What's next for Chase Field? Politicians work toward deal to keep DBacks, taxpayers happy

The Arizona Diamondbacks had tied the 2023 World Series when the team sprinted onto a packed Chase Field at the start of Game 3. The twirling towels and electric atmosphere signaled fan fervor and genuine optimism.

Few people had expected the team to get far in the postseason. Nights like this were mere dreams in 1998, when the cavernous downtown Phoenix ballpark opened.

Three months after that magical night in late October, franchise owner Ken Kendrick hinted he could move the Diamondbacks out of Arizona, sowing doubt for fans about what will happen to their team and their ballpark.

But the Diamondbacks abandoning their 26-year home ranks as the least expected option as talks continue about the future of county-owned Chase Field.

The team, Maricopa County and Phoenix all independently agree the team should stay after the lease runs out in 2027. For key players in the decision, such as Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall, the question is how, not if.

Efforts to keep the franchise happy at Chase Field have for years been mired in big egos, political promises, brinksmanship and negotiating leverage. Questions remain over who should own or operate the ballpark and who should pay what.

The Diamondbacks want a functional ballpark, with luxury amenities for fans. The county wants out of a costly renovation bill. The city wants to keep downtown vibrant and not be left with a derelict site. Each wants any future partner to pay their fair share. Who needs the other partners more will play out in negotiations.

Phoenix wants to advance its plans for an entertainment district. A vacancy at Chase Field would mean an eyesore where council members currently envision a bustling entertainment hub that rivals Nashville's Honky Tonk Highway.

For county officials, a Diamondbacks' departure would leave egg on their faces. They want to avoid a monumental cost to demolish the ballpark.

The parties have had confidential talks about the ballpark's future. Hall said the team met with public officials a few times to explore ideas but have not ironed out any details. Phoenix City Council members met internally three times, county supervisors once.

Maricopa County Manager Jen Pokorski wrote Phoenix City Manager Jeff Barton in August asking the city to consider pursuing "partnership options" for Chase Field and other county property.

Chase Field has long vexed the MLB franchise. It holds 48,633 fans, but last season the average attendance was closer to 24,000. Some games, fewer than 10,000 fans showed up. Empty seats look bad. The team wants to fix that and add other revenue streams from skyboxes, concessions and concerts. It wants public support to help pay for it.

Other professional sports teams have secured a median of $500 million in public funding to renovate or rebuild their stadiums in recent years across the country.

But Maricopa County has long been reluctant to throw taxpayer money toward upgrading the ballpark and has toyed with transferring ownership to Phoenix. Former elected city leaders have considered ways to help renovate the venue as a means of luring more restaurants and hotels downtown.

Former Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio, citing an historically toxic relationship between the club and the county, thinks the team will leave if current negotiations sour.

But former Supervisor Steve Chucri, noting the relationship has improved, said the team won't want to lose its spot in the nation's fifth-largest city.

"I never for a minute thought the Diamondbacks wanted to leave Arizona," he said. "They're going to want to stay and try to figure out what they can make happen."

Mary Rose Wilcox, a former county supervisor who voted to build Chase Field, urged the three parties to come together publicly.

"The timing is perfect. Everybody feels so good about them," she said.

A long, tense history

That wasn't always true.

Chase Field has long been polarizing. It's been called a mistake and a financial drain, but also a catalyst for transforming downtown Phoenix and a source of civic pride.

Building the stadium cost $354 million, $238 million of it from county taxpayers. The Diamondbacks picked up the rest — about $116 million. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors passed the deal in 1994 on a 3-1 vote, with one abstention. A gunman later shot Wilcox over her yes vote.

But a survey commissioned by the county in 2000 showed 65% of respondents believed the deal was a good use of public funds. Even more said the investment was good for downtown Phoenix and the Valley.

Then, a new slate of fiscally conservative supervisors took office in the early 2010s and was unwilling to pay for ballpark improvements. The relationship between the Diamondbacks and the county soured.

By 2016, The Arizona Republic reported former Supervisor Andy Kunasek told Kendrick to “take your stupid baseball team and get out” and “go back to (expletive) West Virginia.”

DiCiccio said in a March interview he tried to broker a three-way deal, but he said county officials "just dug their heels in" because "everybody was the smartest person in the room. When you get that, it's hard to get past the egos."

In 2017 the team sued Maricopa County, seeking to break its lease at Chase Field to find outside financing for ballpark improvements.

The team claimed in court that the ballpark needed as much as $187 million in repairs and was unsafe.

Documents show Maricopa County officials spent more than $46 million on repairs and new amenities at Chase Field from 2005 to 2017.

The case settled in 2018. The terms sealed an icy relationship and paved the way for Kendrick's veiled threat in February.

Kunasek thought the 2018 deal, reached after he left office, gave the team an incentive to run down the ballpark.

"It's more in their interest to let the wheels run off, to have it falling apart at the end of the lease, so that we're not looking at refurbishment, we're looking at replacement,” he said in March.

In the years since, the team has spent just $10.7 million out of the county reserve fund dedicated to maintenance, according to the county's quarterly financial reports.

Hall said the team didn't want to plow millions into a facility it might abandon. Nonetheless, he said the team has invested about $100 million overall into Chase Field improvements, such as new LED boards and refurbished concession stands.

The team didn’t provide receipts to back up its spending. County documents show that between 2009 and 2015, the team pitched in more than $5.2 million toward maintenance and upgrades.

“We've put in as much money into the facility as the taxpayers did," Hall said, referring to the $116 million payment and subsequent investments.

Chucri, who helped engineer the settlement agreement, agreed the team ponied up.

"They haven’t run it into the ground,” he said. “I never believed that argument, because they have just as much to lose in the sense of customer or fan experience."

Both sides describe improved relations in recent years. And that brings its own set of concerns in an election year. A change in county or city leadership could plunge that progress into unknown waters, adding urgency to the pace of talks for the team.

"It's a concern," Hall said. "I think it makes a lot of sense to try and get something done before we have new electeds."

Everyone has a wish list

While details of discussions remain private, no mystery surrounds what the parties want.

The Diamondbacks laid out their wish list in a report sent to Henderson, Nevada officials in 2016.

It included a smaller, more intimate ballpark, ample parking and an on-site concert hall. Critically, the team wanted homes, shops and restaurants clustered around the ballpark, a growing trend among pro sports teams because it guarantees extra revenue and entices fans. In recent years, the team has softened its stance on a smaller venue.

Phoenix has a similar vision. It wants a downtown entertainment district to become a national destination.

The city paid for a study of the entertainment district, pegged to its hope of redeveloping the Phoenix Convention Center's south building to include a hotel, residential units, restaurants and shops on the ground level oriented toward Chase Field.

In 2016, former Mayor Greg Stanton promoted the idea of a "sports entertainment complex." He said he wanted "as much activity as possible" at the ballpark. "I don't want to lose the Diamondbacks."

How could it work?

Talks, for now, are in early stages. Nothing is off the table, but all signs point toward some kind of partnership to keep the Snakes at Chase.

Options abound: The Diamondbacks could leave Arizona, move somewhere else in metro Phoenix, refurbish Chase Field or rebuild it. They could renew the tenant-landlord agreement with the county, enter a similar deal with Phoenix, enter a three-way partnership or create a new sports authority. Ownership of the land under Chase Field can be sold, transferred or traded. The cost of improvements could be shared, or funded by development, bonds, private equity, loans or a new tax district.

Hall said he hopes any new agreement includes the city, county and state. He pointed to the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority used at the Cardinals stadium as "a great model."

The Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority allows the recapture of tax revenue generated by the Cardinals' operations to fund State Farm Stadium's maintenance. That applies to state income taxes paid by Cardinals' players and staff.

"We're willing to put the majority of our own money into the stadium and all of its needs. We just feel like there should be some sort of a partnership," Hall said.

Hall said he'd be open to other tax recaptures, too, such as using hotel taxes, which target tourists.

Another option comes from a 2021 law that allows for surcharge on sales made in the ballpark. Revenues from an additional 1% to 9% surcharge could pay back bonds to improve or maintain the ballpark, as long as they're collected in a special tax district.

Hall told The Republic he has no interest in using the tax district, saying, "I don't want to stick it to our fans."

Another option is transferring ballpark ownership.

DiCiccio said he tried to negotiate a deal with Supervisor Clint Hickman in which the county would transfer Chase Field to Phoenix for free. The city would help pay to demolish or downsize the ballpark and rezone the land so the team could build an adjacent hotel, and conceptually the team would pay for most of the work, DiCiccio said.

Stanton echoed similar ideas on "Arizona Horizon" in 2016, when private investors considered buying Chase Field for $60 million.

Stanton said acquiring the site only made sense "if they look at it as an opportunity to do things like hotels or offices or other condominiums and residential retail."

There's also the option of building on the existing 2018 agreement between the county and the team, which Chucri said wasn't perfect, but "has set a path of success for the team."

What's happening at other stadiums

The Diamondbacks aren't the first MLB franchise to parley an expiring lease into leverage.

In the 1980s and 1990s, eight new MLB ballparks opened. Most of those teams had 30-year leases, which are nearing their ends.

Victor Matheson, a professor who specializes in sports economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, said a lease expiration "transfers a gigantic amount of bargaining power ... to the team."

Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, began hosting baseball the same year as Chase Field, 1998. In late 2023, the Rays and St. Petersburg, Florida, announced plans for the team to leave Tropicana Field for a new stadium nearby.

The new facility is expected to cost $1.3 billion as part of a $6 billion mixed-use development. Pinellas County and St. Petersburg will fund $600 million, and the rest comes from the team.

But spending hundreds of millions of public dollars on a stadium doesn’t guarantee a public benefit, sports economists said.

“Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking stadiums automatically make money hand over fist for the cities,” Matheson said. “The way it usually works is the taxpayers end up taking a bath.”

JC Bradbury, a professor who specializes in sports economics at Kennesaw State University in Georgia agrees, noting the public has become more jaded by propping up stadiums with their taxes.

Still, there has been about a 20% increase in public spending in stadiums over the past decade, he said.

“Team owners have learned that if they ask politicians for things, they will get them,” Bradbury said.

But a prominent local economist who studies the economic impact of major events said such critiques oversimplify the issue.

“Downtown Phoenix, in the '80s and early '90s, was an absolute ghost town,” said Dennis Hoffman, economics professor and director of the Seidman Research Center at Arizona State University, recalling the area shutting down in the summer.

"Take a picture of downtown Phoenix in 1993 and take a picture of it in 2003,” he said. “It's transformational."

Today, the arching retractable roof over Chase Field remains a landmark and a symbol of that transformation.

But that roof also symbolizes the challenge ahead. Officials called off an exhibition game after six innings against the Cleveland Guardians in late March when they couldn't close the roof safely with fans inside.

It was a rainout, the ballpark's first for baseball.

Soggy fans were left to hope Hall's words come true when he told The Republic a week earlier: "We do have a solution for that. It's probably not going to be in place until the next season."

Sasha Hupka covers county government and regional issues for The Arizona Republic. Do you have a tip to share? Reach her at sasha.hupka@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @SashaHupka. Follow her on Threads: @sashahupkasnaps.

Taylor Seely covers Phoenix for The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com. Reach her at tseely@arizonarepublic.com or by phone at 480-476-6116.

Corina Vanek covers development and business for the Arizona Republic. Reach her at cvanek@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @CorinaVanek.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Politicians aim for Chase Field deal to keep DBacks, taxpayers happy