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Councilmember Charles Allen at Wednesday nights ANC6C meeting.

CM Allen Says He Will Work to Change a Bad Stadium Deal

by Larry Janezich

Posted:  May 16, 2025

CM Charles Allen told ANC6C Wednesday night in his presentation on the DC budget that the city will spend over a billion dollars to build a new stadium on the RFK campus. 

Allen said, “Right now a majority of the council does not support the proposal…I think actually a good number of my colleagues want to get to a yes but they are not there yet…A majority is absolutely opposed to the deal as is because it’s not a good deal for the city and it’s not a good deal for the taxpayer.”  Allen said that for more than a decade he has been consistent in pointing out that NFL stadiums are not economic generators.  

(More than a half dozen prominent economists and the St. Louis Fed point to data showing that using public funds for new stadiums is a poor investment.)

Allen cited one example out of what he said is many regarding why this is a bad deal.  He said that the proposal as it now stands is that DC would build, fund, own, and maintain parking garages for 8,000 spots.  The two parking garages at Nats Ballpark provide 1250 spaces for a 45,000 seat venue.  For the 65,000 seat stadium, the Commanders want 8,000 spaces.  “That,” Allen said, “would create a wall of parking garages right next to the fields and block off the fields from the community.” 

“I think it’s a really bad idea to build that much parking … also that we all need to foot the bill and on top of that…we get no parking tax revenue so we will own, build, maintain, and operate parking garages and then we get zero revenue from it.”

Allen said that there is no money in the proposal for another Metro to serve the site, and “that makes no sense if we’re going to be building a stadium and provide for 15,000 new people … as we build 6000 homes.”   

ANC6C Commissioner Mark Eckenweiler asked Allen if the proposed deal includes “sweeteners” for the city as is sometimes the case for municipalities providing subsides for sports arenas. 

Allen said that right now there’s no revenue sharing from things like naming rights.  The Commanders are also tax free on things like concessions and sales – not just on the stadium – but entire RFK campus…”and so the commanders will get all of that for a dollar a year and build everything on it…we will not get property tax, we will give up all parking revenue tax and sales tax….If you look at Nats Park the way that that works right now is that the District and the Nationals split 50/50 parking revenue on large scale events that are 5000 or more.  So why would we treat one stadium very differently than the other?”

Allen said it makes no sense that we’re just giving it all away “so that’s what I mean that this is a bad deal.  If it’s going to pass we’ve got to make a lot of changes to it.” 

Allen’s position seems to be that in the event the city council passes the bill, it will need to be a better deal – that being the case, he did not say that even with major changes he could support the bill.