Alexandria officials pointed to “partisan warfare” in Richmond. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and state legislators accused each other of being at fault. And a real estate executive involved in the failed deal alluded to “potential pay-to-play” schemes in the General Assembly, while two leading Black Democrats on Thursday suggested those claims were racist.
Still, there was at least one area where most of them — including real estate developer JBG Smith, other leading lawmakers and officials at Monumental Sports — saw eye-to-eye: In one way or another, the arena’s failure would cast a long shadow on Virginia’s ability to attract other businesses.
The state’s prosperous D.C. suburbs have in recent years attracted one major headquarters after another — from Amazon’s much-hyped “HQ2” in Arlington to defense heavyweights Boeing and Raytheon and the real estate data company CoStar just a few weeks ago, not to mention a Virginia Tech graduate campus in Alexandria that is meant to boost the potential workforce for those companies.
For arena dealmakers, the loss of the arena appears to end that winning streak — and put a major stain on Virginia’s record instead.
“There is plenty of blame to go around,” Alexandria Mayor Justin M. Wilson (D), who supported the deal, said in an interview Thursday, “to the city, to the commonwealth, to JBG, to Monumental, to the governor. But the reality is that this sends a really bad message about how we approach economic development in the commonwealth. … This is a bad omen.”
Wilson suggested in a video statement Wednesday that the plan had not received a fair hearing in the state Senate, where Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) had wielded her powerful role leading a key committee to block the deal from receiving a hearing or a vote.
But speaking by phone the following day, he also acknowledged that a tight timeline for the project — owing to the General Assembly’s schedule and the need to negotiate around existing leases at Capital One Arena and in Potomac Yard — had limited public engagement around the proposal.
Youngkin, for his part, released a statement that similarly pointed to the state legislature.
“All the General Assembly had to do was say: ‘thank you, Monumental, for wanting to come to Virginia and create $12 billion of economic investment. Let’s work it out,’” he said. “But no, personal and political agendas drove away” the deal.
Yet Senate Majority Leader Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax) — who at one point had sponsored Youngkin’s bill to allow the arena — said the deal’s failure “falls squarely” on the governor’s lack of communication.
“If you want to get something done in this state, bring in the legislature as a coequal partner early in the process,” he said in an interview.
Surovell also cast aside the notion that the deal collapsed solely due to politics. The state had never before called for using taxpayer-backed debt for an economic development project, he said, so the arena could have set a precedent that would threaten the state’s prized AAA bond rating.
“You wait to the last second, ‘Hey, how about we open up this brand-new level of risk?’” Surovell said. “Everybody keeps acting like this is just a political objection. It wasn’t.”
Perhaps the sharpest statement came from JBG Smith CEO Matt Kelly, who pointed fingers at what he said were “special interests” and donations to state legislators seeking to move the Monumental arena to Tysons and combine it with a casino.
“To say we are disappointed is an understatement,” Kelly said in statement. “We are disgusted with the back-room-dealing and opaque scheming that took place as this played out.”
A JBG Smith spokeswoman declined to specify which “special interests” or legislators he was referring to and said the company would not be commenting beyond Kelly’s statement.
Kelly also cited a report in The Washington Post last weekend that detailed how a trio of business and political leaders — including Surovell; Lucas; casino developer Chris Clemente;
and Ben Tribbett, a consultant who works for both men and Lucas — had recently been shopping around the combined arena/casino idea as a “Hail Mary” effort…
Read More: Virginia leaders point fingers after Alexandria arena deal collapses