Yesterday, WUSA9 had an incredible story on Monumental Sports and Entertainment posting several claims in support of their proposed arena. The issue is that everything Monumental Sports said was incorrect. As WUSA9 wrote, Monumental was called out for “untrue statements about the rarity of the financing of its proposed arena“.

– WUSA9

Yesterday, Monumental Sports was claiming on social media that the financing for the proposed arena would include the most amount of private funding for any project in recent memory and one of the least amounts of upfront state cash. One problem? It isn’t remotely close to being true.

As WUSA9 noted in their story, a number of different stadiums have been built in the last two decades using zero public financing. Their list includes the following stadiums in the NFL, NBA and MLB: SoFi Stadium, MetLife Stadium, Chase Center, Oracle Park and Yankee Stadium.

As a small sidenote, I should say that what constitutes public funding can be tricky at times. While I agree with WUSA9’s overall point, I do think their list above is incorrect. WUSA9 claims that Oracle Park was built with only private funds. Yes, but the city did pay significant amounts for infrastructure costs and gave city-owned land away for a discount. Yankee Stadium was built with a combo private money and public tax bonds. But considering the federal government subsidized the construction of Yankee Stadium “to the tune of $431 million federal taxpayer dollars“, I would say the public has given quite a bit. MetLife was built with private money as well. But the public did give up a significant amount of revenue through parking and other aspects around the stadium.’

Even with those little corrections, WUSA9 is correct that not everyone needs the public to fund a new arena, ballpark or stadium. USAToday wrote a story months ago showing that three NFL stadiums “have been built without any public funding“.

To remind everyone, the current proposal for a new arena has the State of Virginia paying for $2.8 billion in bonds. Monumental says they will give just $400 million. Virginia taxpayers, alone, would pay more than a billion dollars in taxpayer money.

“The project — which would include a new headquarters for Monumental, along with a state-of-the-art studio for its media network, a practice facility for the Wizards, a performing arts venue and an expanded e-sports facility — would surpass costs for any similar facility on record, leaving taxpayers an expected net cost of about $1.35 billion” – WTOP, 12/20/23

And the proposal from Monumental Sports also includes little bits of pieces of information that the public needs to understand and know about before this stadium is agreed upon. The proposal includes a tax increment financing (TIF) district. Today, this is a very common way of paying for new stadiums.

“But Virginia’s legislation goes further than other TIFs. The Virginia proposal would capture state and local income taxes that Potomac Yard workers would normally be paying, but rather than putting these revenues toward schools, police and other services, they would go back into the arena. Corporate taxes paid by Monumental and other companies that operate there, too, would be diverted to pay for development costs and debt service” – Bloomberg, 02/17/24

But Monumental Sports was not done. They also claimed that this new arena would allow for Alexandria, Virginia to be the first city “to bring in two major professional sports teams at the same time with one venue“.

Again, that is not correct. No matter how it is spun, two teams have moved together to a new city. In fact, the Capitals and Wizards have moved together previously.

• In 2016, SoFi Stadium brought the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles and the San Diego Chargers to Los Angeles where they share that stadium.
• The Falcons and Brewers both started playing in 1966 at the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium.
• Also, and this one is hard to understand how it was missed…the Capitals and Wizards have previously moved to a new arena in a new city together. It happened in 1997 when Capital One Arena opened its doors.

– Fox5

When WUSA9 asked Monumental Sports about these issues, it deleted the post right after. Now, the new social media post says:

“This project features a significantly higher percentage of private financing than MANY other stadium and arena projects” – WUSA9, 02/05/24

Monumental never addressed or answered why they also claimed that Alexandria had a chance to bring two major professional teams to one new stadium.

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