urbanSTL

Great thread on this. This started as a $18m lawsuit and ended with $790,000,000. Everything else is/was noise

Wow. This is an fantastic result. Great to see the City stand up for itself against Kroenke's BS. 

If you’re taking a dump on the lawyers here, you’re a loser. These folks doggedly pursued the case for a group of DISINTERESTED PLAINTIFFS for 5 years without seeing a dime. They deserve a medal and street named after them.

The talk of compensation in the billions and the dirty laundry of some of the richest and most powerful people in America potentially on the stand exposed. Yet we end up with neither and get a measly 790m instead.

Forgive me for feeling underwhelmed.

^stop investing so much in “talk” and you won’t feel underwhelmed

Although I would have liked this go further 790 million is still a lot of money and a win for our region rather than gambling it all away
790 million extra other cities aren’t getting


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Suburban Sprawl wrote: ↑

Nov 24, 2021

The talk of compensation in the billions and the dirty laundry of some of the richest and most powerful people in America potentially on the stand exposed. Yet we end up with neither and get a measly 790m instead.

Forgive me for feeling underwhelmed.

In no world - including the rarified club of NFL owners - is $790m "measly." 

What kind of things might the Regional Sports Commission use their share of the money on?


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^ Convention center expansion, Dome maintenance/demo

Would probably be fascinating to comb through all 197 pages of this thread to see how wild it is that opinions changed over the course of time. Five years ago if someone would have told you STL would be squeezing Kroenke and the NFL for $800mm cash, you'd have called that person the king of all sunshine pumpers. Now we've got people convinced the city took a low ball offer.

I think the lawsuit started around page 100

While the total amount seems underwhelming, it is still impactful.  I would think anything substantially larger would be tied up in appeals for a long period of time (given the 32 NFL legal teams)...with the settlement amount most likely getting whittled down.

Hopefully, this will be used to bring some development timelines to the left, fill budget gaps, and/or invest in areas that need attention.

Statement from the Mayor and County Executive.

We should take the $527 million after lawyer fees, throw in an additional $4.5 billion of public funds, build a decent NFL stadium and beg the league for a team.   /s (sorry, couldn't resist)

I think the recent cloud talk makes it feel a bit underwhelming, but in reality this seems like a pretty good deal. They're paying the actual damages more or less entirely. While I'm sure there's a "no admission of wrongdoing" clause this is, in fact, a fairly clear admission from the NFL that they screwed up and did our town a dirty. And by being gracious about it maybe we can get some of the bad blood out of all our systems and move forward. Each party will have more than $175M to play with. This does a lot of good to a lot of budgets. The CVC won't need so much bond money for their upgrades. The city and county can afford to fund some dream projects that might have otherwise seemed out of reach. (Yes N/S, I'm talking about you.) And the law firm gets a big payday, so maybe they can do something creative. Further, the $790M is just the financial portion of the settlement. I'm curious if there is anything else. The details will emerge, but I'd call this a pretty big win. Did we run up the score as much as possible? Maybe not. But we most definitely won, and won big. I'd say this baseball town made a pretty good four game sweep of that football league.

How much debt is left on the dome?

pdm_ad wrote: ↑

Nov 24, 2021

How much debt is left on the dome?

$0.00, the last payment was sent in august. The $12 million ($6 county and $6 city ) is now being used to finance the $210,000,000 CC expansion.

Between this settlement, the $500 million the City received as part of the American Rescue Plan (to be spent by 2024), and the $8 billion infrastructure money coming to the state, this is a once in a generation infusion of cash to the City and region.  I'm as cynical as the next person on this forum.  I'm sure I'll be frustrated by how some of the money will be spent, and how long it will take to spend it.  But surely this is nothing but good news for our City and region.       

Actual paper work

Forever_Lou wrote: ↑

Nov 24, 2021

Between this settlement, the $500 million the City received as part of the American Rescue Plan (to be spent by 2024), and the $8 billion infrastructure money coming to the state, this is a once in a generation infusion of cash to the City and region.  I'm as cynical as the next person on this forum.  I'm sure I'll be frustrated by how some of the money will be spent, and how long it will take to spend it.  But surely this is nothing but good news for our City and region.       

I'd like to see the money invested...

• The school system.
• Crime prevention measures (social workers, better city-owned CCTV cameras, etc).
• Road repairs (repaving and narrowing).
• Replacing aging bridges.
• Repairing broken sidewalks.
• Cleaning up City Hall a bit.
• Constructing two or three BRT lines (north-south metro I still feel like isn't worth it at this time).
• Getting our homeless off the street and into quality tiny homes with access to health services and food to help get them back on track.
• Demolition of unsalvageable LCRA homes.
• Set aside some money meant to promote the start-up of small, family owned businesses throughout the City and provide grants to those that are struggling.
• And, probably a way out there idea, is to provide grants to people making less than a certain amount of money per year, or are first time homebuyers (or both) to go into neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment over the years and renovate a home. Money could also be set aside to provide grants to existing home owners who are barely getting by to make updates to their homes to make them safer and/or energy efficient.

It's would cost lot of money in the ideas I have listed, and it would probably all be eaten up by what I listed, but they seem like good investments to secure a wonderful future for St. Louis. As far as trashing the current Convention Center expansion in favor of a new, ground-up one, just no. Dome can be renovated, but demoing and starting over doesn't seem like an option right now.

dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑

Nov 24, 2021

Actual paper work

Thank you sir! It's nice to see it in writing with signatures. While there may be no admission of liability in the settlement documents, $790M sure looks like an awful lot of actual liability. And the settlement itself is a nice tacit admission that it really could have been a lot worse for the league. I love it!

Let’s simplify this, we spent $16m on the plan to keep the rams and got $790m in return

If we invested $16m in Bitcoin when the lawsuit was filled in 2017 we would have $590m now