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http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0VC0EP

With NFL Rams gone, St. Louis still stuck with stadium debt

By Robin Respaut

(Reuters) - The National Football League’s Rams left behind more than bitterness when the team ditched St. Louis for Los Angeles last month - it left a stadium saddled with about $144 million in debt and maintenance costs.

Taxpayers will now shoulder the remaining payments for the Edward Jones Dome with only the help of revenue from tractor pulls, volleyball tournaments, concerts and the like.

St. Louis Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed has asked the NFL to help pay off the stadium, but so far has gotten no response.

“The fans are being left holding the bag,” Reed said. “I think they should factor that into the total cost of the move."

The leftover debt and maintenance costs are another example of the NFL's negotiating prowess with many cities, sports economists said, and also reflects larger problems with the deal St. Louis struck with the Rams.

Even before the team decided to leave, the city's stadium revenues didn't cover its payments, leaving the city with annual shortfalls.

The league and the Rams did not respond to requests to comment.

Across the country, cities have gotten stuck with substantial costs after sports teams leave or even move across town. Often, local governments must pay bonds, maintenance costs, or demolition fees after a team is gone.

Houston’s iconic Astrodome, once dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World, sits empty a decade after the facility housed 25,000 evacuees of Hurricane Katrina and nearly 20 years after the Oilers left. The Detroit Lions’ former Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, was used sporadically after the team moved downtown in 2002, but shuttered for good when the inflatable roof was deflated.

Today, after years of exposure to the elements, the Silverdome is slated for demolition. Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, the Washington Redskins' former home, may meet the same fate, said Greg O’Dell, president and CEO of Events DC, the convention and sports authority that owns the stadium.

NFL stadiums are primarily designed for one thing - eight home games a year - and don't necessarily adapt well to alternate uses. Cities also have little chance of attracting a new professional team to an old stadium; building a glitzy new one is often what it takes to win league approval.

“These things become economically obsolete before they become physically obsolete,” said Victor Matheson, College of the Holy Cross economics professor.

It’s not uncommon for local governments to pay debts and maintenance on abandoned stadiums for years - even after it is demolished. Seattle’s Kingdome bonds were retired only last year, 15 years after the facility was imploded in 2000. Philadelphia has $160,000 left to pay on Veterans Stadium, more than a decade after the facility was torn down. Debt from Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome - demolished in 2008 - still hadn't been paid off in 2013, according to state filings.

In St. Louis, the $280 million agreement to build the Edward Jones Dome for the Rams raised eyebrows since its opening in 1995. Unlike other stadium deals, the St. Louis contract included a clause requiring the 67,000-seat dome be maintained to a first-tier standard, meaning the facility must be considered among the top quarter of all NFL football facilities.

As the stadium aged - and new, state-of-the-art NFL stadiums were erected in New Jersey, Texas, and California – the bar became more onerous.

“This was a contract designed to be broken” by the team, said Matheson, who studies stadium finances. “They had a terrible, terrible contract with the Rams."

A few years ago, to maintain the stadium’s top-tier status, the Rams sought an estimated $700 million of improvements. St. Louis balked, and the Rams started looking elsewhere.

To cover costs, the city paid about $6 million for annual debt service and maintenance for the stadium but collected only about $4.2 million in direct revenues from Rams games, according to the Mayor's office. The state, which paid $12 million annually, made $12.4 million in revenues from NFL activities, Missouri Department of Economic Development estimated. The county paid $6 million annually; it's unclear how much of that was offset by Rams-related revenues.

All three entities will continue paying their share until the debt is paid off in 2021.

Without the Rams’ revenues, St. Louis is looking at an even deeper financial hole. And it’s coming at a time when the city is facing a spiking murder rate, high poverty and high debt. Last August, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the city’s credit rating to Aa1 from Aa3, which could lead to increased borrowing costs.

“We’re going to have to tighten the belt in a few places,” said Reed, the alderman.

In 2002, St. Louis city voters displayed their frustration with public stadium financing by passing a ballot measure that required a public vote to approve any future sports subsidies.

But last summer, a judge invalidated the law as too vague. The next day, voters rejected a $180 million proposal to purchase more fire trucks and improve police equipment.

The juxtaposition of residents voting on such basic needs while being denied a say on stadium subsidies did not sit well with Jeanette Mott Oxford, executive director of Empower Missouri, a social justice organization, and co-founder of the Coalition Against Public Funding for Stadiums that campaigned for the ordinance.

“When you live in an urban area, there is money needed for public safety, public health, even just repairing potholes,” Oxford said. “I just became so cynical."

(Reporting by Robin Respaut)

First they could afford two stadiums and the Rams leaving the dome would be good since they could have more events at the dome, and now they can't afford the one?

They built the damn thing without a NFL team in the first place. then they lure the Rams there with an unrealistic lease. they have no one to blame but their idiotic civic leaders.

bubbaramfan wrote:They built the damn thing without a NFL team in the first place. then they lure the Rams there with an unrealistic lease. they have no one to blame but their idiotic civic leaders.

No, it's all Stan's fault.

Elvis wrote:First they could afford two stadiums and the Rams leaving the dome would be good since they could have more events at the dome, and now they can't afford the one?

No shit. they should have thought about that when the decided to play hard ball with the Rams. Sucks for them but they asked for it. And they got it. Or should I say they got nuthin'?

This will be the story of all stories when teams look to relocate in the future when asking for public money.

Articles like this piss me off. The idiot that wrote this should not be printed anywhere ever again.

1) The Astrodome was not constructed solely for the NFL in fact there were many events including the Houston Astro's. The Oilers were a team for 8 years before they leased the Dome for their games, playing prior to that at U of Houston and Rice University.

2) He lists other stadiums that stand unused on publicly owned property on public money. Another example of idiot politicians! You have a publicly owned asset on public land and you're letting it fall apart and not generating revenue? Shame on you not the team you used to lease it to.

3) He mentions stadiums that are still being paid for after they've been abandoned. Who drew up the financing? Who laid out the projected P&L's for the stadium? If the politicians that fleeced people for money to build stadiums knowing full well when these situations arose they'd be out of office! They don't know a damn thing about running a business, how it earns money and how to pay off the buildings they own otherwise they wouldn't be freeloading off the public as politicians!

4) The Dome wasn't built for the Rams in the first place! If not for that “They had a terrible, terrible contract with the Rams." as he puts it they would never have had a professional sports team in there generating revenue!

5) And this is the one that pisses me off the most. Where were the articles from these social justice warriors when Peacock and Blitz were planning to build a new stadium and take the Rams out of the Dome? Their hero's plan all along was to do exactly what they're crying about now! And the best part of it all they sold it by saying the Dome would make more money with the Rams not there. So if there's a revenue problem with the Rams out of the Dome and they can't pay it off maybe they should check with Peacock, he had a plan all along that it seemed wouldn't have created this problem. Unless that was another unsuitable part of his stadium plan.

OldSchool wrote:Articles like this piss me off. The idiot that wrote this should not be printed anywhere ever again.

1) The Astrodome was not constructed solely for the NFL in fact there were many events including the Houston Astro's. The Oilers were a team for 8 years before they leased the Dome for their games, playing prior to that at U of Houston and Rice University.

2) He lists other stadiums that stand unused on publicly owned property on public money. Another example of idiot politicians! You have a publicly owned asset on public land and you're letting it fall apart and not generating revenue? Shame on you not the team you used to lease it to.

3) He mentions stadiums that are still being paid for after they've been abandoned. Who drew up the financing? Who laid out the projected P&L's for the stadium? If the politicians that fleeced people for money to build stadiums knowing full well when these situations arose they'd be out of office! They don't know a damn thing about running a business, how it earns money and how to pay off the buildings they own otherwise they wouldn't be freeloading off the public as politicians!

4) The Dome wasn't built for the Rams in the first place! If not for that “They had a terrible, terrible contract with the Rams." as he puts it they would never have had a professional sports team in there generating revenue!

5) And this is the one that pisses me off the most. Where were the articles from these social justice warriors when Peacock and Blitz were planning to build a new stadium and take the Rams out of the Dome? Their hero's plan all along was to do exactly what they're crying about now! And the best part of it all they sold it by saying the Dome would make more money with the Rams not there. So if there's a revenue problem with the Rams out of the Dome and they can't pay it off maybe they should check with Peacock, he had a plan all along that it seemed wouldn't have created this problem. Unless that was another unsuitable part of his stadium plan.

Good points but she also left out that the dome is first and foremost a convention center and that's one of the reasons for the out clause since it wasn't a real football venue.

http://www.fieldofschemes.com/2016/02/0 ... last-time/
St. Louis wants to expand convention center after losing NFL, because that worked so well the last time
Posted on February 3, 2016 by Heywood Sanders

Coming off the loss of the Rams, St. Louis’ leaders have come up with a can’t fail strategy for boosting the city and its fortunes: Spend hundreds of millions to improve the convention center and domed stadium complex abandoned by the Rams to better compete in the national convention market. Kitty Ratcliffe, head of the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission, owner of the center and dome, recently proclaimed, “Our competitors are building, while we’ve been doing nothing.” The chief of staff for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay weighed in with “We’re looking at this as a boost for the region’s tourism industry.” And they promised a consultant study “in the next few weeks” that would document the needs and set out a price tag.

Here they go again. Thirty years ago, faced with the loss of the NFL Cardinals, then-Mayor Vince Schoemehl and the region’s business leaders promoted a combined convention center expansion and domed stadium as the cure for the city’s ills. The argument by mayoral staffers was that “the City cannot feel like a ‘winner’ if it’s constantly losing things.” The city’s then budget director argued that a combined dome/convention center would be “an exciting world-class building project. We don’t often get this type of opportunity to make an international impact, like the Astrodome.”

Armed with consultant studies that promised a big boost in convention activity from what was supposed to be the country’s fourth biggest convention center, the city, county and state governments plopped down $240 million for a dome that still didn’t have a football tenant. More consultant studies said that what St. Louis really needed was a 1,000-room hotel next door to the new America’s Center complex. The head of the Convention and Visitors Commission in 1999 forecast that a new hotel would boost major conventions from 33 in 1998 to 56 in 2004, with hotel room nights almost doubling, to 800,000 a year. Mayor Clarence Harmon pressed the case for state aid for the hotel as “the foundation of our efforts to revitalize downtown and its is a cornerstone of our overall economic development strategy in the City of St. Louis.”

The new $277 million, 1,081-room Renaissance Grand Hotel opened in 2003 and immediately floundered, with occupancy and rates well below consultant forecasts. Beyond the problem of opening in the wake of 9/11, the hotel never spurred the predicted convention boom. By 2006, there weren’t 54 major conventions, but just 32. And the total continued to sink, so that 2008 saw just 438,000 convention room nights, a bit less than the 800,000 promised. With no new convention business, the hotel proved a total dud, and bondholders foreclosed on it in 2009, finally selling it for a third of debt. The story of the city’s convention business is still the same — 26 major conventions in 2014 and 425,411 room nights in 2014, almost exactly the same as the figures for 1997 and 1998.

Now, lest the city once again be viewed as a “loser,” with more promises of a “boost” for tourism, state and local officials seem poised to throw away more public money.

OldSchool wrote:Articles like this piss me off. The idiot that wrote this should not be printed anywhere ever again.

1) The Astrodome was not constructed solely for the NFL in fact there were many events including the Houston Astro's. The Oilers were a team for 8 years before they leased the Dome for their games, playing prior to that at U of Houston and Rice University.

2) He lists other stadiums that stand unused on publicly owned property on public money. Another example of idiot politicians! You have a publicly owned asset on public land and you're letting it fall apart and not generating revenue? Shame on you not the team you used to lease it to.

3) He mentions stadiums that are still being paid for after they've been abandoned. Who drew up the financing? Who laid out the projected P&L's for the stadium? If the politicians that fleeced people for money to build stadiums knowing full well when these situations arose they'd be out of office! They don't know a damn thing about running a business, how it earns money and how to pay off the buildings they own otherwise they wouldn't be freeloading off the public as politicians!

4) The Dome wasn't built for the Rams in the first place! If not for that “They had a terrible, terrible contract with the Rams." as he puts it they would never have had a professional sports team in there generating revenue!

5) And this is the one that pisses me off the most. Where were the articles from these social justice warriors when Peacock and Blitz were planning to build a new stadium and take the Rams out of the Dome? Their hero's plan all along was to do exactly what they're crying about now! And the best part of it all they sold it by saying the Dome would make more money with the Rams not there. So if there's a revenue problem with the Rams out of the Dome and they can't pay it off maybe they should check with Peacock, he had a plan all along that it seemed wouldn't have created this problem. Unless that was another unsuitable part of his stadium plan.

Just an added thought. I believe the CVR requested the NFL pay off the dome shortly after the move. If it were to be more profitable why would the NFL be on the hook for the dome? Doesn't make sense.