Wilson Building Bulletin: Remember when Bowser was a stadium skeptic?
The mayor says the council should move quickly to approve the stadium deal. But they're following in her footsteps and taking their time.
It’s been just over 10 days since Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Washington Commanders unveiled the deal to bring the team back to the city and into a new 65,000-seat stadium at the old RFK site. And according to Bowser, time is tight for the D.C. Council to sign off on the deal.
"It's a now-or-never situation. The Commanders have to make a decision. We're not their only choice," she said last Friday on WAMU’s “The Politics Hour,” stressing that lawmakers have to approve the deal by the July 15 deadline in the initial agreement with the team — or at least stay as close to that as possible.
And while they’re at it, she said, they should avoid messing around too much with the deal she negotiated. "This is delicate. It's not easy to come in, 'Change this, change that,’” she said on the show.
We get it: The executive is the city’s dealmaker-in-chief, the person with the broadest view of what D.C. wants, what it can give, and how much it can push in either direction without blowing up any deal in-the-making. Lawmakers have the procedural right to review proposed deals, but most mayors would probably prefer that they didn't do much more than that.
Bowser, though, should be at least mildly sympathetic to questions being raised by some councilmembers over what's in the Commanders deal. She was in their very position in 2014, after all, when she was presented with a similar — albeit less costly — stadium deal where the sitting mayor urged speedy council approval.
That deal involved D.C. United and plans for what would eventually become Audi Field in Southwest, the cost of which was split between D.C. and the team. (The city put in $150 million to acquire and prepare the site, while the team paid $250 million to build the stadium.) But despite similar exhortations from then-mayor Vincent Gray that the council quickly sign off on the deal, Bowser, then the chair of the council’s economic development committee, urged slower-going deliberation.
“We know that the executive and the developers and property owners and the team have been working on very complicated aspects of this deal for many months, probably a couple of years at least, and it is very important for the taxpayers of the District of Columbia to be assured that the council will approach the review and analysis of the deal with with equal force and expertise,” said Bowser during a hearing on the Audi Field proposal in the summer of 2014.
Bowser even took it a step further: She got her colleagues to agree to hire an outside consultant to review the proposed deal. The assessment, which took most of the fall of that year to complete, unearthed more than $25 million in unexpected costs the city could incur and raised concerns around a significant provision of the deal: a land-swap that would have seen D.C. hand the Franklin Reeves Center at 14th and U Streets NW to a private developer.
Bowser ultimately prevailed on her colleagues to remove the land-swap altogether, because the proposed stadium deal undervalued the site by more than $11 million. (In 2023, Bowser’s administration selected a developer for the Reeves Center site; the new building is slated to include the NAACP’s national headquarters, a hotel, and housing.)
Now, of course, she finds herself in charge, with one leading skeptic of the stadium deal also having been her colleague and partner during the 2014 Audi Field negotiations.
“I’ve been reflecting on this because I have lived through Nationals Park, the Audi Field proposal, and the mayor’s proposal in 2016 to close D.C. General,” said D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson earlier this week. “In each of those instances, the council required longer than two months to work on them and the council made significant changes that saved the city millions of dollars.”
Mendelson and other councilmembers are still digesting what details they have on the Commanders stadium deal, but have already started raising questions about a provision granting the team exclusive development rights for residences and retail on multiple parcels of land, as well as why D.C. is exempting the team from property taxes for the stadium and sales taxes on three parking decks that would accommodate up to 8,000 cars.
But one thing they may not have much of is time. While their review of portions of the deal could stretch into the fall, a significant chunk of it — $500 million for preparing the site for development — will likely have to be agreed on as part of the 2026 budget, which the council is expected to finalize by late July.
