Pointing out there are more questions than answers about the Oakland Athletics’ proposed Las Vegas stadium has become evergreen content for sports writers and opinion columnists — which might explain some of the trouble the team has had securing private financing for its share of the project.
More than a year after Nevada lawmakers approved a $380 million subsidy to lure the sports franchise from the Bay Area, we’re still pretty light on details about how the team plans to finance its field of dreams in the Mojave Desert. During last month’s meeting of the Las Vegas Stadium Authority board, for example, the team’s representative offered little more than a general assurance that owner John Fisher’s effort to secure private funding was “in good shape.”
According to Sandy Dean, a partner with the Fisher family and a representative for the A’s, the team only expects to use about $350 million of the $380 million in taxpayer-funded incentives approved by lawmakers last session — with the remainder of the $1.2 billion needed to build the stadium coming from a mix of loans and “private equity.”
What entities would be stepping up to provide such private equity, however, has not been detailed. For critics of the A’s move from Oakland, such a lack of specifics indicates there’s a real possibility Fisher and his team still don’t have any solid plan put together — a suspicion that was only exacerbated by Dean’s comments that “it would be a positive to have outside investors.”
Given that Fisher has long been criticized for not investing heavily in his own team, it’s not a stretch to say such “outside investors” are probably more than a “positive” — they’re quite possibly an outright necessity at this point. And Fisher’s plans to build a fantastical “armadillo”-shaped stadium in the resort corridor might not be as attractive to outside investors as it was to lawmakers and lobbyists vying for a new “economic development” project to brag about.
After all, as FieldofSchemes.com pondered while reporting on the stadium last month, one has to wonder if any serious investor would be in a hurry to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a team that’s only valued at around $1.2 billion — especially when it’s starting out in Las Vegas with $300 million in new debt.
According to Front Office Sports, the team has sports financing company Galatioto Sports Partners helping it find investors — but even with such professional assistance, instilling confidence in potential investors is going to be a challenge given the team’s haphazard approach thus far to relocation logistics.
From “binding” land agreements that didn’t work out to scrambling for a new homefield before the Vegas stadium is built, the A’s departure from the Bay Area has been a cavalcade of corporate missteps and public relation disasters. No wonder the opinion within Major League Baseball is decidedly mixed regarding the team’s future, with some players telling Bill Shaikin with the Los Angeles Times they predict the move will be “an abject disaster” for fans, the team and Las Vegas.
Nonetheless, for the stadium’s cheerleaders in Nevada, such uncertainty and potential calamity are apparently nothing to fear given the degree to which Las Vegas has proven itself amenable to new sports teams. “If you build it, they will come” has become the unofficial mantra of those touting the stadium deal — and to make their case that the A’s move is “in good shape.” Many have tried to draw parallels to Allegiant Stadium’s rapid construction schedule and subsequent financial profitability.
However, the Raiders’ game plan for bringing professional football to Nevada was in an entirely different league than the improvised, shoot-from-the-hip, Calvinball being played by Fisher and the A’s this time around.
Since the A’s first began flirting with the idea of leaving Oakland, its search for a new homefield has been far more ad hoc and impulsive than the way Mark Davis approached the construction of his $1.9 billion dream project for his Las Vegas Raiders. Prior to lawmakers approving the Raiders deal in 2016, Davis had already pledged $500 million toward construction and the late billionaire and Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson had pledged $650 million — leaving a cool $750 million for government coffers to pitch in via a room tax increase.
Even when Adelson pulled out of the deal, Davis and the Raiders had no problem securing replacement funding, indicating the team had clearly put together a pretty solid business strategy long before they went hat-in-hand to lawmakers for public assistance.
The A’s, by contrast, are still trying to negotiate seemingly basic terms of their agreement with the Stadium Authority board — and details regarding everything from construction to game schedules remain hazy to this day.
Of course, even if the A’s managed to hobble together something that looks vaguely like an actual strategy for their relocation, it wouldn’t change the fact that subsidizing the whims of billionaire sports moguls isn’t sound public policy. Academic research is largely in agreement that dipping into the public treasury to prop up private sports facilities doesn’t deliver the sort of widespread regional prosperity lobbyists and analysts promise it will.
Given the multitude of unanswered questions about the A’s stadium, there’s no reason to think this project will be any different. A few solid answers from team representatives, however, would at least provide the public with the sense that there’s some sort of a plan in place to earn a tangible return on the $380 million our electeds promised to dole out.
As it is right now, it feels more like the treasury is being raided because lawmakers were wooed by a few meaningless stadium renderings and vague promises of things to come — and that’s really not a solid approach to developing economic growth, regardless of how one feels about Fisher or the A’s.
Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.
