August 21, 2025 • 11 mins
How the city got here from the early days of the Alamodome to now.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
So the project to are the motion to pause, the
vote for this to go on the ballot and to
accept the Spurs termsheet fail today, so this will go
to the ballot. Seven City council members voted for it
or against. I guess against it, but for the pause.
(00:26):
So what the mayor wanted was a thirty day pause.
And as I said before, you can still do whatever
you want the next thirty days. I don't know why
you need to pause. Just just go do what you
are going to do in those thirty days and continue
to educate people however you want to educate them. So
it's on this Facebook thread today, and once again there's
(00:46):
people on this thread that I think are believing that
it's it's not something that we should do, that it's
not our business as a city to make sure our
professional sports teams get under you know, opinion that's going
to be paid for by somebody other than them. And
this argument's been going on for fifty years since municipalities
(01:06):
started building of buildings and funding it through different bond
issues and tax issues and all that kind of stuff.
So this post started out with the Spurs should should
secure their one billion blackmail payment today because they're gonna
they're gonna vote in the way that they did. They
(01:27):
also made name some other names, and some were calling
this the business owner's bailout program and basically saying this
is going to cost everybody a whole bunch of money
if they decide to do this, And some of the
replies were, it's dangerous and filthy downtown. Why would I
ever want to go down there again? I saw this one,
(01:48):
the Project Marvel. Let's see if I can pull this
back up. It went away. The Project Marvel is an
infrastructure nightmare to our downtown area. It will out money
from citizens that should be paying their bills inside of
rip off prices for tickets and parking. Well, my retort
to that is is why do you care what a
people spend with their money? Yeah, people probably should pay
(02:12):
their bills instead of going to a Spurs game. But
if they choose to put it on the visa card
and pay it over the next ten years, how's that
hurting you. I don't think you want to legislate how
other people live their life or behave their lives. That's
kind of a slippery slope to go on. And I
also made this point that the Spurs are putting up
way more money than other professional teams are. Every person
(02:34):
has a right to vote however they wish. But if
you think that sidewalks and roads and infrastructure and affordable
housing and all those things are more important, then see
if you're a city council will put some kind of
a funding mechanism in place to do that, because this
one it can't. And when we had Andrew Solano on
yesterday from the the Spurs political consultant, basically, the money
(02:58):
that's coming from this that's it's I guess it's a
percentage of the sales tax when it's using a certain
zone downtown. That money goes to the state. The state
collects that, but they will let you keep it if
you're directing it towards a basketball arena or a convention
center to improve your downtown. That's how that works. It's
a law. You cannot taymove the law and say let's
(03:20):
put it over here and this is more important. That's
the way that it has been for a long time.
So then I get this one, and this is one
of my favorite ones. First of all, this person says
the dome is an isore with parking issues among other problems.
If it's so great, then the Spurs should embrace the
Dome and not jettison perfectly a good venue. This project
(03:43):
is making someone money and it's not the taxpayer. Make
no mistake, this project is not for the betterment of
San Antonio. So let's hold on and let's do some
education again. The Alamo Dome, and this is me speaking here,
has by far been the biggest cash register that San
Antonio has ever had. I don't remember the numbers that
(04:04):
were out a few weeks ago, a few years ago,
but I think the Alamodome has generated ten to twenty
billion dollars of economic impact and it's time in San Antonio.
My numbers may be off a little bit, but it's
a lot, and I don't think there's any any single
standing building in this community that's done more to create
revenue and economic impact for San Antonio. And when you
(04:26):
talk about economic impact, you're talking about people that go
to work at the games, the people that are parking
a lot, attendants, the people that are ushers, the people
that are servers. All of those people make money and
intend spend money that creates sales tax and it's good
for the economy. Let me also once again educate people
(04:46):
on the Alamodome, because this was something that was talked
about and it's been revisionist history many times over the
last thirty five years. The Alamodome was never quote unquote
promised to get your an NFL team. It was built
by the standards that the NFL set when we started
(05:09):
construction in nineteen ninety and by the time the building
was completed and the NFL decided to expand in nineteen
ninety three, some of those specs from the NFL changed
and Charlotte and Jacksonville were awarded teams. Jacksonville, the NFL
probably to this day, is still not happy that the
team went to Jacksonville. That was a colossal mistake. That
(05:32):
team has been poorly run for a long time. It
has had a few moments in the sun and the playoffs,
but it is not a team that is is the
benchmark for how you should run a professional sports team.
And Jacksonville, I don't think is anywhere near the football
city that San Antonio would have been, and there was
nothing that would have stopped san Antonio from prospering had
(05:55):
they done that. Now, I'll say this, if there had
been an NFL team that was awarded to San Antonio
nineteen ninety three, and here we are in twenty twenty five.
There is zero question that not only would we be
talking about a new building for the Spurs, we would
be talking about a new NFL stadium as well, because
the Alamodome is not equipped nor do I think it
(06:15):
can be renovated to meet the new standards, the twenty
twenty five standards of the NFL. That's water under the bridge,
so we'll move on on from that. The other part
of this that I think needs to be a part
of the education is that the Spurs moved We're never
going to move into the Alamodome. When it was voted on,
that was never going to be a Spurs A venue.
(06:39):
It was going to be for that Alamo Bowl, the
Olympic Festival, it was going to be for future Bowl games.
It was going to be. No one knew at the
time that UTSA would ever get football, but it turned
out to be a great venue for them and still is.
And back in nineteen ninety when Red Maccombs had just
purchased the Spurs, and I believe that was the first
(06:59):
year that the Pistons were in the Palace of Auburn
Hills and he attended that game and he went, oh
my goodness, I got to get out of the hemisphere.
I don't have suites. I don't have these kind of
seats for that are for VIPs. These are revenue streams
that I don't have. So he made a stopgap issue
to go to the Alamodome because he could sell those
(07:19):
things and tell a new arena was going to be funded.
And he knew that he was going to sell the
team well before nineteen ninety nine when the arena vote
actually took place. So the Spurs did go into the Dome,
but it wasn't the perfect venue for basketball. It's been
a perfect venue for a lot of things, but certainly
not for the NBA. And it's one thing when you
(07:43):
play the Lakers on a Marquee matchup on a Saturday
night and put forty thousand fans in there, But when
you play the Grizzlies two nights later, and that's when
they were in Vancouver, it was kind of hard to
sell twelve thousand tickets, let alone forty. And when you're
a sports franchise, one of your most important things is
selling season tickets, and when you play in a venue
(08:04):
where tickets are not in demand. Because the building can
be as big as however you need it to be
on any given night, season ticket sales are going to
struggle because the number that you can sell is not
a finite number. And so I think that's something that
has got to be part of the discussion as well.
(08:24):
We did try to get an NFL team. The NFL
changed the rules him as fair Arena needed to be
remodeled or torn down, They needed to have the Convention
Center space there. Red knew he was going to sell
the team, and then we got to nineteen ninety nine,
and fortunately Cindy Kryer and Judge Wolf and the people
at the county made sure that the Spurs didn't go
(08:44):
someplace else. And let's as I was talking with with
Andrew Solano yesterday, think back when you were at the
Alamodome for the Western Conference Finals in ninety five or
even the first championship in nineteen ninety nine. Did you
have a smartphone? Were you tweeting? Were you texting? Were
you facebooking? Were you doing all those things? No, they
(09:05):
didn't exist. You might have had a cell phone, but
there's probably the size of a cleenex box and weigh
twelve pounds and it was a pain to carry around
with you. We didn't have the technology that we have now,
and all of those things are vitally important for the
fan experience. Fans engage things on their phone, Fans attend
games with digital tickets on their phones. People want to
(09:28):
get on Facebook and Twitter. The idea of having an
arena that doesn't have the highest speed WiFi that you
can get and the most modern technological things. Now we're
going to have people in some arenas around the league
that can gamble in real time on their phones. All
of those things are part of the infrastructure that all
these owners realize that we need more of. So, as
(09:49):
I was saying in this post today, there are a
lot of reasons to vote no, and I'm going to
get to those coming up in a little bit because
I think there are some very valid reasons and there's
a couple of groups of people that I have a
little bit of concern for. But I really hope that people,
when they make a decision to vote yes or no,
educate themselves on this. And you are the i would say,
(10:11):
of one thousand people, nine hundred and ninety of them
are never going to be affected. I think I've probably
rented a car or a U haul to move things
or something that would have a potential tax on it,
maybe ten times a year, maybe ten times in the
thirty seven years I've been here, and one percent of
(10:32):
if I'm going to rent a vehicle or a rental
car for something that's one hundred bucks, the annual inflation
on that car is going to be more than the
one percent that you're going to pay for the extra tax.
In other words, if you rent a car today and
it's one hundred bucks and that's the tax, title and everything,
and then next year when this tax goes into place,
(10:53):
perhaps it's one hundred and one, is that really going
to stop you from renting a car. I don't think so.
That That's part of the education process. So vote however
your heart desires. That's part of the constant the republic
that we live in, and it's part of your right
to have an opinion and have your vote heard. But
please be educated about what you're voting for. And the
(11:15):
idea that I don't like the spurs, I don't want
billionaires getting stuff for free and all of those kind
of things is we'll discuss on a little bit. Are
kind of part of cutting off your nose despite your face,
because all the things that you think need to be
improved are not necessarily going to be approved and may
have a lesser chance of being approved if the spurs
aren't here in a few years. So we'll get to
(11:37):
more of that coming up. It's a Andy Everete show
on the ticket
So the project to are the motion to pause, the
vote for this to go on the ballot and to
accept the Spurs termsheet fail today, so this will go
to the ballot. Seven City council members voted for it
or against. I guess against it, but for the pause.
(00:26):
So what the mayor wanted was a thirty day pause.
And as I said before, you can still do whatever
you want the next thirty days. I don't know why
you need to pause. Just just go do what you
are going to do in those thirty days and continue
to educate people however you want to educate them. So
it's on this Facebook thread today, and once again there's
(00:46):
people on this thread that I think are believing that
it's it's not something that we should do, that it's
not our business as a city to make sure our
professional sports teams get under you know, opinion that's going
to be paid for by somebody other than them. And
this argument's been going on for fifty years since municipalities
(01:06):
started building of buildings and funding it through different bond
issues and tax issues and all that kind of stuff.
So this post started out with the Spurs should should
secure their one billion blackmail payment today because they're gonna
they're gonna vote in the way that they did. They
(01:27):
also made name some other names, and some were calling
this the business owner's bailout program and basically saying this
is going to cost everybody a whole bunch of money
if they decide to do this, And some of the
replies were, it's dangerous and filthy downtown. Why would I
ever want to go down there again? I saw this one,
(01:48):
the Project Marvel. Let's see if I can pull this
back up. It went away. The Project Marvel is an
infrastructure nightmare to our downtown area. It will out money
from citizens that should be paying their bills inside of
rip off prices for tickets and parking. Well, my retort
to that is is why do you care what a
people spend with their money? Yeah, people probably should pay
(02:12):
their bills instead of going to a Spurs game. But
if they choose to put it on the visa card
and pay it over the next ten years, how's that
hurting you. I don't think you want to legislate how
other people live their life or behave their lives. That's
kind of a slippery slope to go on. And I
also made this point that the Spurs are putting up
way more money than other professional teams are. Every person
(02:34):
has a right to vote however they wish. But if
you think that sidewalks and roads and infrastructure and affordable
housing and all those things are more important, then see
if you're a city council will put some kind of
a funding mechanism in place to do that, because this
one it can't. And when we had Andrew Solano on
yesterday from the the Spurs political consultant, basically, the money
(02:58):
that's coming from this that's it's I guess it's a
percentage of the sales tax when it's using a certain
zone downtown. That money goes to the state. The state
collects that, but they will let you keep it if
you're directing it towards a basketball arena or a convention
center to improve your downtown. That's how that works. It's
a law. You cannot taymove the law and say let's
(03:20):
put it over here and this is more important. That's
the way that it has been for a long time.
So then I get this one, and this is one
of my favorite ones. First of all, this person says
the dome is an isore with parking issues among other problems.
If it's so great, then the Spurs should embrace the
Dome and not jettison perfectly a good venue. This project
(03:43):
is making someone money and it's not the taxpayer. Make
no mistake, this project is not for the betterment of
San Antonio. So let's hold on and let's do some
education again. The Alamo Dome, and this is me speaking here,
has by far been the biggest cash register that San
Antonio has ever had. I don't remember the numbers that
(04:04):
were out a few weeks ago, a few years ago,
but I think the Alamodome has generated ten to twenty
billion dollars of economic impact and it's time in San Antonio.
My numbers may be off a little bit, but it's
a lot, and I don't think there's any any single
standing building in this community that's done more to create
revenue and economic impact for San Antonio. And when you
(04:26):
talk about economic impact, you're talking about people that go
to work at the games, the people that are parking
a lot, attendants, the people that are ushers, the people
that are servers. All of those people make money and
intend spend money that creates sales tax and it's good
for the economy. Let me also once again educate people
(04:46):
on the Alamodome, because this was something that was talked
about and it's been revisionist history many times over the
last thirty five years. The Alamodome was never quote unquote
promised to get your an NFL team. It was built
by the standards that the NFL set when we started
(05:09):
construction in nineteen ninety and by the time the building
was completed and the NFL decided to expand in nineteen
ninety three, some of those specs from the NFL changed
and Charlotte and Jacksonville were awarded teams. Jacksonville, the NFL
probably to this day, is still not happy that the
team went to Jacksonville. That was a colossal mistake. That
(05:32):
team has been poorly run for a long time. It
has had a few moments in the sun and the playoffs,
but it is not a team that is is the
benchmark for how you should run a professional sports team.
And Jacksonville, I don't think is anywhere near the football
city that San Antonio would have been, and there was
nothing that would have stopped san Antonio from prospering had
(05:55):
they done that. Now, I'll say this, if there had
been an NFL team that was awarded to San Antonio
nineteen ninety three, and here we are in twenty twenty five.
There is zero question that not only would we be
talking about a new building for the Spurs, we would
be talking about a new NFL stadium as well, because
the Alamodome is not equipped nor do I think it
(06:15):
can be renovated to meet the new standards, the twenty
twenty five standards of the NFL. That's water under the bridge,
so we'll move on on from that. The other part
of this that I think needs to be a part
of the education is that the Spurs moved We're never
going to move into the Alamodome. When it was voted on,
that was never going to be a Spurs A venue.
(06:39):
It was going to be for that Alamo Bowl, the
Olympic Festival, it was going to be for future Bowl games.
It was going to be. No one knew at the
time that UTSA would ever get football, but it turned
out to be a great venue for them and still is.
And back in nineteen ninety when Red Maccombs had just
purchased the Spurs, and I believe that was the first
(06:59):
year that the Pistons were in the Palace of Auburn
Hills and he attended that game and he went, oh
my goodness, I got to get out of the hemisphere.
I don't have suites. I don't have these kind of
seats for that are for VIPs. These are revenue streams
that I don't have. So he made a stopgap issue
to go to the Alamodome because he could sell those
(07:19):
things and tell a new arena was going to be funded.
And he knew that he was going to sell the
team well before nineteen ninety nine when the arena vote
actually took place. So the Spurs did go into the Dome,
but it wasn't the perfect venue for basketball. It's been
a perfect venue for a lot of things, but certainly
not for the NBA. And it's one thing when you
(07:43):
play the Lakers on a Marquee matchup on a Saturday
night and put forty thousand fans in there, But when
you play the Grizzlies two nights later, and that's when
they were in Vancouver, it was kind of hard to
sell twelve thousand tickets, let alone forty. And when you're
a sports franchise, one of your most important things is
selling season tickets, and when you play in a venue
(08:04):
where tickets are not in demand. Because the building can
be as big as however you need it to be
on any given night, season ticket sales are going to
struggle because the number that you can sell is not
a finite number. And so I think that's something that
has got to be part of the discussion as well.
(08:24):
We did try to get an NFL team. The NFL
changed the rules him as fair Arena needed to be
remodeled or torn down, They needed to have the Convention
Center space there. Red knew he was going to sell
the team, and then we got to nineteen ninety nine,
and fortunately Cindy Kryer and Judge Wolf and the people
at the county made sure that the Spurs didn't go
(08:44):
someplace else. And let's as I was talking with with
Andrew Solano yesterday, think back when you were at the
Alamodome for the Western Conference Finals in ninety five or
even the first championship in nineteen ninety nine. Did you
have a smartphone? Were you tweeting? Were you texting? Were
you facebooking? Were you doing all those things? No, they
(09:05):
didn't exist. You might have had a cell phone, but
there's probably the size of a cleenex box and weigh
twelve pounds and it was a pain to carry around
with you. We didn't have the technology that we have now,
and all of those things are vitally important for the
fan experience. Fans engage things on their phone, Fans attend
games with digital tickets on their phones. People want to
(09:28):
get on Facebook and Twitter. The idea of having an
arena that doesn't have the highest speed WiFi that you
can get and the most modern technological things. Now we're
going to have people in some arenas around the league
that can gamble in real time on their phones. All
of those things are part of the infrastructure that all
these owners realize that we need more of. So, as
(09:49):
I was saying in this post today, there are a
lot of reasons to vote no, and I'm going to
get to those coming up in a little bit because
I think there are some very valid reasons and there's
a couple of groups of people that I have a
little bit of concern for. But I really hope that people,
when they make a decision to vote yes or no,
educate themselves on this. And you are the i would say,
(10:11):
of one thousand people, nine hundred and ninety of them
are never going to be affected. I think I've probably
rented a car or a U haul to move things
or something that would have a potential tax on it,
maybe ten times a year, maybe ten times in the
thirty seven years I've been here, and one percent of
(10:32):
if I'm going to rent a vehicle or a rental
car for something that's one hundred bucks, the annual inflation
on that car is going to be more than the
one percent that you're going to pay for the extra tax.
In other words, if you rent a car today and
it's one hundred bucks and that's the tax, title and everything,
and then next year when this tax goes into place,
(10:53):
perhaps it's one hundred and one, is that really going
to stop you from renting a car. I don't think so.
That That's part of the education process. So vote however
your heart desires. That's part of the constant the republic
that we live in, and it's part of your right
to have an opinion and have your vote heard. But
please be educated about what you're voting for. And the
(11:15):
idea that I don't like the spurs, I don't want
billionaires getting stuff for free and all of those kind
of things is we'll discuss on a little bit. Are
kind of part of cutting off your nose despite your face,
because all the things that you think need to be
improved are not necessarily going to be approved and may
have a lesser chance of being approved if the spurs
aren't here in a few years. So we'll get to
(11:37):
more of that coming up. It's a Andy Everete show
on the ticket
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