The Washington Commanders have a deal with Washington D.C. to build a new 65,000-seat stadium in Ward 7, on the site of the crumbling old bones of RFK Stadium. The D.C. city council passed a funding bill late Wednesday, by a vote of 11–2; with that settled, the Commanders expect to break ground in 2026, and to have the stadium completed before the start of the 2030 NFL season. Most stadium and arena public-funding deals suck for taxpayers, but this one sets a new bar.
Per the agreement, the District will provide more than a billion dollars in direct funding for construction and infrastructure, a figure to rival the insane and since-rejected deal proposed by the McCaskey family for downtown Chicago. As the District of Columbia—the nation’s 22nd largest city by population and 86th-ranked county or equivalent by median household income—absolutely does not have one billion dollars sitting in a large pile someplace, this cash will be raised via debt financing. But that hideous outlay only scratches the surface of the public commitment to this stadium project. The deal exempts the Commanders from property taxes on the stadium and the surrounding development; it exempts the Commanders from sales taxes on personal seat licenses; it gives the Commanders the exclusive right to develop housing and retail around the stadium, at the low price of $1 per year; and it gives the Commanders rent-free use of 24 acres of city-controlled land for a period of 26 years.
The city’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer found, per a report released in July, that the Commanders do not need the tax exemptions in order to operate as a business; that, in fact, the exemptions only relieve the Commanders from the embarrassment of paying taxes that would be “exceptionally high relative to other recent NFL stadium deals.” This report pins the value of the exemptions, over the period of the lease, at about $1.5 billion. According to a study from D.C.’s Council Budget Office, the total package of subsidies will cost taxpayers $4.4 billion. Hilariously, this CBO study also found that a mixed-use development of the 24-acre RFK site would be generating about $1 billion more per year in tax revenue by 2059 if the project excluded the football stadium.
The great Neil deMause got together with University of Colorado Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter back in May and worked out a more thorough evaluation of the deal, including a conservative estimate of the total value of the forfeited rent. It’s hideous! Per Field of Schemes, “the absolute minimum cost to D.C. taxpayers for Harris’s RFK Stadium site project, then, is $7.5 billion,” but could potentially be up to three times as much as that by the end of the lease.
Because of the breathtaking shittiness of this deal, it has not been popular with district residents. A July poll from Tavern Research showed margin-proof majorities of residents opposed the tax exemptions and wanted to see the city hold a competitive bidding process for development rights around the stadium. Despite the triumphant language used to describe the deal—Jeff Bezos’s heartbreakingly enshittified Washington Post went ahead and called the project “transformative” and credited the project with delivering to Ward 7 “not only a sports venue but also entertainment, retail, housing and riverside park space,” despite it being years or even decades away from completion—it remains light on guarantees. “I suspect there will continue to be local costs beyond what we’ve budgeted,” said an extremely defeated-sounding Brianne K. Nadeau, the councilmember for D.C. Ward 1, in a conversation with Defector after the bill had passed.
Nadeau was one of the two “no” votes on the final bill. The other, at-large councilmember Robert C. White Jr., attempted to attach some amendments to the bill ahead of the Wednesday vote, to no avail. One of the doomed amendments would’ve given the city the right to claw back from the Commanders some of the surrounding property in the event that it has not been developed to plan a whopping 25 years from now. Another, somewhat softer amendment, this one from Ward 3 councilmember Matthew Frumin—an eventual “yes” vote—would’ve addressed a failure to develop the property with financial penalties. This one also failed. Frumin—who’d vowed to vote “no” if the deal could not be rejiggered to include accountability measures—came around in the end because “this is a time to come together.”
Commanders president Mark Clouse, the appointed goon of team owner and private-equity freak Josh Harris, immediately opposed the amendments, per reporting from The Athletic, effectively declaring accountability to be an unsurvivable burden on the team. “These amendments could limit or even preclude construction, reduce RFK’s ability to attract major events, limit the city’s ability to deliver on its proposed housing, and hinder CBE (Certified Business Enterprise) participation in the project,” wrote Clouse, in a letter to the council. Clouse also cited opposition to the amendments from labor unions, whose participation in stadium construction has been promised in the deal and who, according to Clouse, have been “lobbying against any further amendments to the deal.” And, indeed, four labor leaders co-bylined a Sept. 16 editorial in Washington Business Journal, crowing about the labor guarantees negotiated into what was then a tentative stadium deal. Notably, the editorial does not touch the subject of amendments, but it was important to the bill’s authors that its framework had the public support of organized labor.
Labor unions do not oppose accountability. Certainly they do not give an earnest shit whether whatever vampire scum owns the Commanders 30 years from now is required to pay a few million dollars for failing to have built affordable housing. What these unions oppose, says Nadeau, is the dissolution of the deal, which is exactly what the Commanders threatened when presented with the amendments. “They had heard from the team that if the amendments passed that the team would pull out,” Nadeau explained to Defector. “In which case, all of those union jobs would go away. So I think they felt pressed to send a letter, saying, ‘Please don’t support any amendments, we don’t want the bill to go away.” This is not some new low in political maneuvering, but it’s worth noting the disparity in negotiating leverage: The sale of the Commanders, by infamous non-goat-fucking creep Daniel Snyder, did wonders to rejuvenate the appetite among local politicians for hosting the franchise, and granted the team’s new owner the overpowered threat of simply moving his ascendant team up the road.
Now that the deal is in place, says Nadeau, the leverage imbalance will only get worse. “If the project has additional costs, I’m sure the district government will try to help find that money, because [construction] will already be underway,” she explained, with a deep sigh. “That’s a concern, because we have lots of other things that we could do for the city with that money, like build affordable housing, and schools, and fire stations. All of that comes out of the same pot.” The pot, over the long term, will be several billion dollars short of what it might’ve been sans a big dumb football stadium.
Charles Allen, Ward 6 councilmember and another “yes” vote, says that he supported the bill despite acknowledging that “decades of experience and research” have definitively proven that public investment in NFL stadiums is bad news. “But building 6,000 new homes,” said Allen, to the Post, “creating thousands of good-paying jobs for D.C. residents, protecting our Anacostia River and Kingman Island, expanding the number of youth sports fields and facilities—those are very good investments.” Having deprived itself of the chance to guarantee these investments, the city is now left to take the word of a hungry billionaire whose own lackey said aloud that accountability is a deal-breaker. Economic activity is coming to a large piece of government-controlled land along the Anacostia River; whether this will be a long-term boon to anyone but the private-equity guy is anyone’s guess.