The Commanders and Mayor Muriel Bowser made the announcement many have been waiting for on Monday, that the team and the city have struck a deal valued at over $3 billion total to build the next Commanders Stadium back at the RFK campus, along with mixed-use development around it.
The D.C. Council will still have to approve the deal, which was noted in the timeline the Mayor’s office and the team laid out for media Monday…but Council Chair Phil Mendelson told Grant & Danny that it’s premature to say it won’t happen, but there’s a lot he, and maybe other council members, need to see that would mean it wouldn’t necessarily get approved today.
Mendelson did say he’s excited about the possibility of the Commanders returning to a new stadium, but reiterated that cost and budgetary concerns are his big hang-up from being an absolute yes right now.
“We have yet to see the Mayor's budget, so we have yet to see what the impact is on spending. It's really kind of hard to know the situation, but my sense is that the mayor's deal with the commanders is going to cost over a billion dollars,” Mendelson said. “We're just now starting to get some information on that, and this may be shocking, but the Mayor has not chosen to share anything until now with the Council, even though the Council has to approve, and I certainly hope we don't see the same kind of situation that we saw last year in Virginia.”
Mendelson went through those costs that were outlined in the Mayor’s proposal about the money, what it’s being used for, and how it’s being generated, but the fact to him is that despite the spin of percentage of cost, actual dollars are a number that can’t be ignored, especially with the usage rate.
“If you look at actual dollars, it’s one of the more expensive public subsidies. A billion dollars is a stiff amount,” Mendelson said. “A Super Bowl is once in a generation for a city, and the aspiration is 200 dates, but I think those might be weddings and bar mitzvahs. The Nationals is 80 games and other events, the arena is something like 225 events. Very different, and you can’t make the argument it’s going to bring in all this tax revenue, when all that money is just going to be re-invested into building the stadium.
Listen to Mendelson’s entire visit above with his thoughts on the RFK situation!