D.C. mayor touts stadium deal for Commanders at RFK site

D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is hoping to get a deal done to bring the Commanders back to the site of RFK Stadium. She'll need to get the D.C. Council to approve the arrangement. And she'll need to hope that efforts to force the measure onto a ballot will be unsuccessful.

In her first public comments regarding the situation, Bowser made the case for bringing Washington's football team back to Washington, D.C.

“I think that D.C. residents . . . are very excited about world-class sports," Bowser said at a media event on Monday, via NBCWashington.com. "They were excited about the Washington Nationals, the Washington Wizards, the Washington Capitals, the Washington Mystics, DC United. They know we’re the sports capital and they know what that means for our economy. But more than that, I look forward in a couple of days [to] presenting our ideas about how we address a shifting economy."

That seems to be the primary argument for the stadium — the economy is changing, because government is changing.

“[O]ur economy is shifting because of federal government decisions about people, headquarters and the like,” Bowser said. “And so Deputy Mayor Albert and I, and our entire team, is very focused on how we prepare D.C. for a different economy. And a big, big bright spot in our economy is entertainment and sports. So we're gonna be presenting to the council a very robust plan about how we change our economy to get ready for the future.”

Meanwhile, the organizers of the Homes Not Stadiums movement are attempting to put the issue on the table for a June 2025 election. To turn the opposition to public funding for the venue into a ballot initiative, the group needs roughly 23,000 signatures, per NBC Washington.

Regardless of the local effort to derail the deal, the agreement as reported last week looks like a good one for D.C., relative to comparable NFL stadium deals. D.C. could be paying as little as $500 million for a $3 billion facility. At a time when the standard seems to be a 50-50 public-private split (with the team/league responsible for overages), 1/6th is, to use a technical term, not too shabby.