The sports stadium swindle is out-of-control.

The already phenomenally wealthy owners are insatiable.

The residents of Oakland, California and the San Francisco East Bay are grumbling about the almost determined departure of the Oakland A’s, an MLB franchise team that has been an area fixture since 1968. A few days ago, it was announced that the team had agreed with the gambling-entertainment behemoth Bally’s on building a stadium at the Tropicana Resort Casino property in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Why are the Oakland A’s looking to bust a move to Vegas as the NFL Oakland Raiders did a couple of years ago? Oakland and the surrounding Alameda Country taxpayers are done being bilked out of taxpayer funds that should be going to public safety, roads, and education. Instead, those funds are glad-handed to billionaire sport team owners. Oakland and Alameda County are unwilling to buy a place of business for the owner of the baseball team any longer. A stadium (place of business) for an owner who Forbes says is worth $2,200,000,000 (as of 2023). By the way, $2.2B is a common cost of these stadium deals, probably a coincidence but somewhat interesting. Now Las Vegas, Clark County, and the State of Nevada are more than willing to write a series of welfare checks to a billionaire, so the team is moving. Yes, it is that simple. The Nevada politicos are willing to hand welfare of $400,000,000 to a double-plus billionaire and have the taxpayers on the hook for anything and everything that goes wrong with any phase of the private entertainment venue. How did the government get into this racket?!? The why is corruption, and the how is complex and involves a lot of used car salesmanship.

So why is Oakland/Alameda Co. suddenly not into sports stadium welfare? Because when you grab the hot potato out of the oven without a mitt on and you get seriously burned, you need to learn your lesson the first time around. The second burn may be even more painful.

We were tricked into building a new seat section at the Oakland Stadium known as “Mt. Davis” (after the Davis family, the team owners). Old Al “fuck the Alameda County taxpayers and the police and fire departments by the way as I rob them of their funding…” Davis threatened to move the team back to Los Angeles unless we shelled out $100+M in the form of a revenue bond. A bond that the team never paid a dollar toward the principal of debt. By the time the Davis family and the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, the bond debt was still $100M+ twenty years after the bond’s issuance. Yes, 20 years and the original “loan principal” that taxpayers were on the hook for in the end was still the same damn amount. Imagine never paying the principal of your home mortgage and only paying the interest. Oh yeah!! That was subprime and negatively amortizing loans and the bank crash. That was a different hucksterism. Yes, games were played and revenue was generated for those 20 years, but none of that money went to the actual construction costs of “Mt Davis.” Oh, here is a picture of Mt. Davis …tarped over. Geez, the best seats in the house, eh?

It becomes an endless credit line on which we owe perpetual interest. The team owners and their sycophants conned and we got suckered.

Look at the NFL San Francisco 49ers stadium deal in Santa Clara County, California for just one example (of many!) of the complete hustle being played time and time again on taxpayers. [There are exceptions to the openly accepted taxpayer rip-offs, but they are now very rare.] Santa Clara (both city and county) immediately had buyer’s remorse. The Mayor of the city of Santa Clara once said (source: BleacherReport):

"We learned we cannot trust the 49ers," Santa Clara mayor Lisa Gillmor said last week, per John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle. "They are our partners, but they have exploited what we've tried to do in the city. They recognized the fact that we were ill-prepared... they were professional; they knew what they were doing."

What the flagnog?!? Exploited??? That was only three years after signing the contract that city, county, and regional officials clearly did not understand. The government representatives made one huge (read: expensive to the taxpayers) mistake after another and the deal became a sore point for years in the Bay Area.

Not only did your representatives in government screw you, the taxpayer, but they also signed on to piledrive your sphincter for the next forty years! What did you get out of it, you locals around the stadium? Traffic nightmares, a bad playing surface that had to be replaced, a 1-10 season, missed revenue estimates by a mile due to half-empty games, night game lighting causing problems with San Jose International Airport (to the point of flight restrictions), $16 beers, and a couple incidents of fan violence aka hooliganism.

What a taxpayer investment, eh??

Of course, Santa Clara and the 49ers spent years in litigation. The animosity got so bad that during an open session of the city council meeting, the Mayor called the police to keep the peace after a discussion about the team and the city turned into a hostile screaming match. The team’s acolyte on the city council was accused of bullying and cursing at other council members in a closed session. Where is the acumen?!? Then the team turned around and settled the lawsuit but immediately turned back to the funny-money numbers they used to con the region into the stadium in the first place! The team wildly claimed that the city would receive $13+M in “benefits” from the settlement. In reality, the cash settlement was $1.6~M.

But not every city/county/region with gullibly corrupt (or worse, bribe-able) local government officials is drinking the grape Kool-Aid. Tempe, Arizona area voters just overwhelmingly said hell no to dishing out welfare to a private entertainment business and its owner(s). This time it was the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes looking for a stadium on the cheap (for them). The voters, because of a recent change in state law requiring single-issue ballot propositions, had to decide three different measures to pass the scheme. The voters had to approve a zoning change, agree to change Tempe’s General Plan (in exclusive favor of the team/team ownership), and then also say yes to the development agreement, you know, where the trouble starts for the taxpayer.

Meanwhile, nearby Phoenix is suing Tempe saying the zoning change is rendered mute by a previous airport agreement (pertains to the type of housing that can be located by the busy airport). The new Tempe $2,200,000,000 stadium fiasco would have been located just two miles from an international airport.

In the end, the Tempe taxpayers could not see doling out welfare to a wealthy private interest group. That’s a good thing!! As reported by AZCentral, all indications are the voters turned out to vote down all three propositions by the same wide margin. They figured out the boondoggle before, unlike Santa Clara, they became the next victims.

How much of a boondoggle are sports stadium “deals” with munis??? According to Brookings: “In every case, the conclusions are the same. A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.” So in layman’s terms: the teams and ownership groups are bullshitting the taxpayers.

Reason Magazine reported: “Even the fiscally conservative Scott Walker is not immune to the stadium spending craze. The Wisconsin governor wants to allocate $220 million in public bonds to keep the Milwaukee Bucks basketball franchise in the area. Walker has dubbed the financing scheme as the ‘Pay Their Way’ plan, but professional sports teams rarely pay their fair share when it comes to stadiums and instead use public money to generate private revenue.” So this is not a one-sided problem where one political party or movement is helping the farces along. Walker fashioned himself as an ultra-conservative with fiscal responsibility in mind. Well, Mr. Right-Wing Fashionista, there is nothing responsible about handing welfare to a private (usually massive wealthy) interest when I bet you could not explain at any level how actually it is the government’s role to not only finance but be the back-end liability holder in these nefarious stadium deals.

Dear Liberals (Oakland, looking at you!), you can’t pave the roads. You can’t run your police department or your schools without a federal court judge's supervision. You got millions for a stadium remodel?? GTFOH.

So the next time your locale wants to toss approximately two billion dollars of your road/schools/public safety/education funding at a billionaire to build the next Enron Field, think twice. Think three times. Then vote “NO!” or you will be taken to the cleaners by yet another bad-for-you but good-for-the-team-ownership rotten stadium deal.

If you are worth $2.2B, yes, you can afford to finance a private funding deal with Goldman or a private equity firm to build your place of business. You can solicit investments from other wealthy investors with capital to offer. You can put it on your American Express black card, I don’t care, but keep the taxpayers out of it.

Government has no role in a stadium. Especially when it can’t fund its schools (and still can’t after the stadium arrives) or run a professional police force. Especially squared if you have general obligation and public retirement debt bonds (hello Alameda County! Welcome to the party, pal!) by the $100Ms or even billions, your last priority has to be buttressing a freaking stadium deal. Obviously, sports stadiums are both distractions to the purpose of the government (which obviously has a problem taking care of its own business already) as well as a complete swindle.

Until next time.
Think about it.