How much the scrapped Sixers arena cost the city
The new arena was promised “at no cost to city taxpayers.”
Sixers owners claimed that the now scuttled new arena in Market East would come at no cost to city taxpayers. But taxpayers did foot the bill for the arena in another way: Time. Lots of it.
At least a half-dozen government agencies and hundreds of staffers were involved in planning over the years.
The exact cost to taxpayers is hard to calculate. Experts said any tally would likely be an underestimate. However, using public schedules, payroll records, and office surveys, we’ve done some back-of-the-envelope math.
Here’s what we found…
The arena was the blockbuster legislative item of Council’s fall season, taking up more time than any other legislative issue.
To calculate the cost we can start with, for example, Councilmember Mark Squilla’s' hourly salary of $75
The arena was discussed over 48 hours of committee hearings throughout 2024. Squilla attended all of them which gives us $3,600.
Based on attendance records and a survey of Council members, we estimate at least 700 hours spent in hearings. When you factor in 16 Council members' time, including increased hourly rates for senior roles, that gives us a total of about $56,250.
But what about prep time?
About two-thirds of the 17 Council offices responded to our request for an accounting of their hours spent on the arena – time spent compiling research, legislative analysis, and talking points.
Which takes us to $102,000.
But each lawmaker also has a support staff helping with prep work and hearings. The average Council staffer salary is $72,000, or about $34 an hour. Council offices provided a wide range of answers. But based on their estimates, and applying the average to those who didn’t respond, staff spent at least 4,485 hours of collective work, which equals $152,490.
Taking us to a total of $254,490 for the hearings alone. That’s most likely an undercount as it doesn’t account for support staff like minute-takers, tech to set up the YouTube broadcasts, security, etc…
Then there are the behind-the-scenes hours.
Outside of public hearings, every Council members and their aides spent time in community meetings, taking phone calls from constituents, examining the various studies, and fielding lobbyists.
Based on time estimates from each Council member’s office, we can ballpark a total of $118,370 backstage Council member costs.
So for just Council, the Sixers proposal demanded at least 8,600 hours of collective time, at a ballpark cost of $372,860.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s office declined to estimate how many hours the mayor spent on the arena proposal in the last year. In a statement, she said her administration would spend “as long as it takes” to win a project with so much economic benefit for the city.
However, her public schedule shows at least seven town halls and community meetings on the plan, each running about three hours. At least four aides joined her at each forum. Minimum labor cost, just for that outreach: $10,600.
And, at a Monday news conference, Parker also noted her team had “traveled across this country, visiting arenas.”
We know of at least two trips – to Atlanta and Boston – the latter including the mayor, her security detail, her top three aides, and two city planners. City credit records obtained by The Inquirer, in addition to payroll, adds $13,200 for these trips.
Even the fallout after the plans were scrapped have taken up time. If every member of City Council and the mayor’s office either attended or remotely watched Monday’s hour-long news conference, that would add at least another $13,000 to the tab.
But this is the very tip of the iceberg. Parker’s top aides also attended many of the Council hearings, met privately with the Sixers organization on multiple occasions, and fielded countless phone calls and emails about the bid for 76 Place.
“However many hours, days, weeks or months it takes – everyone in the Parker administration is ready to do the work for the people of Philadelphia,” Parker said, in a statement.
The arena plans were met with backlash and sparked many protests. The police department spent $36,523 in protest-related overtime pay on eight days when rallies took place since 2023, a spokesperson said. The majority of that stemmed from two days in December when Council held its final votes on the arena, which drew large crowds in City Hall.
Then there’s base pay for officers, which the department couldn’t provide. For larger protest marches, however, 20 police officers and a captain would typically earn $3,528 for four hours of work. There have been at least four arena events that drew, at minimum, a police presence of that size. So conservatively, that’s at least another $14,112.
That gives us a combined total of $50,635 for policing costs.
Then there’s SEPTA. While it did secure an agreement from HBSE to cover $1.5 million in outside contractors for arena planning, staffers were involved in the process, too.
A SEPTA source with direct knowledge of the planning process mentioned a lengthy review of impact studies and a weekly working group of about eight staffers. Those alone would have conservatively cost $8,800 for SEPTA’s time – but records show numerous other agency staffers had been meeting about the arena since late 2022.
This gives us a conservative total of $469,095 of taxpayer money spent on a Center City arena that won’t happen.
Of course, this doesn’t factor in hundreds more hours of work by city planners, attorneys, communication staff, engineers and many more who all believed the plan was going forward.
J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University who studies sports development, said the volume of public resources devoted to the Sixers arena was extraordinary compared to other privately funded stadiums — and it likely impacted most corners of local government, at some point.
“It’s not just one person that says ‘I’m gonna devote time to this,’” he said. “You can’t do something until someone else does something.”
Still, some officials now say they don’t view the total planning process as a total waste. After the Sixers announced they would build their arena in South Philadelphia, Parker said, “I’ll let other people Monday Morning quarterback about how we were pawns in the game.”
In hindsight, some officials thought those thousands of hours toiling away on a now-dead $1.3 billion idea could have been put towards other ills.
“Council’s other business didn’t stop, but it’s hard to argue that the arena hearings didn’t slow that work down,” said Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, noting that his staff contended with long hours, missed time with family, and intense public anger due to the arena saga.
Sam Katz, who worked for Comcast as a consultant on the opposing side of the arena pitch, said there were other incalculable costs. “There’s the cost of credibility. There’s the cost of respect. And the cost of anxiety,” he said. “I can’t quantify all that.”
Methodology
The Inquirer used the length of the video recordings for Committee of the Whole hearings between Nov. 12 and Dec. 12 to estimate the minimum amount of time that Council members spent in hearings about the proposed arena.
We also reached out to all 17 Council offices and asked for an accounting of their time spent on the arena outside the hearings. Eleven offices agreed to provide an estimate. Some officials requested not to be identified to speak freely about a sensitive issue.
For those who did not respond, we checked hearing attendance using publicly available transcripts. We then applied the average staff time estimates from the offices that responded and applied them to those that didn’t. (Except in the case of Councilmember Brian J. O’Neill, who was not recorded present during the committee hearings and his office did not respond for comment. Their time was not included in our estimate.)
Council members are paid differently if they are in leadership positions. Members who do not hold leadership positions are paid about $74 per hour based on a 40-hour week. Council President Kenyatta Johnson is paid $93 hourly.
We based the estimates of police presence at protests using payroll records, with an average pay of $41 per hour for an officer and $62 per hour for a captain.
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Staff Contributors
- Design and Development: Sam Morris
- Reporting and Data: Max Marin, Ryan Briggs, Jasen Lo, and Charmaine Runes
- Editing: Sam Morris and Daniel Rubin
- Illustration: Dain Saint
- Copy Editing: Brian Leighton