There must be something magical about Potomac Yard that, like mythical sirens calling out to sailors, lures unsuspecting governors to their political doom.
More than three decades ago, then-Gov. Douglas Wilder looked at the old railyard in Alexandria and saw a football stadium. He negotiated a deal with Jack Kent Cooke, then owner of Washington’s National Football League team, and in July 1992 announced with great flourish a plan to move the team to Virginia.
“The announcement at Potomac Yard was a media extravaganza,” The Washington Post reported. “Local television carried the event live. There was a large model of the 78,600-seat stadium on display, as well as signs declaring the site the home of ‘Jack Kent Cooke Stadium at Potomac Yard.’” The NFL commissioner was on hand, and so was the team’s legendary coach, Joe Gibbs.
“We are going to build a stadium here at Potomac Yard,” Cooke declared. “We will have that stadium ready by the 1994 season, and nothing is going to stop us.”
By that October, it had all come undone. Neighbors objected, ridiculing Wilder and Cooke as “the powerful and the greedy.” Legislators felt out of the loop. Del. Vincent Callahan, R-Fairfax County and a senior legislator of some consequence despite his minority party status, told the Post: “It came unraveled almost from the start,” he said. “It was the poorest example of a legislative public relations effort in Virginia that I’ve ever seen.”
Callahan is no longer with us but I have to wonder what he’d think of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s attempt to put a combination basketball and hockey arena in the same general area, because the dynamics seem much the same.
The arena is now officially dead: The city of Alexandria said so Wednesday afternoon. Shortly after that, the District of Columbia announced that NBA’s Washington Wizards and the NHL’s Washington Capitals were extending their lease.
Even before that, it seemed functionally dead. Key legislators said they haven’t heard anything from the governor lately. Youngkin had been looking at the option of sending the legislature a budget amendment, or a stand-alone measure, dealing with the arena when the General Assembly reconvenes on April 17 for its so-called veto session. However, two key legislators — Senate Finance chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, and House Appropriations chair Luke Torian, D-Prince William County — had told The Washington Post that they didn’t think Youngkin has the votes to pass the arena deal, no matter what procedural form it took.
Gov. Youngkin statement on arena project:
“Virginians deserve better. A one-of-a-kind project bringing world-class athletes and entertainment, creating 30,000 jobs and $12 billion in economic activity just went up in smoke. This transformational project would have driven investment to every corner of the Commonwealth. This should have been our deal and our opportunity, all the General Assembly had to do was say: ‘thank you, Monumental, for wanting to come to Virginia and create $12 billion of economic investment, let’s work it out.’ But no, personal and political agendas drove away a deal with no upfront general fund money and no tax increases, that created tens of thousands of new jobs and billions in revenue for Virginia. I’d like to thank Ted Leonsis and the Monumental team, the City of Alexandria, JBG Smith and countless other partners for their professionalism, belief in Virginia and fortitude. Congratulations to Monumental for striking a great deal, I’m sorry you won’t be in Virginia.”
This arena deal went south for basically the same reasons the stadium deal did 32 years ago: neighborhood opposition and lack of legislative buy-in. The former was always inevitable — when has any big project ever not had local opposition of some sort? — but the latter was not. That raises the question: What happened?
In the words of the great philosopher Captain in the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” “What we’ve got here … is a failure to communicate.”
In Youngkin’s defense, he thought he was going through the right channels. Two days before the deal was made public in December, he met with the Major Employment and Investments Project Approval Commission, a panel of senior legislators who are tasked with reviewing incentive projects for large economic development projects.
This is a case of knowing the rules, but not the unwritten rules. Four of the five Senate positions on that commission were held by legislators who weren’t returning to the General Assembly. That meant Lucas wasn’t one of those at that briefing. Nor were some other senior senators.
That may not have been Youngkin’s first mistake, though.
The Washington Post reports that the initial inquiry from Monumental Sports and Entertainment — the owner of the Wizards and the Capitals — came to Virginia’s economic development office in December 2022 where it was officially code-named Project Potter. In April 2023, Monumental’s top executive, Ted Leonsis, first toured the Potomac Yard property. He and Youngkin first met to discuss the deal in July 2023.
I’ve had one senior legislator — a Democrat, if it matters — tell me that’s when Youngkin should have involved some key lawmakers. At that point, the makeup of the upcoming General Assembly was very much in doubt, so Youngkin should have briefed leaders from both parties. He didn’t. I can understand why he didn’t — the more people who know, the more likely it is that word will get out and sink the deal.
However, there’s an age-old conflict between governors and legislators, no matter which parties they belong to: Governors think they run the state. Legislators humor them in this fantasy; they see governors as temporary administrators. “Governors come and go, but the legislature is forever” is a phrase I’ve heard more than once. The point being: Legislators don’t like being cut out of a deal that they think they should be involved in because they see themselves as the ones who really run the state. That was the case in Wilder’s day, when the same party — Democrats — controlled both the governor’s office and the General Assembly. It’s still the case today, when we have a Republican governor and a legislature that last summer was split between the two parties — and after the election was controlled entirely by Democrats.
On Wednesday, before Alexandria announced it was pulling out of the deal, Lucas and Torian were in Roanoke as part of their statewide tour to talk up the budget that Youngkin has called a “backward budget” and suggested he might veto. I asked them if, in hindsight, there was anything different the governor could have done to get the arena deal through.
Torian pointed out that after the Nov. 7 legislative elections, it was clear to all that Lucas would be the next chair of Senate Finance. (It has been clear since the June primary that she’d be in line for this position if Democrats won, which they did.)
“If you’re going to have a $2 billion deal come to the Commonwealth of Virginia, wouldn’t it make sense to get on the phone and call the incoming [chair] of Senate Finance and Appropriations? Ladies and gentleman, that never happened,” Torian said. “The governor sought to negotiate a $2 billion deal for the commonwealth without including, on a regular basis, or not including at all, members of the Virginia General Assembly.”
This is essentially the same complaint that legislators from both parties had about the Wilder deal back in 1992.
It’s common for Democratic legislators — and some Republicans, as long as their names aren’t attached — to complain that Youngkin is acting like the corporate CEO he once was and not understanding that the legislature is a co-equal branch of government (and one that sometimes think it’s a little more than co-equal).
“He thought was going to come in and it’d be like the Carlyle Group and he’d tell us what to do and we’d say, ‘Hi hi, which way to go?’” Lucas said. “I grew up in a shipyard and I have some terminology to tell him which way he could go.”
That critique might be true, but we should remember that Wilder was accused of the same thing with his arena deal — and he’d been a longtime legislator before he was elevated to statewide office.
We do know that Youngkin misjudged at least part of the power relationship between a governor and the legislature. He held out the prospect of toll relief in Hampton Roads; the tolls on the tunnels between Portsmouth and Norfolk have been a sore point for Lucas. However, as chair of the budget-writing committee, she didn’t need the governor’s offer; she could just write toll relief into the budget on her own.
If the governor wanted the arena, he needed to sit down with key legislators to work out a bargain — a bargain that, by definition, might involve the governor agreeing to sign some bills he otherwise might ink a veto to, such as legalizing retail cannabis or raising the minimum wage. That’s the way deals work. It never happened. Even the arena bill’s Senate patron, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County, issued a statement saying “by the time the deal was brought to the table it was essentially non-negotiable, even for myself as the bill’s sponsor.”
You can’t just present a take-it-or-leave-it deal to the General Assembly because legislators are always going to want a say. Wilder learned that in 1992, and Youngkin learned it again in 2024, both times the hard way. “I think once the whole process got off on a bad foot and the further it got down the road, he was dug in,” Lucas said of Youngkin. Of course, some might say the same about Lucas, who single-handedly kept the arena from coming to a vote either in her committee or on the Senate floor.
I’m sure the governor believes that the business case for the arena spoke for itself, but that’s not how the legislature works, rightly or wrongly. It might have always been hard for a Republican governor to sell a Democratic legislature on a plan that was easy to ridicule as a bailout for a billionaire — no matter that the governor contended the arena development would generate excess revenue that could be used for projects statewide. The optics alone were hard for some Democrats (and some Republicans, too). Still, I thought Democrats might have been eager to negotiate on the arena to get their priorities signed into law, but I’ve been told they’re content to wait Youngkin out — they’re convinced a Democrat will win the governorship in 2025 and then they can pass these bills again. They may be wrong, of course, but that’s how they see the world and one of the first rules of negotiating is to understand how the other side sees things. That meant Democrats had almost no incentive to negotiate.
There were also some other factors at play that I’m not sure have been given sufficient attention: Youngkin placed up the prestige factor of having two teams playing on Virginia soil, but I’m not sure many others shared that enthusiasm. The teams would presumably have still carried the “Washington” name. In Northern Virginia, the state’s biggest metro, this was simply a proposed relocation of two teams within an existing market. I’m not the first to point out that many people just weren’t that excited about moving the teams 5.8 miles, which is what Google Maps says is the distance from Capital One Arena in D.C. to Potomac Yard.
Outside Northern Virginia, I’m not sure there was much enthusiasm for either of these teams. I’ve pointed out before: The ticket reseller Vivid Seats says that based on its data, the most popular NBA team in the western third of the state is the Charlotte Hornets, not the Washington Wizards. The most popular NHL team across Southside is the Carolina Hurricanes, not the Washington Capitals; in much of Southwest Virginia, it’s the Nashville Predators.
Perhaps the final complication came when the attorney general for the District of Columbia said last week said the Wizards and Capitals are contractually obligated to play in D.C. through 2047. We don’t know if that’s so, but that legal opinion did put a cloud over the Alexandria project; what legislator could in good conscience vote for an arena that may not have its two primary tenants?
All this seems unfortunate to me. Maybe the arena deal was a bad one, I really don’t know. We know that some sports complexes have turned out to be real boondoggles. However, we know that some have paid off and helped drive development — I wrote earlier about the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. As someone sitting on the other side of the state, and as someone just naturally curious, I’d love to have known whether Youngkin’s claim that this is a “colossal opportunity” was right or not. Was the arena project something that could have generated enough revenue to help fix Interstate 81 and fund rural schools? If it would have, then that seems like it would have been a good deal. If it wouldn’t have, then it’s not, and this is no great loss. However, just like Wilder’s proposed football stadium three decades ago, we won’t get to find out.