Time is running out on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposal for the state to get involved in building a sports arena in Alexandria that would house the relocated Washington Capitals of the NHL and the Washington Wizards of the NBA.
Basketball is Youngkin’s preferred sport, but a hockey analogy might be more appropriate here. He faces an all-star goalkeeper in state Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth and the chair of Senate Finance, who so far has swatted away every scoring attempt — and shows no signs of flinching.
Youngkin’s central problem is that he’s got to find a way to get around Lucas and her insistence that she won’t let the arena deal escape her committee to get to the Senate floor — and so far there seems no practical way to do that.
Youngkin is in a tricky spot here. There are lots of changes he’d like to see made in the budget; adding in the arena is just one of them. He’s embarked on a campaign-style series of events to build support for revamping what he calls “the backward budget.” Building public support to pressure a recalcitrant legislature to do something is nothing new, and maybe that pressure will sway some legislators on something like tax cuts. Or maybe it won’t. The arena, though, is being held up by just one specific legislator, and she’s not likely to be moved by all this razzle-dazzle. If anything, it’s likely to make Lucas dig in harder, and bring other Democrats to her side.
There are legitimate questions that can be raised about whether it’s wise for one legislator to have so much power, but Democrats probably aren’t inclined to ask them, not when one of their own is wielding the gavel. Let’s cut through all the policy niceties and look at the raw politics here: Youngkin will be around for just one more regular session of the legislature, the one in early 2025. Lucas and the other senators won’t be on the ballot again until 2027. Who are they more fearful of — the governor or the Senate Finance chair? It’s not Youngkin. They all know they will outlast him. Youngkin is on the clock — he’s got just one chance to get the arena deal while legislators may be fine waiting two years for their priorities.
Rather than focus on building public support, Youngkin might be better off if he got up every morning, drove down to Portsmouth and stood outside Lucas’ door with flowers and chocolates — or the legislative equivalents thereof.
It might be too late for that already. Lucas seems so adamantly against the arena that she seems prepared to let some key Democratic priorities — an increased minimum wage, legalized retail cannabis — slide until the next governor takes office in January 2026. The logical deal had been some kind of grand bargain involving all those things — Democrats sign off on the arena, Youngkin grudgingly agrees to a higher minimum wage and cannabis shops. By definition, compromises require both sides to do something they don’t want to do. Right now, though, it looks like no deal of any kind is happening. That means the advice I’m about to give may come under the heading of “too little, too late,” but I still believe it’s sound.
Don’t call the arena deal “unprecedented.”
This is a word Youngkin likes to use to describe the deal and he’s not wrong. There’s never been a situation where two sports teams, from two different sports, have moved as part of the same relocation plan. It’s only natural that the governor would play this up. In his remarks outside the Capitol after the arena was excised from the budget — this is the event where Lucas was looking down on him from above — Youngkin called the deal a “one-of-a-kind, first-of-its-kind economic development.” These are the buzzwords of a business sales pitch — and that’s why I’d advise the governor to drop them immediately.
This is Virginia. We haven’t much liked things that were unprecedented since 1776. Unprecedented sounds risky, and the essence of Lucas’ opposition is that the deal here is financially risky. By emphasizing how unprecedented the deal is, Youngkin is only feeding Lucas’ fears. She has essentially wrapped herself in the garb of previous generations of Virginia budget chairs who kept a hawkish eye on any kind of financial risk that would endanger the state’s AAA bond rating.
That’s why Youngkin should be emphasizing how this financing scheme has worked elsewhere.
The standard criticism of publicly financed sports arenas is they don’t pay off. That’s often been true, but it hasn’t universally been true. Youngkin should be touting how the Alexandria plan is in line with other cities where things have worked. For instance:
- In Milwaukee, the Fiserv Forum that’s home to the Milwaukee Bucks relies on taxes generated from for the forum itself. More to the point, that means taxes on the NBA millionaires who play there. That’s similar to how the Alexandria arena would work. The exact details may vary from Milwaukee to Virginia, but the basic point seems the same. The arena has generated more than enough revenue to pay off the yearly debt on bonds. And that doesn’t count whatever development has been sparked in the nearby Deer District. (I looked more closely at Milwaukee and other recent arenas in a recent column.)
- A better example might be in Dallas, where the American Airlines Center is home to both the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and the NHL’s Dallas Stars. Like the proposed Alexandria deal, it was funded through a “tax increment financing” scheme that relied on taxes generated from the center to pay off the debt — and it has. The center opened in 2001 and the debt was paid off just 10 years later, according to the Dallas Morning News.
- These plans have been used in lots of other places, including the joint NBA/NHL arena in Denver and most recently for the proposed minor league baseball stadium in Chattanooga, Tennessee. TIFs themselves date back even longer; they were first used in California in 1952. The mechanism here isn’t unusual at all; the question is whether this is a good use of it.
Youngkin would be better off to cite all these examples — even if the details differ somewhat — and use phrases such as “proven,” “tried and tested,” “demonstrated.” Instead of making the arena deal sound exciting, he should be trying to make it sound safe. Just how safe it is, well, that might still be a matter of debate — The Washington Post recently ran a story questioning whether the arena would ever be able to meet its projected number of events per year. However, purely for messaging purposes, the governor might be well-advised to try different language.
From the beginning, Youngkin has faced some special challenges in selling the proposed arena:
- The argument that billionaire owners should pay for their own facilities is always a good one, even though in practice that’s hardly ever how it works. The reality is that if a community wants top-level professional sports, it has to pay at least something for an arena or stadium. In the NBA, 28 of the 30 teams play in arenas built with some kind of public financing. In the NHL, the figure is 25 of 32.
- Virginia, though, isn’t as desperate as some communities to have such top-level pro sports. Most of our population is already within easy driving distance of an existing pro sports city: Washington, D.C. It’s not as if we’re a community yearning to proclaim itself in the big leagues (the way Las Vegas was with the NFL Raiders) or a community that felt itself in danger of losing a team (as Milwaukee was with the Bucks, and countless other cities before it). Yes, it would be nice to have these teams in Virginia, but it doesn’t feel necessary. They wouldn’t be bearing the “Virginia” name; they’d still be “Washington” teams. If the choice were between these teams moving to Alexandria or decamping to, say, Kansas City, a city without either an NBA or NHL team, that might be a more interesting situation. Instead, the threat, if you want to call it that, is that the teams stay in D.C. For a lot of people, that simply prompts a shrug. Economically, this would be a boost to Virginia, but we’re really just talking a relocation within a metro area.
- We’re also a state, not a city and, as I’ve pointed out before, much of Virginia doesn’t feel any sports allegiance to D.C.-based teams. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of the free market. Ticket reseller Vivid Seats has compiled a map of the United States that showed the most popular NBA team in each county, based on ticket requests. This effectively maps the economy. For Virginia, it shows that once you get south of Augusta County or west of Prince Edward County, the Wizards don’t have much traction. The top team is generally the Charlotte Hornets, which fits into previous studies that show much of the western part of the state is more economically connected with North Carolina than it is the rest of Virginia. What does it matter to us what part of the D.C. metro the Wizards play in when they’re not our team?
Vivid’s county-by-county map for NHL teams is very similar. In much of Southside Virginia, the favorite team is the Carolina Hurricanes, who play in Raleigh. Go far enough west and it becomes the Nashville Predators. In Dickenson County, it’s the Vancouver Canucks. (No clue; probably a small data sample). The governor’s pitch playing up state pride doesn’t matter much if we’re not already identifying with the other part of the state. - The governor’s best argument for the arena is that this is simply economic development — the project could lead to 30,000 jobs, but that’s mostly in the form of secondary growth, and how many people really believe those figures? If Amazon promises to hire 25,000 people, that’s one thing — that’s one company promising a single expansion — but once you start talking about projections and multiplier effects, many people simply zone out.
That’s why the governor might be hurting himself by talking up the benefits of the arena in “unprecedented” tones. He may well be right. The whole goal with the Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, California, is to grow a “stadium city” of related development. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that an arena in Alexandria — which would host more games than a football stadium ever will — would also generate related development. Whether it’s enough to pay off the bonds, and whether it’s enough to do something about some of the terrible sections of Interstate 81 that I have to drive on — that’s beyond my power to say. I’m not an accountant and I’m not an economist. However, as a wordsmith, I’d advise the governor that more conservative language might be the order of the day — safety first is never bad advice.