Communities across the country are trying to decide whether or not to shell out big bucks for professional sports stadiums, everything from $650 million in Charlotte and $775 million in Jacksonville to $850 million in Buffalo and a whopping $1.2 billion in Nashville.
Supporters promise economic growth, but critics say the reality never lives up to the hype.
On Tuesday, county commissioners in Florida approved spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help build a new Major League Baseball stadium.
But earlier this year, Missouri voters rejected a stadium sales tax to build a new stadium for the back-to-back Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs.
Experts say these debates will be happening more and more in the coming years -- with dozens of teams seeking new stadiums as buildings age and leases expire.
“We’re looking at basically another $40 billion in spending over the next 20 years,” said Professor J.C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State University.
Economists who study stadiums say across the four major U.S. sports leagues, dozens of teams are set to see their leases expire in the next decade.
And while every stadium project is different, they all have at least one thing in common: soaring price tags.
“Stadiums that were once costing a few hundred million now cost well over a billion dollars, and the public contribution has increased to around an average of $500 million in the past decade,” Bradbury said.
Teams justify hefty price tags by promising new economic growth.
But experts have a warning.
“What we see is that spending in and around stadiums is mostly reallocated local spending, not net new spending in the community,” Bradbury said.
Supporters of stadium projects disagree.
“You have to put money into something to get money back,” said Bob Ott, a retired Cobb County (Georgia) commissioner.
Ott said the $300 million in taxpayer dollars they invested to help pay for the Atlanta Braves’ stadium has made the county a major league destination.
“We’ve got restaurants, we got bars, we’ve got apartments, we got people living there,” Ott said.
Across the country in Inglewood, California, sits So-Fi stadium, home to the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and Chargers.
The $5.5 billion stadium was privately funded in exchange for tax reimbursements.
Mayor James Butts said the stadium deal was the hail-Mary his city needed.
“We would have been bankrupt, period!” Butts said.
But even when team owners pick up the tab, some say there’s still a cost to taxpayers.
The Major League Soccer team New York City FC. will be building a new privately funded stadium on land provided by the city tax free, a move the city’s independent budget office said could cost the city at least $516 million in tax revenue, per the New York Times.
Councilmember Shekar Krishnan was the only person to vote against the deal.
“This was a massive giveaway of public land and public dollars to an entity that could absolutely pay back in taxes, in benefits and investments to our communities,” Krishnan said.
As stadium debates continue, Chicago and Cleveland are just a few of the cities currently working through the process as their professional teams look to potentially build new facilities with the help of public funds.