs, parking and beer, for instance — revenue that belongs to team owners, not to the public, said NFL Executive Vice President Eric Grubman.

Grubman said he had not seen the city bill. But if such money was bonded to pay for construction costs, he said, it should be credited toward the team’s portion, not the public’s.

“It’s an NFL asset in the way we view the world,” Grubman said. “Whether on tickets or parking, that tax wouldn’t exist but for the activities of the team.”

That's right. The NFL views TAXES as their money, not the public's money.

I don't even know what to do with that. Yes, businesses often finagle tax rebates or credits or waivers or what have you.

But to outright say that taxes on gameday revenue ought to go directly to the NFL team. I just... I've got nothing. If that's the way they think, why don't they just f***ing charge more. (Which itself would be crappy, but at least it'd be honest.)

[dfwabel]

The NFL hasn't seen the most recent financing plan for the stadium (they saw something else earlier this week), but Grubman made some general comments, and HOLY CRAP. I hate this league. It's just disgusting.

Generally, the NFL considers naming rights and even game-day taxes on tickets, hot dogs, parking and beer, for instance revenue that belongs to team owners, not to the public, said NFL Executive Vice President Eric Grubman.

Grubman said he had not seen the city bill. But if such money was bonded to pay for construction costs, he said, it should be credited toward the teams portion, not the publics.

Its an NFL asset in the way we view the world, Grubman said. Whether on tickets or parking, that tax wouldnt exist but for the activities of the team.

That's right. The NFL views TAXES as their money, not the public's money.

I don't even know what to do with that. Yes, businesses often finagle tax rebates or credits or waivers or what have you.

But to outright say that taxes on gameday revenue ought to go directly to the NFL team. I just... I've got nothing. If that's the way they think, why don't they just f***ing charge more. (Which itself would be crappy, but at least it'd be honest.)

Hate to burst your balloon Homie, but the NFL is big business whose owners are America's captains of industry. They consider a stadium just like a factory in terms of tax breaks, but their labor is in much greater peril in terms of long term effects from working at said "factory".

That said, America is still addicted to it even while there was a HS football player death for the 7th consecutive week.

[Gothamite]

Welcome to professional sports. You think your Cardinals are somehow pure and selfless?

Your issue isn't with the NFL. It's with the United States of America. And I'll gladly join you on the barricade, comrade.

[STL FANATIC]

You've bursted no balloon's of mine. I fully agree. And if their stance was to simply request tax breaks, well, yes that's par for the course of big business. Of course most businesses that do so have a much greater economic impact on the place from which they're receiving tax breaks.

But my issue isn't with the idea of tax breaks. (I have issues with that, that's just not what I'm talking about.)

My issue is that they expect every single tax on the gameday experience to be theirs. That is ABSURD.

Basically, if St. Louis hammers out this agreement and then decides they want to raise the tickets tax another 1% to collect a little extra money... well the NFL considers themselves entitled to that extra 1%.

You see the difference in that stance from what most big businesses do? It's insane. And yet, it's completely unsurprising I suppose.

I hate that the NFL still sucks at health issues because it means people are going to die. But I will be so happy when that ultimately knocks this league down a peg.

Welcome to professional sports. You think your Cardinals are somehow pure and selfless?

This is a really weird response to what I wrote.

[The_Admiral]

I don't think the Cardinals extort tax dollars for a low-quality product.

[Gothamite]

Welcome to professional sports. You think your Cardinals are somehow pure and selfless?

This is a really weird response to what I wrote.

You are calling out the NFL for the obscene one-sided greed that characterizes professional sports. I'm saying its endemic to them all. The Anheuser-Busch naming rights money - does it count towards the public's contribution to the stadium, or the team's? By all rights those hundreds of millions should be used to pay down the taxpayers' obligations. And yet....

We can't pretend that this is a problem unique to the NFL.

[pcgd]

Naming rights deals are not the same as the taxes generated by sales of tickets, concessions, etc. Yes, companies ask for tax breaks in order to move into a location all the time, and that conversation over the morality of that is one worth having. Also the arguement that the public should get naming rights moneies on publicly owned or financed stadiums is one worth having. However the teams generally don't publicly state they should get all those sales tax dollars because they generated the original purchase. That's like Target saying they are entitled to the sales tax on all your purchases, I've never heard another sport or company make that statement before. They propose new taxes specifically for construction costs, but not they are entitled to taxes generated by them. That is a new level of absurdity.

When a league rises to a new level of greed I don't think the response should be "you're other favorite teams does something similar!" I mean, what arguement are you even trying to make here? It's like you're agreeing with him but just throwing a jab in there towards the Cardinals to make sure he doesn't get a point out there.

Also, Busch Stadium was mostly Privately financed. $45 million of the 365 was public dollars. Most other MLB stadiums in recent years have the opposite ratio.

[The_Admiral]

I would guess, then, that in ten years' time the Cardinals have mostly or fully paid off the public portion of the funding? What about the long-overdue Ballpark Village? Was that privately financed as well? At any rate, I would say that all that mostly-private spending has been good for St. Louis. I don't think publicly funding a football stadium would be all that good, run-down as that area may be now, especially if they're still paying for the crappy stadium they already have. I'm sure there are ways to rehabilitate that part of town without building a ridiculously expensive building that will mostly be empty.

[STL FANATIC]

The Cardinals aren't some ultra pure organization. They wanted lots of public funding, but as PC noted, they didn't get it. Only $45 million was public, and they did get something of private-public help by having the city or county sell bonds but with the team being responsible for paying them back...something like that. I wasn't at an age of carrying when it happened and I've never dove in to really figure that out.

But yes, Ballpark Village is where the Cardinals largely took advantage of the public. They made lofty promises and got big tax breaks as a result. They let the area become blighted and then got whatever breaks come along with re-developing a blighted parcel. Some of this was not their fault... the economy really hurt, and this city can be tough of developers, and their developer (Cordish) sucks (although they could always fire them). But it was mostly there fault. And right now (almost 10 years later) we have a nice mall of bars (but just a mall of bars) surrounded by lots of parking that carries the title of Ballpark Village despite it being nothing of a Village. Future phases are planned, but who knows when they'll come. It will always be a disappointment and that is where the public should be hard on the Cardinals.

But what the NFL is doing is off the charts bad. Think about it. The whole reason anyone tries to justify public spending on an NFL stadium is because they claim it brings a great deal of economic activity to the area. But the NFL is now saying that because it wouldn't exist without their presence, it should be theirs. How long until they start requesting that all sales, food, and hotel tax on home football weekends goes their way as well? (In St. Louis and probably many other cities, the hotel taxes already ARE going their way...)

[Gothamite]

You're right - it's a whole new level of bad. But unfortunately it's also a perfectly logical progression of the evil we've allowed to creep into these deals.

Time to stamp it out altogether. That's why we said Kroenke was the least-bad person in this whole mess; far from an angel, at least he's not trying to extort public dollars out of any city.

[Mac the Knife]

I have this evolving theory that it'll be the Chargers and Rams sharing the Carson site, and that the Raiders are not only being squeezed out of the Los Angeles move, but that the other NFL owners want Mark "Chucky" Davis out of their club because (a) he's quite an odd duck, a misfit within NFL ownership circles, ( he has no children, and thus the owners feel like there's not the type of multi-generational ownership stability the NFL tends to like, © Mark's neither an astute football or even general business man by most accounts, and finally (d) it's a little bit of payback for all the grief Dad put the league through when he was alive.

[NJTank]

Mark Davis looks like the Banjo Player in Deliverance