{"id":505437,"date":"2026-10-23T15:02:51","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T15:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/505437\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T15:02:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T15:02:51","slug":"friday-roundup-sacramento-raleigh-quebec-weigh-stadium-subsidies-for-teams-that-dont-exist-yet-field-of-schemes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/505437\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday roundup: Sacramento, Raleigh, Quebec weigh stadium subsidies for teams that don\u2019t exist yet \u2013 Field of Schemes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apologies for the occasional outages that beset this site this week, some of which may have been related to the PHP security crisis<\/a> but much of which likely was not. In any case, everything seems to be back to normal, and I\u2019ve blocked a lot more of the bots that were slowing the site down, so fingers crossed that there will be fewer \u201cerror establishing a database connection\u201d messages going forward.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s still plenty of news, though:<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s only being funded by the value of property tax that is generated by the stadium, by the surrounding development,\u201d said West Sacramento city manager Aaron Laurel, which still isn\u2019t how that works at all<\/a>.
\nBoth Democratic Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Amy Klobuchar and Republican Lisa Demuth say they\u2019d be okay to consider state subsidies<\/a> for new or upgraded venues for the Timberwolves, Lynx, Wild, and Vikings \u2014 yes, the Vikings are asking for money to upgrade their 10-year-old stadium<\/a>, I\u2019d forgotten that too \u2014 though Klobuchar did so with the caveat that the state has to be \u201creally smart\u201d so taxpayers \u201cdon\u2019t get hosed.\u201d Meanwhile, three candidates for state senate in Wake County, North Carolina say they\u2019re opposed to using state money for a stadium<\/a> 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\u2019s worth keeping an eye on.
\nThe Canadian Football League is reportedly ready to conditionally approve a 10th franchise in Quebec City<\/a>, 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 \u201cthe shovels of the [provincial and federal] governments must contribute to it,\u201d so it\u2019ll be up to the province\u2019s new separatist-led government<\/a> to decide whether it wants to chip in or not.
\nCheck it out, it\u2019s an entire CBS News article about how new sports venues have fewer regular seats and more luxury suites and how it\u2019s pricing lots of fans out of going to games<\/a>, something that was covered much better last year<\/a> 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\u2019s been covered (by me<\/a>, among others) for more than two decades now \u2014 maybe mentioning that income inequality can have bad consequences would offend too many of Bari Weiss\u2019s billionaire besties<\/a>.
\nThe\u00a0Tampa Bay Rays are trying for their first World Series title starting tonight, after a postseason run where they couldn\u2019t sell out all their seats at Tropicana Field<\/a>. Maybe that\u2019s because Tropicana Field sucks, maybe it\u2019s because the St. Petersburg location sucks, maybe it\u2019s because the Rays were trying to charge too much for tickets<\/a>, or maybe it\u2019s because public transit to get there sucks<\/a>. 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<\/a>.
\nAlso in World Series news, the\u00a0Milwaukee Brewers sold $1,000 \u201ctimeless tickets\u201d ten years ago that could be redeemed for any future game, then neglected to set aside World Series seats for buyers of the promotion<\/a>, also welp.
\nD magazine editor Bethany Erickson is starting an online book club<\/a> to read J.C. Bradbury\u2019s new This One Will Be Different<\/a>, send her an email<\/a> if you want to join. (I\u2019ll hopefully be doing so, though I have a head start as I\u2019ve already read the book \u2014 review to come next week, if all goes according to plan.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apologies for the occasional outages that beset this site this week, some of which may have been related…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122],"class_list":["post-505437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}