Progressives on Capitol Hill want to make it harder for professional sports teams to jump to a new city, citing \u201cbillionaire\u201d team owners who they say leverage relocation threats for big public subsidies.<\/p>\n
The so-called Home Team Act, introduced by U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Austin) and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), would require that sports franchise owners give locals at least a year\u2019s notice before moving to another city. <\/p>\n
During that time, the local community would have the right of first refusal to purchase the team, as Green Bay did with the Packers<\/a> NFL franchise.<\/p>\n \u201cFar too many Americans know the pain of losing a team just so that the owner can make a buck,\u201d said Casar, who cited his own experience losing the Oilers NFL team to Tennessee in 1997 when he was a child growing up in Houston.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Home Team Act would have saved the Houston Oilers. The Home Team Act would have kept the As and the Raiders in Oakland. The Home Team Act would make sure that the Spurs stay in my home district, in San Antonio,\u201d Casar said at Thursday\u2019s press conference on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n A spokeswoman for Spurs Sports & Entertainment declined to comment on the legislation.<\/p>\n The team\u2019s owners just inked a deal with city and county leaders last year to build a new $1.3 billion arena downtown<\/a> \u2014 paid for, in part, by roughly $800 million in public funding<\/a>.<\/p>\n Spurs owners never publicly threatened<\/a> to relocate if the deal didn\u2019t go through, but Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai made no bones<\/a> about that possibility while trying to bring voters on board with using the county\u2019s venue tax for the new arena<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cEven when teams don\u2019t actually move, the threat of moving sets off a race to the bottom,\u201d Casar said. \u201cBillionaire owners pit taxpayers against one another, and then extort the government for billions of dollars.\u201d <\/p>\n Sanders said that siphons public dollars away from communities\u2019 most pressing needs.<\/p>\n \u201cMunicipalities all over this country are struggling right now to educate their kids, to pave their streets,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cThe idea that you have billionaire owners running very profitable operations, [who] say, \u2018If you don\u2019t give us even more, we\u2019re going to leave,\u2019 \u2026 literally that means taking money out of the education of the kids, out of childcare for the kids, out of infrastructure for the people of that community.\u201d <\/p>\n San Antonio\u2019s deal with the Spurs calls for city bond money to help fund infrastructure around the new arena \u2014 at a time when the city already has less bond capacity<\/a> for flood control, drainage and other amenities.<\/p>\n