(The Center Square) – A new marketing report on the Washington Commanders proposed stadium and development says the project will lead to $24.2 billion in total economic output over 33 years.

The group that produced the report, however, is regularly discredited by economists who study the impact of sports stadiums

The report from marketing firm Conventions, Sports and Leisure estimates the project will cost $8 billion, with $3.2 billion a new stadium on the site of the former RFK Stadium over a three-year construction period and $4.8 billion for the surrounding mixed-use district over a seven-year span.

The mixed-use portion of the project is planned to include 8.1 million square feet of development. Also, it will have approximately 6,477 multi-family housing units, 519,200 square feet of office space, 376,300 square feet of restaurant and retail space, 800 hotel rooms, 8,200 parking spaces, a sportsplex, supporting infrastructure and green space.

Despite advocates saying the team would be mainly paying for the project, the plan actually calls for more than $2.5 billion worth of taxpayer subsidies.

The economic impact report says the project will lead to $5.1 billion in taxes, including $1.6 billion in property taxes from the mixed-use district, $2.3 billion in sales and ticket taxes, $735.1 million in income taxes and $452.8 million in hotel taxes.

Economists who have extensively studied the impact of sports stadiums have long said that CSL’s reports are inaccurate and misinformation.

The firm has been referred to as the “Wile E. Coyote of the sports stadium racket” by publicly financed stadium blog “Field of Schemes,” written by Neil DeMause. CSL is owned by Legends Marketing, a joint venture involving the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys. 

“Viewing what ‘economic impact’ consultants do to be economics is like considering horoscopes to be astronomy,” economist J.C. Bradbury of Georgia’s Kennesaw State University wrote. “Newspapers are smart enough to put horoscopes next to the comics and Dear Abby, while economic impact ‘studies’ get banner headlines on the front page.”

The reports are often criticized because they do not include crowding out of other visitors on event days, diverted spending from other events and fail to use basic economic principles such as the broken window fallacy, which states that money spent to repair broken items is not a net benefit.

Bradbury previously told The Center Square that CSL is hired by a group looking to push public funding for a project and those numbers are used to tell constituents about how good a project is for a community, even though the actual economic numbers do not show that.

“It’s resulted in a larger cottage industry for giving out tax incentives in general,” Bradbury said. “These are totally fake and they mean nothing but they are required to provide some sort of guidance, even though they don’t.”

(The Center Square) – Virginia has secured more than $100 billion in corporate investment commitments since January 2022.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced it during a press event at the future site of Kalahari Resorts & Conventions in Spotsylvania County. According to the governor’s office, that investment total exceeds the combined amount secured under the past two administrations. It includes more than 265,000 new jobs and over 15,000 new business starts across the commonwealth.

That’s about the cost of 1,200 F-35 fighter jets.

Youngkin signed Executive Order 49 at the event, making permanent the Made in Virginia Investment Accelerator, a state-led program designed to streamline site development, permitting, infrastructure planning and workforce coordination for major business projects.

The program supports companies planning to invest more than $250 million or create at least 250 new jobs in Virginia. It focuses on six key sectors: energy, data centers, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, supply chain management, and commercial aerospace and defense.

“Virginia isn’t just competing to win. Virginia is winning,” Youngkin said in a statement. He pointed to $9 billion in tax relief, regulatory reforms, and expanded infrastructure investments as key factors behind the surge in corporate interest.

The governor’s office said the investment accelerator brings together state agencies responsible for permitting, transportation, workforce training, economic development and energy planning. It is led by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and Secretary of Commerce and Trade Juan Pablo Segura.

“We are setting business investment records because of the Governor’s leadership and his signal to the market that Virginia wants to partner with the business community, wants to innovate with private industry, and wants to support private investment as much as possible,” Segura said.

Partner agencies include Virginia Housing, Virginia Energy, the Virginia Department of Health, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, and the Virginia Department of Transportation.

The Kalahari project, which hosted the executive order signing, is expected to become the largest indoor water park on the East Coast and is one of the state’s major tourism and hospitality investments.