Apologies for the occasional outages that beset this site this week, some of which may have been related to the PHP security crisis but much of which likely was not. In any case, everything seems to be back to normal, and I’ve blocked a lot more of the bots that were slowing the site down, so fingers crossed that there will be fewer “error establishing a database connection” messages going forward.
Also back to normal: the weekly news roundups, though this one is for a shorter week since the last one during my travels was just on Monday. There’s still plenty of news, though:
The California state legislature has passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill opening the door to using a mega-TIF district to siphon off $1 billion in property, sales, and hotel taxes to pay for a stadium for an MLB expansion team in Sacramento. “It’s only being funded by the value of property tax that is generated by the stadium, by the surrounding development,” said West Sacramento city manager Aaron Laurel, which still isn’t how that works at all.
Both Democratic Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Amy Klobuchar and Republican Lisa Demuth say they’d be okay to consider state subsidies for new or upgraded venues for the Timberwolves, Lynx, Wild, and Vikings — yes, the Vikings are asking for money to upgrade their 10-year-old stadium, I’d forgotten that too — though Klobuchar did so with the caveat that the state has to be “really smart” so taxpayers “don’t get hosed.” Meanwhile, three candidates for state senate in Wake County, North Carolina say they’re opposed to using state money for a stadium to lure an MLB expansion team to Raleigh. This probably is mostly to do with the fact that there are actual local rich people lobbying for the funds in Minnesota and none yet in North Carolina, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
The Canadian Football League is reportedly ready to conditionally approve a 10th franchise in Quebec City, to play in a proposed C$350 million stadium that has no funding plan yet, hence the conditional part. Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand has said (translated from French) that “the shovels of the [provincial and federal] governments must contribute to it,” so it’ll be up to the province’s new separatist-led government to decide whether it wants to chip in or not.
Check it out, it’s an entire CBS News article about how new sports venues have fewer regular seats and more luxury suites and how it’s pricing lots of fans out of going to games, something that was covered much better last year by the New Yorker. It also manages to avoid ever mentioning the soaring income inequality in the U.S. that has made it feasible for sports teams to market themselves mostly to the rich and near-rich and ignore the bulk of the populace, something that’s been covered (by me, among others) for more than two decades now — maybe mentioning that income inequality can have bad consequences would offend too many of Bari Weiss’s billionaire besties.
The Tampa Bay Rays are trying for their first World Series title starting tonight, after a postseason run where they couldn’t sell out all their seats at Tropicana Field. Maybe that’s because Tropicana Field sucks, maybe it’s because the St. Petersburg location sucks, maybe it’s because the Rays were trying to charge too much for tickets, or maybe it’s because public transit to get there sucks. Might be worth finding out before sinking billions of tax dollars into a new stadium at a site where public transit also sucks, oh right, welp.
Also in World Series news, the Milwaukee Brewers sold $1,000 “timeless tickets” ten years ago that could be redeemed for any future game, then neglected to set aside World Series seats for buyers of the promotion, also welp.
D magazine editor Bethany Erickson is starting an online book club to read J.C. Bradbury’s new This One Will Be Different, send her an email if you want to join. (I’ll hopefully be doing so, though I have a head start as I’ve already read the book — review to come next week, if all goes according to plan.)