I'm interested to see how the
law changes on the theme park district impact MLS and Coyotes. The law has been around forever but it has never been utilized. I'm told it was originally created for a theme park in Williams that never happened. Then a few years ago I remember the Dbacks got it amended to make it work for what they wanted.
This year, it was changed again, ostensibly for MLS? A lawmaker from Snowflake sponsored so that doesn't make sense. Basically, instead of needing both the County Board and City Council to approve, you just need one. But only a City with 500k or more people can do it alone, which is Mesa, Tucson and Phx. At least that's my read.
The Dbacks have been saying now for a couple years they have no intention to use it, probably because you have to use your own money to pay the debt service on the bonds, which isn't much fun. It was funny that the Coyotes took so much heat for it being a sweetheart deal when the Dbacks have said several times that its such a bad deal for them they don't even want to use it.
The biggest challenge I see is no one wants their stadium/arena paying property taxes cuz that's a huge cost and literally no stadium in the country does that as far as I know. There's almost always some kind of municipal ownership thing.
So the only option for a team is a city builds and owns it (unlikely), the county does it like Chase (very unlikely), the state decides it wants to do another Cardinals deal with the Stadium district (very unlikely), tribal land, which is complicated because you won't get a full-up district with housing, or the theme park district.
The danger of doing it in Mesa is it could be referred to the ballot and I'm not sure how their voters will react.
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