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Always on fifty five KRC, the talk station TATO six I fifty five kr CD Talk station. Hey, Happy Thursday to you. Freddie E.
Resident expert on all things local, county and City Adam Keaylor returns. He's in the studio to talk about really fun stuff the Bengals in the county and the stadium negotiation, as well as the reality about the city and the county and city wasting our money. Adam Keaylor, Welcome back to the studio. Man, it's always great saying thanks. Anyhow, let's start with the stadium because this also it deals
with state issues as well. As you and I were talking about before the segment started, that the ridiculous, insulting, crazy proposal of funding the the the multi trillion dollar Cleveland Brown Complex. These well connected team owners with their millions and if not billions of dollars, the idea that taxpayers are supplementing and supporting what funds they're millions and billions of dollars, and and for for like bread and
circus kind of stuff. Here, Oh, the stadium six hundred million dollars in bonds, which are ultimately going to cost the taxpayers of the state of Ohio what a billion dollars when you thought factor.
In tracker every year every year, it's like, you know, tens of millions of dollars it's going to cost us. Yeah, it's not free money. It's no, it's no, that's yeah. And that's my point. And there's a finite amount of money in the world. And I always like to point out everybody's got a list of stuff and things they
want from government. I have a limited list, like, let's take care of what we've built already, so we don't go further into a whole and you have to ask for more money from me, Like, let's take care of roads and infrastructure and provide us with a safe community, and then we'll take care of the rest. We don't need much of stuff and things. Roan I got, you know, maybe twenty thousand dollars with a landscape and I'd like to get done at my house.
Yeah.
Really, you know what, I'll tell you what, why don't we have everybody listening on is pay tax to take care of your landscaping?
Yeah?
But anyway back to the stadium, so they commit and the Bengals work out this phase one of what it's supposed to be four phases. Now the Bengals, you know, because they know that they got a pr problem and a good will problem because they have this we're going to take our team and run away if you don't give us what we demand mentality, which is fueled by the terrible stadium deal that we got into originally, Ye, the worst in the Nation's theatrically worse.
I mean, it's documented that it's the worst. There's experts that have come out and said it was the worst. So do you think any of the.
Voters that are still around, the voted for that had any understanding of how lopsided this thing is that we are going to perpetually be obligated to keep up with the Joneses in terms of stadiums in this country.
Well, the sales tax never ended, I know, remember that was supposed to get sunseted and that never ended. And that's what we're funding this with. That's what the county portion of the money is supposed to be coming from. Is that sales tax that they just continued to save up that they never you know, they they never stopped charging us for so that's where the money is coming from. In the Bengals money is actually alone from the NFL. Part of it alone from the NFL. That G six
or G seven money or whatever it is. Yeah, some of that's.
Total involved here.
It's like one hundred and eighty five million dollars they're gonna pony up for this phase. Yeah, yeah, they're gonna puy up one twenty, which the Bengals getting credit for. But ultimately it's a loan or is it a gift or a loan?
It's a kind of a gift, so it's future revenue. It's it's like a loan on future revenue that they're going to get anyway.
Okay, but it makes some good look good on paper, like see, oh yeah, look, we we don't have any obligation or the least to do this, but here we are funding part of the upgrades. But the other, the other component of this is what they're what we collectively, This what the stadium collectively is going to get from
these upgrades. And I have to ask out loud because you know, I sound like a bit of a populace and all this, but I keep pointing out a lot of this money is going toward like the boxes where the rich people play.
Some of that is yeah, yeah, there's some electric upgrades, there's like escalators, they're moving things around, they're shifting the way things are, and you know, they're trying to keep up with the demands of the NFL, like some of these other cities that are you know, building brand new stadiums. I mean in Jacksonville, they're doing a billion dollars worth
of upgrades to their stadium. A team that sucks worse than the Bengals have you know, failed us over the years, and you know they're doing they're spending that kind of money just on upgrades and we're at like eight hundred and thirty million something like that. Yeah, to make the Bengals happy. But you remember they can renew that lease. They have what five different times or is it two five year extensions or is it five two year extensions.
It's one of the two. My recollection is it's the latter. But it doesn't matter. They can cause this thing to last what another ten years or.
What they can drag it out before and then they're going to ask for a new stadium at that point, like you know, this.
Is going to happen it makes my head just spend. Yeah, and after that draft, I don't know, you know, I just keep going back to this.
You literally could have the Bengals play on a high school football field.
Yeah, they get it.
I mean the game is played on that finite amount of space predetermined by the rules how big a football field must be. And the idea in a day when you considered home with an eighty inch TV screen with nine gajillion cameras watching the game like you're sitting on the field high resolution, missing nothing by your drinking your
own inexpensive beer and using your clean bathroom. The idea that we keep building and expanding and building expanding these elite stadiums where most of the masses can't afford to even go, is just it just frankly pisses me off.
Well, and I think the general public has become more cognizant of the fact that we don't have this kind of money, like what right? The taxpayer just keeps getting beat down more and more and more, and it affects the middle class more and more and more. And if anything, Trump and what they're doing with Doze and Elon Musk and all this other stuff where they're uncovering all this waste. I mean, it almost makes you wonder. It kind of opens up the door for the conversation of what else
are they wasting our money on. Why can't we come up with with some money for this stuff? Why is it so hard to do this? And we're broke? Like I mean, even Dwine said it, he said, we don't have the money for this kind of stuff. Right, So the general public is now like, hey, maybe money doesn't grow on trees. And the average voter, you said, you know, twenty five years ago, thirty years ago, whenever they did this this last lease, I think it was twenty five
year lease. You know, did the average voter know what they were voting for and knowing what they were getting into, know, because I mean, if you talk to the average voter, they're busy taking care of their kids, they're busy doing their.
You know, it boiled down to like, I don't want to lose the Bengals in Cincinnati. Now, that's what the vote was for, right, because if we don't build a new stadium, then they may move to another city.
Yeah exactly.
And you mentioned people that are in politically this is what's going on up there, right, and it's not just sports teams, it's it's everybody. It's developers, it's I mean you see this with the connected community situation and high parts. It's other businesses that, hey, move to Cincinnati, moved to Hamil County, We'll give you tax breaks. And that's your competing against every city and every municipality. They're all trying
to attract businesses. They're all trying to bring things that are going to excite the citizens to their city, and they're always offering some sort of a tax break or some sort of a And now you've got FC Cincinnati saying, hey, look, we spend all this money on this stadium. We're building this billion dollar plus entertainment area in the West End.
Can we get some of that money back?
State of Ohio like, hey, we'd love two hundred and fifty million dollars or whatever it was, or they spent two hundred and fifty million dollars in a stadium. They want a little bit of that back. So you're going down a slippery slope. And Senator Blessing he mentioned this recently where he's like, look, you know you do this for the Browns. Next thing, you know you're doing it for the Bengals, You're doing it for the Blue Jackets,
You're doing it for the Reds, right. I mean it's beautiful last couple of days and the Reds had five thousand people in the stadium, you know, or whatever it was. I mean you you know, yes, you could play it on that field, right, you got fifty thousand seats in that stadium and ten percent of a field, right, So, I mean the teams have to put a good product on the field, which lately the Bengals have been, even though they missed the playoffs and they shouldn't have last year.
But uh, you know, the fans are saying, hey, look, what what are you giving us? Like, yeah, you can leave, but at the end of the day, you're you're still going to put a good product on the field. And how are you giving the Browns six hundred million dollars? They haven't put a good team on the field in decades. They can't even get a quarterback.
I know.
But and that that even is a concept that we're talking about the potential of the state taxpayers funding the Cleveland Browns project. Yeah, I mean that those words are coming out discussing it as a concept is just to me, it's mind boggling.
Yeah. Yeah, and maybe all those.
Problems and concerns and all the finite amount of money that has taken in Columbus and that are elected officials.
I mean, have it as a written proposal. Yeah, to think.
It's Haslam family. Know what kind of photos do they have of our elected officials? Well, they donate money, so they donate money to the right people. So there is that. But also, I mean, the Browns packaged up their deal and you know, they put it together the right way, They got it in in time, and here come Zamon County the day a day later, it's too late, after the budget was already passed, saying hey what about us, here's we want some money too, and it.
Just looks it look bad. Yeah, it looks bad.
Yeah, but Brian, they had twenty five years of work on this. Yeah, they've had twenty five years of work on this. They kept kicking the can down the road. They wait last minute the Bengals mentioned it. They said, look, we don't know what's going on, Like, what's are they talking to us? And you don't know if that was
them play. I mean, they negotiate with multimillion dollar you know, entitled football players all the time, right, so they know how to negotiate, and they're dealing with these you know, these age and everybody all the time. I mean, it's not like the three people sitting in Hamilton County are anything like sports agents when it comes to negotiating.
Right.
They just had to pay some what was a guy two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to help them negotiate the deal with the Bengals in the first place, this guy out of New York.
That's because our elected officials don't know much about the subject matters over which they legislate, you know what I'm saying.
That's and most of them aren't, you know, business owners. They're just they're.
Politicians, politicians with no background experience in any given subject matter, and yet they're pulling the strings and making the calls on these matters. It's just absolutely mind boggling. Yeah, we'll continue with Adam Kahler one more segment before we get to Jay Rattle if at eight sixteen right now fifty five kc DE talk station.
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state that traffic backing up past Fairbanks. Chuck Ingram on fifty five krs he talked station.
A twenty years fifty five KRCD talk station. Should I say Happy Thursday? It's like the subject matter we've been talking about all day. I mean, from Indian Pakistan breaking out in war all the way to this ridiculous stadium conversation we're having. Just yeah, I can't find inspiration this morning.
Adam Taylor and studio breaking it down for us. And of course, in the aftermath of the revelation, he reached a memorandum of understanding here in Hamilton County with the Bengals for phase one of what ultimately will be an eight hundred plus million dollars stadium upgrade deal. In the background, we've got Columbus approving or at least moving in the direction of allowing six hundred million dollars in bonds to go to the Cleveland Browns, and one of the things
and I talked about it. I guess it was last week when the details came out about that. Adam Taylor and you had mentioned it a couple times off air that the legislation itself limits these these the funding of sports teams to one counties with one million or more YEP, which means Hamilton County is out of it because we only have eight hundred or so thousand people in Hamilton County. So that would mean Columbus and Franklin County in Cuyahoga County. Are those the only two qualifying counties?
They are the only two.
Yeah, the House added a rule only counties with a million plus residents can get stadium funding.
And since Hamilton County, which.
Man Hamilton County obviously was designed to exclude the Bengals, and of course.
Well we always get treated to like the red headed step child. I mean, we put more into the state every year than we get back from the state.
Yeah, you had mentioned that figure off air, and my Hamilton County friends might be interested in knowing. So how much does Hamilton County pay in taxes, So.
We pay about two and a half billion dollars a year in taxes. We get back one point eight five billion in state controlled spending. Now we get money from the federal government and everything. That's not the same thing though, No, But if you're talking about money we put into the state versus money we get back, we essentially subsidize. Out of the three biggest counties, we're the biggest subsidizer of money back into the state right now.
Contrast that with Franklin.
Let's say so so well, I mean you look at you look at actually Franklin County gets about there. They actually make four hundred and sixty million dollars a year, so they pay what they pay from what they pay. Yeah, and that gain of and then Cleveland somewhere in the middle. Cleveland's still they lose more than they actually put in. But now you're talking about another six hundred million dollars, so we actually are are down more than what we're
even asking for in this stadium thing. But and my thing is is like, look, you know, us funding a stadium is a little crazy. I mean, we do own it, like the county does own that, like I own a commercial building over in Covington, and I have to keep that upgraded right for my tenants. So I get it when it comes to that. I get why the Bengals
were asking for it, and I understand their position. But at the same time, it's like, if you're going to fund a stadium and you're gonna ask taxpayers to pay tens of million dollars a year in bonds to pay these bonds back once they issue them, and then you put in a rule that says, wait a minute, only counties with over a million residents. Any team in that county, it can get it. But anybody under and we're at
what eight hundred and thirty thousand residents. Half our cities, you know, a third of our city actually is in two other states.
Yeah, that's a valid point geographically obviously, Yah River in the state line right there.
So yeah, this is why I want to seceed Brian.
Take northern Kentucky, take southeastern create our own state, state of Cincinnati. Let's just create our own state, because I mean, this kind of stuff comes up and this ends up, you know, screwing us a lot of times. But we're the biggest metro area in Ohio if you included north of Kentucky, right, which we're in in Ohio, but it's in our metro area. We're the biggest economically, we have
the biggest GDP in the state as well. And Columbus, you know, they they h annexed a lot of their townships and you know, we still got you know, del High for example, we got Norwood, Indian Hill and things like that. Well, Columbus went in and they you know, they added all those together. So technically they're the biggest city in Ohio. So when businesses are looking to relocate, when they're looking to do stuff, they say, oh, Columbus is the biggest city.
Wrong.
Cincinnati is the biggest city. It's the most cosmopolitan city, it's the most historical city, it's the most geographically interesting city. It's you know, it's it's it's the north and the south.
Well, if you get you get the benefit of you know, the the downtown urban environment. But because not all the areas are annexed or they're not under the control, which is the city of Cincinnati, which is yeah, good thing, that's a draw right.
Well, look at Franklin, I mean it's all you know, just like here, one party rule exactly, and it's mostly progressive. So what you're gonna get up there and what you're gonna get here is what you're going to get up there. So del Hi doesn't vote like the rest of the city. You know, it's it's it's more conservative. So if it did get dragged in, well, then all of a sudden,
it's gonna you know, have to deal with it. Although it would help with voting when it comes to the city, our guy, Corey Bowman, it would help him out a whole lot. You know, bring Norwood in, that would help Cory out a little bit.
He may have nabbed some of the Hyde Park folks. Oh, I think he nabbed a whole lot of Hyde Park folks. I'm hoping so, And I hope my hard Park friends out there go and vote for Corey Bowman. Just as a slap in the face to have to have purvol and the insult that they heap down upon you by ignoring what you want to do with your own town. Corey Bowman or Bowman, Adam Keylor, it's always a pleasure having you in the studio. Man, get at me all riled up this morning. Yeah, but that's what it's all about.
Spreading the awareness and hopefully someone will finally make a stand and just put their foot down. Take care of my friend. We'll talk again real soon, folks. I hope you can stick around. We got iHeart Media eighty eation expert Jay Ratliffe coming up, moving away from politics, stalk Aviation. Stick around fifty five KRC, the talk station at U Line.
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