Finance plans

On April 3, 2023, the Mayor’s Office will share what it is calling the finance plan for the football stadium. The Sports Authority was briefed on it a few days ago on March 28, 2023. I’m concerned that they are still intentionally hiding the ball on how much captured tax money will be controlled by the Titans through the course of the 30 year lease.

To start, it may help to see what a “finance plan” has looked like previously. Here is the the 2017-18 transit plan. The finance plan for transit is at pages 45-55. At page 50, there is a detailed “Sources and Uses” for the entire project. It shows how $8.95 billion of project revenue will be raised over the life of the project and how the $8.95 billion will be used over the life of the project.

Then at pages 54-55, there is even more granular detail about how the $8.95 billion will be raised and spent. Here’s an image of a small portion of that highly detailed information.

For the football stadium deal, the administration already disclosed in 2022 that they expect the revenue from captured public tax sources to be approximately $2.9 billion over 30 years. Before now, they have never provided information about how much of this tax money would be needed to pay off the $760 million construction bonds, or how much will be controlled by the Titans for future improvements to the new stadium.

I have predicted that the cost of paying off $760 million of bonds to build the stadium would use no more than half of the $2.9 billion in tax revenue. The slides presented to the Sports Authority do not provide exact information, but it looks like this prediction was accurate. Here’s the slide.

From the graph, it looks like the city will pay 3 years of interest only, and then pay the bonds off over 30 years. It’s hard to tell from the graph, but it likes the average is maybe $44 million per year for 33 years, which would be $1.45 billion. Again, there’s still some guesswork because they haven’t provided a total for us, but paying the $760 million in bonds will still leave half of the $2.9 billion in captured tax revenue available for other uses.

Unfortunately, from the slides I am seeing used during the Sports Authority meeting, we still don’t have a breakdown of how the rest of the money will be used. Here’s the slide they did show at the Sports Authority meeting on March 28:

Everything below the green line will be used to pay the $760 million in construction bonds. All of the tax revenue above the line will be used for…well…we don’t know exactly. Here’s a video I did last week that describes in words how this captured tax money will be spent. I was genuinely hoping that this finance plan would have spending details like what was in the transit finance plan from a few years ago. But it looks like we don’t have that yet.

Keep in mind that this failure (so far) to disclose how much of the captured tax revenue above the green line will go toward different uses is an intentional effort to keep you from knowing how much in tax revenue will essentially be under the control of the Titans for new stadium improvements in the future.

I am hoping to get more detailed information than these Sports Authority slides when the administration makes their finance presentation to the Council on April 3.