MLB has told the brewers that they need to make stadium repairs

[BrewerFan]

14 minutes ago, owbc said:

There are several different ways to raise enough capital for stadium improvements with that valuation. 

Yeah, use it to take out a loan. And now you're in a small market repaying a ~500M loan vs letting Nashville, an affluent city that was already bigger than Milwaukee as a market and growing faster than any other city, build one for you. 

I don't want to become the Milwaukee Sounds and watch AAA Baseball. Hell, I feel like I did that growing up as it was.

Selig, Kohl, they were loyal to Milwaukee. They made a lot of money, but they made staying part of the sale. These owners, I doubt the City of Milwaukee is their priority. 

I wish they'd just kept the 5 county tax going to pay for all this. It didn't bother me in the least bit and it kept them around...

[KeithStone53151]

In my experience, it is very normal for the lessor(City of Milwaukee) to pay for upkeep costs and large capital repairs of the building. That's how most lease agreements work in the business world. People don't rent space and pay extra to upkeep the building for you. This assumes the Brewers are paying market rent in their lease payments, which is highly unlikely because if the Brewers were making large lease payments to the City we wouldn't need nearly as much funding from the City/taxpayers(otherwise it makes you wonder where those rent checks are going). Worth noting, this building is specialized in nature and can't easily be repurposed to many other businesses like an office building or grocery store could be...so the Brewers have significant leverage from that perspective.

All that said, this seems like a no brainer to shell out for the repairs if it comes with a significant extension of the lease agreement to keep the Brewers in Milwaukee long term.

[nate82]

10 hours ago, owbc said:

There are several different ways to raise enough capital for stadium improvements with that valuation. 

Except that is not what they are saying.  They believe the Brewers have that as a spendable asset like the Brewers have $1.6 billion in cash they can spend.

I would prefer crowdfunding over the government giving any sports team money for a stadium.  Crowdfunding has been around for awhile it is how the base was paid for for the Statue of Liberty.  Currently just about everything from comic books, video games, music, movies, books and even businesses have been funded through crowdfunding.

One video game has raised over $500m in crowdfunding over about 8-years now.  So it is possible for a team to do a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the project.

[owbc]

1 hour ago, KeithStone53151 said:

In my experience, it is very normal for the lessor(City of Milwaukee) to pay for upkeep costs and large capital repairs of the building. That's how most lease agreements work in the business world. People don't rent space and pay extra to upkeep the building for you. This assumes the Brewers are paying market rent in their lease payments, which is highly unlikely because if the Brewers were making large lease payments to the City we wouldn't need nearly as much funding from the City/taxpayers(otherwise it makes you wonder where those rent checks are going). Worth noting, this building is specialized in nature and can't easily be repurposed to many other businesses like an office building or grocery store could be...so the Brewers have significant leverage from that perspective.

All that said, this seems like a no brainer to shell out for the repairs if it comes with a significant extension of the lease agreement to keep the Brewers in Milwaukee long term.

Yes which is why the MLB and NFL absolutely LOVE publicly funded stadiums. The city/state are stuck now because they own the building. That's why I wish they would offer to sell the facility to the Brewers for $0 as part of whatever financing package they come up with. The taxpayers need to get completely out of the stadium business. 

Arenas are different, since it turns out they can be quite profitable. So of course we're now seeing fully private financing for many arenas. I have heard from a source that the Seattle Kraken ownership group is making a huge sum of money from concerts of which they pocket 100% of the revenue.