Ebony Payne is the ‘Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner’ for the neighborhood around RFK Stadium, and she was listening when Mayor Muriel Bowser, DC Council Ward 7 Representative Wendell Felder, and others were at a meeting Thursday where Bowser advocated building the next Commanders stadium on that RFK site.
“Advisory neighborhood commissioners are like the first point of contact for all DC residents for city government services. We represent about 2000 constituents, and the RFK campus lies within what's called my single member district, and then my community of Kingman Park is just off of the campus,” Payne told Grant Paulsen in an exclusive interview aired on Grant & Danny Friday. “We have hosted the team in the past and many of my neighbors have a lot of memories, and remember what it was like to have the team back in their heyday in the 90s, so we are nonpartisan volunteers that just represent our community and our community's needs.”
Payne ran in the last Ward 7 election last year, so she has some intimate knowledge of the council and its workings, and had knowledge of what the Commanders would be looking for even before the RFK bill passed, as local ANCs met with the team last fall.
“What we were told is that the team was looking for a 65,000-seat stadium, with 10,000 to 12,000 parking spots in two garages. They didn't have much more information other than that, it was very rudimentary plans,” Payne said. “There were no concept designs or anything like that, and they made it very clear that they hadn't reached an agreement with the mayor or with the city; these conversations happened prior to the Presidential election, so Congress hadn't even passed the legislation to give the city control of the land.”
They were supposed to meet with the Commanders again coming up soon, but that has been postponed, which allowed Payne and others to attend the meeting with Bowser and Felder.
“We weren't discouraged from sharing that information with our constituents, and we recently had a community meeting – the Commanders were supposed to come actually next week to speak to the community, and so we had a large planning meeting that attracted about 120 people – and we were preparing questions, because the community has a lot of general concerns. The team asked to reschedule that meeting, and then this meeting with the Mayor and the Councilman popped up, so everybody had to kind of shift gears and attend that to see where things really stand.”
But, where things stand with the neighbors is that they’re not really in favor of a Commanders return to RFK with a new stadium.
“I am a Commanders fan, I think Jayden Daniels is an awesome quarterback, and I was born in 1991 so they've literally played the best in my lifetime,” Payne said, “but I was a part of the Friends of Kingdom Park effort, we have an RFK task force, and we polled over 2,000 people on their feelings – we really targeted the immediate communities around the stadium, and what we found was that 2/3 of people were strongly opposed to a new NFL stadium. We asked them what they wanted to see, and it was a range of ideas from parks to more youth sports – there’s 100,000 kids that play on what's called the Fields at RFK every year, and we finally got a commitment from the mayor last night that that those fields would stay. That was the first time that she had firmly made that commitment, and that was a real concern of the community that those fields would go away.”
And that was a non-starter, as is, perhaps, the Mayor’s ultimate desire?
“The main concern I have right now is one of the Mayor's stated goals is to bring the Super Bowl to DC, and in order to do that, the NFL has certain requirements that cities need to meet, and one of those requirements is a minimum of 70,000 seats and at least 35,000 parking spaces,” Payne said. “The Mayor has stated that we can have it all: a stadium as an anchor, a sports complex for the neighborhood, and housing, but the math doesn't add up with what we've been told, at least initially. If your goal is to host this the Super Bowl, then you have to work backwards from that goal, and I know that tailgating is a big part of football culture, and something that the community really doesn't want to see is surface parking lots. I just haven't seen an NFL stadium anywhere in the country where all of the parking is in garages, so that’s a big concern of mine is how the logistics of all of this is going to work.”
And, it seems as if the use of public funds is also on that list.
“Something else that the Mayor said was that she would not rule out providing subsidies to the team. As a DC taxpayer, I don't want to be spending my taxpayer dollars, and it's a real sticking point with the community; even people who felt like they wanted to see the stadium, they didn't want to see their taxpayer dollars go to build something that, frankly, the billionaire owners can afford to do it themselves,” Payne said. “Especially since they want to come to the site, and RFK is where, as I understand, the fans really want to come. But, I think there's a real disagreement about whether that's a good use of not just the land, but also taxpayer money. We have other needs in the city, and people really are expecting something to be delivered for the community.”
Listen to Grant’s entire conversation with Payne above!