Field of Schemes

30/09/2026

The only way the Trail Blazers wouldn't "stay right here" in Portland is if Tom Dundon chose to move them elsewhere, so this is more than a little like a protection racket enforcer insisting he's "doing everything I can" not to break your kneecaps.

There are, when it comes down to it, really only two ways to conduct a campaign for public money for a sports facility: good cop, and bad cop. You can work to field a winning team, and then argue that it deserves a stadium to match; or you can field a terrible one, and warn...

28/09/2026

Royals owner John Sherman and Mayor Quinton Lucas have rebranded the mega-TIF district as a "stadium impact area," in hopes people will focus less on handing over $560m in taxes than on how a Royals stadium will (somehow) create economic impact miles away.

Kansas City has revealed the dimensions of the mega-TIF district where all increases in sales and income tax receipts, and half of all increases in hotel tax receipts, would be siphoned off and given to Royals owner John Sherman to pay off a new stadium, and it looks like this: The city didn't provi...

25/09/2026

“It's kind of strange that we got to be in a trailer for classes,” said one student who said they weren't notified about the Rays' plans to displace Hillsborough College for a $2B stadium. “I'd say that's definitely not really ideal for college students.”

23/09/2026

The current Wolves arena is only two blocks from the struggling mall floated as an arena site, but sure, maybe a new arena will cause restaurants and retail to spring up because this one will be different — there's a first time for everything, right?

Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez have been muttering since buying the teams in 2021 about wanting a new arena, and team officials just started muttering louder and indicating whether they'll be seeking public money, three guesses what the answer is: CEO Matt Caldwe...

22/09/2026

The Dallas Morning News relying on advocates for and against a $700m Stars arena funding ballot measure to make the case for why this is a good deal or not is an abdication of what journalism is supposed to do: find out facts and inform readers about them.

Is there any journalism trope more tiresome than bothsidesing? Ducking the hard task of investigating the facts by just throwing up your hands and saying "different people disagree" is so plainly egregious that even the dictionary calls it out as reprehensible, and yet it's still a staple of our dai...

21/09/2026

How much a TIF plan for future stadium upgrades would add to the total Browns public price tag is unknown until we see the size of the tax district, but "hundreds of millions" is a reasonable guess, which could push the total to near $2B.

I mentioned briefly here the week before last that Brook Park had designated the land around a planned new Cleveland Browns stadium to be "blighted," which Mayor Edward Orcutt said “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future.” It's now becoming clearer where that mai...

18/09/2026

Given the Guardians' and Cavs' leases only run though 2036 and 2034, Cuyahoga County could just not do the upgrades and dare the teams to break their leases early, but still nobody seems to be pricing out whether that would be cheaper than spending $261m.

Running late today, let's do a speed round: Upkeep costs for the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena continue to climb, with one estimate placing them at $261 million, and the county-run Gateway Economic Development Corp. still doesn't have money identified to pay for them. "We need to f...

17/09/2026

In reality, the public will cover closer to 3/4 of a Royals stadium cost than 1/2. It'd be nice if more journalists would care about reporting actual facts rather than what's in the press release, but that's been a problem for a long while now.

Kansas City NPR station KCUR, which has a pretty bad record of trying to explain stadium financing, set out to do an explainer today on the city's plan to spend $600 million toward a new Royals stadium, and how'd that go? The plan to pay the $600 million Kansas City plans to borrow for or...

16/09/2026

An LA County economic impact study is pretty much garbage-in, garbage-out. Combined with LA28 withholding financial details, it's still very likely that L.A.-area taxpayers will end up losing billions of dollars on the 2028 Games when all is said and done.

Speaking of bad math, an economic analysis of the impact of the 2028 Olympics on Los Angeles, conducted by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. on behalf of the city's Olympic organizing committee, concludes that the 2028 Summer Games could result in between $20.5 billion and $40.6 bill...

16/09/2026

Hochul: "The Bills had options to go elsewhere. They absolutely were being recruited by other cities." Bills stadium czar Ron Raccuia in 2022: “We did not have conversations with other cities.”

For some inexplicable reason, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle got an interview with New York state governor Kathy Hochul that ran this morning, and decided to spend it asking her all about how much she loves the Buffalo Bills. After a whole lot of reminiscing about how no one in her house growi...