Progressives on Capitol Hill want to make it harder for professional sports teams to jump to a new city, citing “billionaire” team owners who they say leverage relocation threats for big public subsidies.
The so-called Home Team Act, introduced by U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Austin) and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), would require that sports franchise owners give locals at least a year’s notice before moving to another city.
During that time, the local community would have the right of first refusal to purchase the team, as Green Bay did with the Packers NFL franchise.
“Far too many Americans know the pain of losing a team just so that the owner can make a buck,” said Casar, who cited his own experience losing the Oilers NFL team to Tennessee in 1997 when he was a child growing up in Houston.
“The Home Team Act would have saved the Houston Oilers. The Home Team Act would have kept the As and the Raiders in Oakland. The Home Team Act would make sure that the Spurs stay in my home district, in San Antonio,” Casar said at Thursday’s press conference on Capitol Hill.
A spokeswoman for Spurs Sports & Entertainment declined to comment on the legislation.
The team’s owners just inked a deal with city and county leaders last year to build a new $1.3 billion arena downtown — paid for, in part, by roughly $800 million in public funding.
Spurs owners never publicly threatened to relocate if the deal didn’t go through, but Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai made no bones about that possibility while trying to bring voters on board with using the county’s venue tax for the new arena.
“Even when teams don’t actually move, the threat of moving sets off a race to the bottom,” Casar said. “Billionaire owners pit taxpayers against one another, and then extort the government for billions of dollars.”
Sanders said that siphons public dollars away from communities’ most pressing needs.
“Municipalities all over this country are struggling right now to educate their kids, to pave their streets,” Sanders said. “The idea that you have billionaire owners running very profitable operations, [who] say, ‘If you don’t give us even more, we’re going to leave,’ … literally that means taking money out of the education of the kids, out of childcare for the kids, out of infrastructure for the people of that community.”
San Antonio’s deal with the Spurs calls for city bond money to help fund infrastructure around the new arena — at a time when the city already has less bond capacity for flood control, drainage and other amenities.
Months after voters approved the initial $800 million in public funding, city leaders said they may even need to raise taxes if they want to have money for projects in other parts of the city.
But supporters of the idea say the downtown sports and entertainment district would provide a much-needed boost to San Antonio’s economy, generating more sales tax revenue and spurring additional development in a part of town that’s been stagnant.
Under Casar’s bill, if a team wants to relocate, its existing community could try to purchase it through a community ownership model. Or, the team could be purchased by a government entity, a nonprofit, a public partnership, or individual or company that would agree to keep it in the same location.
“You could imagine a world where the city has a stake in the team, alongside other partners,” Casar said.
As it stands, Democrats have very little power in Republican-controlled Washington.
But Sanders said the bill ought to be broadly popular, since so many communities are in the midst of relocation scares.
“You can argue, maybe, that professional football is America’s religion,” he said. “So whether you’re a conservative or a progressive, whether you’re Black or white or Latino, you know what? You like your home team.”
