The Virginia State Senate’s Finance Committee did not move forward with discussing a bill to help bond the planned Monumental move to NoVa by Monday’s deadline, meaning that funding initiative is currently dead in the water – or, as has been said, ‘on life support.’
MSE has said they still believe they can get that moving forward, but, of course politics.
“I think it’s the age old argument when it comes to teams moving: do taxpayers want to give money to a billionaire?” JP asked. “We learned there’s a lot of people in Alexandria who don’t want the arena, and then what do we do with all the money?”
Cakes loved Drab weighing in on Twitter that Ted has to play hardball and threaten to move to Kansas City or somewhere, but EB thinks “people may not care.”
“A lot of this might be political back-fighting and one side can’t give the other a win,” Drab said, “but didn’t Amazon and Virginia Tech get money to move into that area?”
“Yeah, but the Amazon facility was supposed to be a lot bigger,” Bish reminded, as JP noted Monumental had the same talking points as Amazon.
Oh, and there’s now threats of legal action from DC Mayor Bowser if MSE tries to leave, which forced Monumental to clap back on Twitter.
“How come she never threatened that before?” Bish asked, with Cakes laughing “Ted had his ducks in a row on that!”
After discussing it themselves, and agreeing with what Eric Flack said yesterday that everyone involved thought this was a slam dunk and turns out to be an air ball, the guys had WaPo’s Ava Wallace on with the latest on the political side:
“It was a lot of politicking over the weekend, with the Mayor publishing an op-ed that Ted Leonsis was about the money, and Louis Lucas was responding to comments Glenn Youngkin made about Democrats that caused a ripple effect in Virginia legislature,” Wallace said. “He’s had the rep of going after a national stage, but he has to work with his local Democrats to get this plan in action. Lucas said this isn’t dead yet, but it did show some cracks in the foundation.”
So where do we stand?
“It sounds like the bill still has support in Virginia, because as long as the House bill has a viable option with language for authority to create an entity to fund the arena, there’s still some stuff to be worked out,” Wallace said. “On the DC side, Mayor Bowser has said DC won’t let Monumental out of their lease early, so there’s a lot of battles on both sides of the Potomac.”