10 Years of Super Bowl Secrets

Lots of secrecy for the NFL, little payoff for taxpayers.

Photo credit: Erik Drost

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Tenneessee Gov. Bill Lee last week signed a new law that allows the Tennessee state Department of Tourist Development to keep contracts it negotiates with private businesses secret for up to 10 years. Those contracts will be shielded from public records law so long as the department’s director and the state attorney general agree that they meet the maddeningly vague standard of being of “a sensitive nature.”

The law is Orwellian in the extreme, as its preamble proclaims that “the department of tourist development adopts as its official policy the principle of open records,” and that “A binding contract or agreement entered into or signed by the department that obligates public funds, together with all supporting records and documentation, is a public record and open for public inspection as of the date the contract or agreement is entered into or signed,” before creating a statute doing precisely the opposite.

But the worst part of it — and why folks all across the country should be worried about what happened in the Volunteer State — is that the main beneficiary of the new law, per the bill’s sponsors, is the National Football League.

Yes, this absurd law was pushed through because Tennessee state lawmakers want Nashville to host the Super Bowl, in a stadium taxpayers have already contributed more than $1 billion toward, without the public finding out how much they’re paying to woo the NFL. So the public policy failure is on two levels: First, in general, secrecy around economic development contracts is bad for taxpayers and communities. Second, lawmakers bolstered that secrecy in the name of hosting the Super Bowl, a bona fide dud of an event for the public by any measure.

The original version of the bill was actually even worse than what was signed into law, giving the department and AG pretty much unfettered ability to keep a Super Bowl contract under wraps for a decade. The final version added a provision stating that once the state starts spending money under the contract, it needs to be divulged to the public.

That’s, I hope it is clear, not very helpful. Once the state is disbursing money under a contract, it’s already been negotiated and executed, meaning the public didn’t get any say into its contents. Or the state could delay payments in order to keep the contract from becoming a public record, which the NFL would presumably be fine with, because the demands the NFL makes of Super Bowl host cities are patently absurd, which is likely why the NFL wants them hidden in the first place.

Tennessee would not be alone in covering up the contents of a Super Bowl contract, of course. In fact, the only one, so far as I know, to actually come into the public eye is a draft of the 2014 contract for the game hosted by Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Included in that contract are requirements that the NFL receive free hotel rooms, which have to have been airing NFL Network for a year before the game takes place, free parking, free billboards, free reservations at bowling alleys (not kidding!), as well as police escorts for all the NFL C-suiters. The NFL mandates the use of ATMs in the stadium that accept NFL preferred cards, presumably so it can charge fees or receive some sort of kickback. It also has the host city cover travel and expenses for 180 people to make a “familiarization trip” ahead of the game.

You can see why the NFL would find this sort of stuff embarrassing. That’s a lot of costs foisted onto the public and local businesses. But that’s all the more reason the public needs to know what state and city leaders are agreeing to on the front end, not years after the fact. (Also, if this stuff is standard fare for the Super Bowl hosts — as it appears to be — how on Earth is of a “sensitive nature” to qualify for exemption under the new law?)

The kicker is that this taxpayer-funded endeavor — played in a taxpayer-funded stadium — won’t even bring benefits to the public. Every year, the NFL and its boosters in the local business community and local tourism boards and agencies claim the Super Bowl host city will see a gigantic fiscal benefit, totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But after the fact studies have found that is simply not the case: The benefits, if any, are a fraction of what the NFL claims, and are sometimes negative.

As economist Victor Matheson wrote in his paper, “Economics of the Super Bowl,” “Ex post economic analyses of the Super Bowl by scholars not financially connected with the game have typically found that the observed effects of the game on real economic variables such as employment, government revenues, taxable sales, GDP, and personal income, while generally positive, are a fraction of those claimed by the league and sports boosters.”

The real benefit is, perhaps, tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds — so having the public pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a stadium in order to receive maybe tens of millions by hosting the Super Bowl is a pretty raw deal. And doing it without the public knowing what else it’s on the hook for due to the NFL’s wild demands is even worse.

The new Tennessee law will also, presumably, cover other mega-events, sporting or otherwise, because while it was drafted with the Super Bowl in mind, it is not at all specific to that game. This is one of those instances in which policymakers let the false narrative around a fancy event lead them into not only making a Super Bowl-related mistake, but one that is going to cause other headaches for the public on who knows what and for who knows how long.

It’s a policy fumble of epic proportions — which is why, even though this isn’t the most important issue in the world or anything, I still think it’s important to call it out. Policy errors around sports, culture, and other things lawmakers find too enticing to avoid can cause other downstream issues for the public. In this instance, it means communities may not know what sort of tourism-related fiascos they’re being subjected to until it’s far too late to stop them.

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— Pat Garofalo