Look out on the horizon, just a few weeks from now, and you see something shimmering in the distance, something that could be a balm to almost everyone who’s been involved in the saga of the proposed new arena for the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals in Virginia.
A mulligan.
A chance for Ted Leonsis and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to repair what each had a hand in breaking: the good faith of a city that needs, more than anything else right now, effective leadership.
The proposed $2 billion deal that Leonsis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin worked out, and announced with great fanfare in December, currently is on life support in the Commonwealth. Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, of the “don’t (bleep) with me” Lucases, used her significant power as the chair of the state Senate’s Finance and Appropriations Committee to strip the proposal from the state’s 2024 budget, which was approved by Virginia’s General Assembly on Saturday. Youngkin has a couple of procedural maneuvers he could attempt to revive the deal in mid-April. But he indicated last Thursday that it was up to the Assembly to change its mind and restore the deal to the budget.
The next few weeks, then, present an opportunity for Leonsis and Bowser to get back to the bargaining table and get a deal done to keep the teams at Capital One Arena, in the District, for the long haul. An opportunity to give downtown D.C. a chance to rally from the COVID-induced loss of residents and businesses in nearby neighborhoods. A chance to deal with the concerns of Leonsis and fans, whether legit or exaggerated, about crime and/or buskers in the surrounding blocks around Capital One Arena on game nights.
(I still cannot believe we’re talking about moving teams out of town, at least in part, because of buskers. It’s music! It’s loud music, to be sure. But, it’s music! We deal with jackhammers, excavators, obnoxious horn honkers and all manner of loud, often irritating noises in the city every day. It’s part of living in a big city. People banging on homemade instruments and/or rapping makes some of y’all that uncomfortable? Jesus.)
What I know about Virginia state politics could fit in a thimble. And when rich people want something, they usually, ultimately, somehow, get it. Leonsis and Youngkin are both rich. So are many of the other people who stand to benefit if the entertainment district set up for Alexandria, including a 20,000-seat arena for the Wizards and Capitals, along with a practice facility for the NBA team, a smaller concert hall and the usual mixed-use bells and whistles that line the pockets of the well-heeled, is ultimately green-lit. So it’s premature to say the Potomac Yards project is DOA.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s say the plan is, at the least, put on hold for the rest of calendar ’24.
Youngkin is term-limited, by state mandate. He has two years left in his governorship. Next year, he will have one year left, making him, essentially, a lame duck. It’s hard to imagine he’ll be in a stronger position politically then than he is now, and he just got his shot sent into the third row by Lucas.
There is, then, an opportunity to change the perception that Leonsis cares far less about the city that his team’s promotional arms have embraced over the last few years than he claims, and that Bowser was stunningly tone-deaf in dealing with the owner of two of Washington’s four pro sports teams. He’s the owner. You have to deal with him, and not the way you’d deal with some gadfly who comes to your news conferences shouting inane questions. All due respect to the Commanders, but they’re open for business, maybe, a dozen or so times a year. The Caps and Wiz, meanwhile, combine for close to 100 nights annually, if there’s a playoff series or two involved.
Leonsis and Bowser need to get together and hammer this thing out.
After Leonsis announced in December that he’d worked out a deal with Virginia, Bowser and the D.C. City Council came up with $500 million in an 11th-hour effort to keep the Wizards and Caps in town. It seemed, at the time, too little, too late. Now, it should be where the two sides restart their discussions.
Leonsis, reportedly, asked for $600 million from the city before turning his attention to Virginia. Bowser, according to reporting in the Washington Post, countered with only a little more than $200 million in public money, asking that Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the parent company for the Wizards and Capitals, front the entire $432 million price tag for renovating Capital One Arena, with the city paying its half back to Monumental over 20 years. If I were Leonsis, I wouldn’t have gone for that, either. Mayors, and city councils, not only change their minds over time, but they also themselves are changed — by voters. Who’s to say what the city’s needs will be a decade from now, or who will be in office then?
That proposal, though, is no longer operative. But that $500 million is still on the table for Capital One, with no strings attached. (Whether that includes the $100 million-plus that would likely be needed for a standalone, state-of-the-art practice facility for the Wizards is not clear, at least not to me.) That should be more enough to fix what needs fixing in COA — which, while not state of the art after nearly 30 years, isn’t falling apart, either: no cracked pipes dumping fluids on paying customers, no lack of hot water for players in the showers or collapsing stands endangering visiting patrons.
The city did last month what it should have done years ago, opening a police substation in Chinatown. The substation also will have mental-health staffing to help intervene with people on the street going through mental-health crises in real time. Hopefully, more cops also will be available to patrol the Capital One Arena footprint before, during and after games and events, few of which extend past 11 p.m. More police, of course, means more potential issues, such as overtime. And addressing personnel shortages. And taking seriously complaints about occasional bad police behavior. These are all real things that are not just immediately or easily solvable because we want them to be.
But, I’d like to think we now all understand what losing two pro sports teams, along with all the concerts and other events that keep COA open 300-plus nights a year, would do to the city.
I’d like to think we now all understand the ripple effects of the teams leaving would have on communities like Congress Heights in Southeast, where Leonsis and the city built the Entertainment and Sports Arena, the home to the WNBAs Mystics and the G League’s Capital City Go-Go. If the Wizards and Caps leave COA, Leonsis and his PR mavens have floated the idea of the Mystics returning to COA, where they played before ESA opened in 2018. And the Wizards, who currently practice at ESA along with the Mystics and Go-Go, would be off to their new practice digs in Potomac Yards.
So what would happen with ESA, then? And to the jobs of the people in the community that staff events there?
Capital One Arena can be reimagined in all kinds of ways. Maybe not a full gutting, as Seattle did with the old Key Arena site, constructing a new building, Climate Pledge Arena, for the NHL’s Kraken, under the old building’s iconic roof. Maybe not a billion dollars’ worth of new bells and whistles, as accompanied the makeover of Madison Square Garden in 2013. But COA would get more than a couple of coats of new paint — and potentially more if Leonsis throws a couple hundred million into the kitty on top of the half a billion D.C. will contribute.
Or … we could think stupid big.
What if the Commanders, Wizards and Capitals all played in the same complex — the way that the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and MLB’s Royals have played at Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums, respectively, in the Truman Sports Complex, just off Interstate-70 in Missouri, for the last 50 years? (Full disclosure: it’s an era the Royals are looking to end.) Or the way the Eagles play in a stadium — Lincoln Financial Field – and 76ers and Flyers playing in an arena – Wells Fargo Center – across the street from one another in South Philadelphia, with the Phillies playing at Citizens Bank Park, their stadium perpendicular to the Linc and Wells Fargo, all accessible by subway, bus and highway traffic?
Yes, I’m looking at you, RFK Stadium site.
This would require Leonsis or the city — more likely, both — to put even more money up front for a new building and practice facility. That may not be in the cards. It’s just an idea. But sports team owners can, and do, put up their own money to build their new palaces, even in this day and age of public-private partnerships. Just sayin‘.
(And, yes, I’m aware that Josh Harris, who owns the Commanders and who also owns the 76ers, is looking to move the Sixers out of Wells Fargo and into a new building just inches from — ironically — the Chinatown section of Philadelphia. Just work with me here.)
The RFK site sits on 190 acres, including the massive parking lots that surround the stadium and the D.C. Armory. I don’t know what Harris’ vision is for a new stadium. I don’t know if he just wants to build a nice, new facility for the Commanders, seating 60,000 to 70,000, or if he wants to blow it out and go all JerryWorld on us — a behemoth of a palace, built for Super Bowls, World Cups and Final Fours and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift shows. AT&T Stadium seats 80,000 to 100,000, with the surrounding area housing 900,000 square feet of retail space, another 150,000 square feet of office space, an entertainment district and Globe Life Field, which opened in 2020, for the World Series champion Texas Rangers.
I’m guessing it’s the latter.
The Cowboys’ monster complex is on 135-140 acres of land.
The Wizards need about 12 acres for a new arena and practice facility.
Two new stadiums would still leave lots of space for parking and roads and for expanding the existing Stadium/Armory Metro stop. There would still be space not only for parking — hopefully, mostly underground — but Uber/Lyft stops, bicycle valet, e-scooter and e-bike stations, green walkway spaces and other ways to reduce vehicular traffic in and out of the facilities and in and out of the surrounding neighborhoods. (Certainly, the neighborhoods around RFK would be no more enthused about this level of project coming to their communities than Alexandria’s Del Ray was about the Potomac Yards project. I get that. And they would no doubt raise holy hell about it, as is their absolute right. I get that too.)
Interstate 295, the main highway that runs to the RFK site, would have to be significantly improved or expanded. Bowser has already indicated she hopes to use the more than $3 billion the city received from the federal government in the Biden Administration’s 2022 infrastructure bill to put all or part of 295 underground by 2040, similar to the “Big Dig” project in Boston that rerouted major highways in and out of the city underground and out of sight.
And if Harris just wants to build a really, really nice football stadium? Allegiant Stadium, the 65,000-seat stadium where the Las Vegas Raiders now play and which opened in 2020, was built on approximately 62 acres of land adjacent to the Vegas Strip. In this scenario, there would be more than enough room for a Wizards/Caps complex as well, with an additional bell or whistle or two, on the RFK site.
Franchises aren’t all running to the suburbs. The Chicago Bears, after years of being all-in on building an uber-stadium in the suburb of Arlington Heights, are now advocating a public-private partnership with the city — including putting up $2 billion of their own money — for a new stadium right next to their current long-time home, Soldier Field. And baseball’s White Sox are looking to partner with the Bears to finance the construction of new stadiums for both teams, along with the city and state. (To be sure, the massive tax bill the Bears were facing if they built in Arlington Heights was a factor in their running, Walter Payton-like, back to the Windy City.)
But, either way — a renovated Capital One, with nearly a billion dollars’ worth of improvements in it, or a mega development with the Commanders at the RFK site — there is a window now, a real one, for The Owner and The Mayor to neuralyze an entire city, restoring our collective memories to patronizing a building, and area, that hundreds of thousands of people from all over the city and suburbs have navigated, mostly happily, for decades. The owner can say he was only looking out for his teams; the mayor can say she was only looking out for her constituents. Everyone can save face.
You can still fix this.
Fix it.
(Photo of Ted Leonsis and Muriel Bowser: Bill O’Leary / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
