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2 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
The Center Square is an odd news outlet: First launched as Watchdog.org in 2009 with financial support from right-wing and libertarian groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, it’s veered between editorial support for conservative causes and some excellent reporting, especially on items where the issue at hand aligns with their sponsors’ political lens. Though I guess you could say similar for lots of news publications these days, so maybe it’s unfair to single them out.
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2 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
Add the Vancouver Whitecaps to the list of teams looking to build a new stadium, maybe, possibly, if the price is right:The Major League Soccer club is in talks with the City of Vancouver about the construction of a stadium at the PNE fairgrounds site, said Whitecaps CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster.
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2 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
It’s always fun when you get to see how stupidity breaks out in real time, and so it was with the story growing over the last few days that the Cincinnati Bengals ownership could respond to the looming expiration of their lease by moving, and in particular by moving to Chicago.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
Day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County! We’ve got a packed day of presenters and we all got lost in campus construction on the way to the meeting room, so let’s go go go:First up is J.C. Bradbury, who should need no introduction, speaking on “Franchise Relocation and Stadium Subsidies: Credible Threats or Cheap Talk?” Why do we still have so many stadium subsidies when they’re so pointless? he asks.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
Today’s main event will be the liveblog of day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which tons of presentations on stadiums and stadium-adjacent topics, but first here’s the regular Friday weekly news r0undup, written entirely on Thursday! If anyone’s roof blew off this morning, it’ll just have to wait till Monday.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
Stadium Day at the second annual sports economics conference at University of Maryland-Baltimore County isn’t until tomorrow, so while I’m attending today, I’m not liveblogging, meaning you’ll have to wait 24 hours for this kind of nonstop excitement.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
As expected, the Ohio state legislature has killed Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal to use increased sports gambling, cigarette, and cannabis taxes to fund a $2 billion stadium slush fund, and will instead move ahead with its own plan to collect all sales and income and other state taxes from in and around a new Cleveland Browns stadium and use them to give Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million toward the stadium’s construction cost.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
Apparently all the stadium news decided to happen in the last 24 hours, that’s okay, I didn’t have any better plans for things to do with my Tuesday. Anyway, in Cleveland yesterday, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam revealed his “Plan B” if the state, county, and city don’t approve $1.2 billion in public money for a new stadium in Brook Park:Haslam said it will come down to whether Ohio lawmakers approve $600 million in funding for the stadium proposal in the budget at the end of June.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
And speaking of people who will be speaking at this week’s sports economics conference and the Casino Night Fallacy, J.C. Bradbury had an op-ed in the Arizona Mirror yesterday on the proposed Arizona Diamondbacks tax-redirection bill, and didn’t mince words, as he never does:The funding mechanism being proposed to benefit the Diamondbacks relies upon what public finance economists call “fiscal illusion.” The tax mechanism was selected to understate the public cost.
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3 weeks ago | 
fieldofschemes.com | Neil deMause |personNeil deMause
With the Oregon senate moving forward with plans to approve up to $800 million in stadium bonds for a potential MLB expansion team, to be funded with player income taxes — it just passed its last committee vote and is headed for the full senate — the Portland Business Journal asked a “Portland economist” to explain it.
