Virginia put one over on DC…
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) and other Virginia leaders proudly touted a plan alongside Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis to bring both teams to a new arena in Alexandria, Virginia, leaving Washington, D.C., leaders scrambling to prevent the move.
The Wednesday announcement of a proposed $2 billion sports and entertainment district being built in the Potomac Yard neighborhood of Alexandria required months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, even as Leonsis negotiated with Washington for renovations to the current home of the Capitals and Wizards, according to a report from Axios.
Full article HERE from the Washington Examiner.
Snort…this is just too funny! Apparently DC powers that be ‘thought’ Leonsis was stuck with DC, whatever happened.
Guess Bowser et al thought wrong!
Snicker…snort… I wonder if she’ll get coal in her stocking in a couple of weeks?
I’m not sure what year it was, but when the US Patent Office moved out of Dc into Alexandria VA, it opened an additional lower-cost (but still big-bux, make no mistake) option to sue the USPTO if they err. While in DC, if they screwed up you had two chances – the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (where 96yr-old Judge Pauline Newman is on the blink if you’ve been following *that* news) and then the Supremes.
Hiring patent attorneys to plead your case at the CAFC or SCOTUS costs terrific amounts of money. But in Alexandria you can haul the USPTO into the Eastern District Court of VA first, *and* get a “jury of peers” trial, so your patent case and the arcane language of its claims will be reviewed by 12 random local people who couldn’t figure out how to get out of jury duty – for about 1/3 the cost of playing the tables at the CAFC. A ruling in your favor might still bleed your opponent too dry to escalate…
The old Patent Office in DC is a lovely limestone columned building and the Smithsonian expanded into it. The new USPTO HQ in Alexandria is a 6-building campus and includes a small but free museum of inventors, patents, and trademark history.
Great! Another raid on the Commonwealth treasury by a ‘bipartisan’ group of politicians. Maybe the Democrats in the legislature here will vote against it.
TPG- Interesting, I didn’t know that!
John- Yeah…sigh Glad I’m out of there!
So who’s paying for the sports complex? and how? something tells me it isn’t the sportsball teams or their owner.
It’s almost certainly the tax-payers of Va or some part of it. So did those tax payers get to say whether they wanted this or not? Obviously the answer to that is NOT because the whole thing was negotiated in secret. The best thing would be if a VA pol manages to get some kind of binding referendum on the ballot for next year and the taxpayers reject paying for it. Let the pols who signed the contract pay for it personally
As in https://www.amazon.com/They-Play-You-Pay-Billionaire-ebook/dp/B00A9YGJ1G ?
Or just Google “taxpayers pay for stadiums”. I remember a book being written on the subject well over 30 years ago, but I can’t remember the title — maybe an earlier version of this one? The thrust of it as I remember was that the idea of stadia bring in lots of out-of-town money was just plain ol’ BS when factually examined. Seems nothing has changed but the large sums the taxpayers fork over.
Francis/Bob- Probably the taxpayers…again…sigh
Potomac Yards has over 100 years worth of railroad pollution in it’s ground. PCBs from diesel engines, asbestos from old brake pads, petroleum byproducts, assorted crap from any number of leaking rolling stock … the initial environmental study done for Jack Kemp Cooke’s desired stadium site back in the ’90s put an end to that dream. Current structures on the site are low rise buildings built on concrete pads. Deep digging for a stadium size structure will release all that muck. I doubt there will ever be a sports complex built there.
🙂