Already in the budget
Exhibit B: The Alamodome
Same pattern, next building. You don't have to leave San Antonio for this, or even leave the last thirty years. The same council that voted down an independent study of the arena deal has been managing this dome the whole time. The city already owns the receipts.
“It's like buying a car with cash.”
Alex Briseño
San Antonio City Manager, at the Alamodome's opening · May 1993
Thirty-three years, promise to receipt
JAN 1989
Voters approve a half-cent VIA sales tax to build it, 53% in favor.
MAY 1993
Opens on budget. City Manager Alex Briseño: “It's like buying a car with cash.”
2002
The Spurs leave for a new downtown arena. The dome starts bleeding money: a streak that won't break for 21 years.
2005
Katrina exiles the Saints here for three games. The city courts them to stay for good. By the next season, they're back in New Orleans.
2014
Raiders owner Mark Davis meets with the mayor about relocating here. Las Vegas offers more. Talks stall.
2023
First operating profit since the Spurs left. Same year, the city touts a $4B lifetime-impact number, a third of it multiplier math nobody actually counted.
$186M
PUBLIC MONEY TO BUILD IT · 1993
$109M
MORE COMMITTED SINCE · UPGRADES THROUGH 2028
SINCE 2002
RUNNING AN OPERATING DEFICIT, HOTEL-TAX SUBSIDIZED
What the $4B is actually made of
It's a real technique, and also exactly why nobody outside the field can check the homework.
$628M
Tax revenue claimed (city, county, state & federal combined)
33,000
Jobs cited: unclear if annual or cumulative job-years
~34M
Total attendees claimed over the full 30 years
$46.8M
Average annual labor income claimed
Four more numbers from the same study, not shown to be part of the $4B above. The full report was never made public.
the city paid a St. Mary's economist to tally this in 2023, for the dome's 30th birthday. $2.7B of it is real visitor spending, the rest is multiplier math nobody actually collected.
The pitch vs. the delivery
The pitchA dome that lands San Antonio an NFL franchise.
The deliveryNever happened. A one-season CFL team, the Texans, folded in ’96. The Saints borrowed the building for three games in ’05 and went home. The Raiders looked in 2014 and picked Las Vegas.
Never
The pitch“It's like buying a car with cash.” (Alex Briseño, 1993)
The deliveryTwenty-one straight years of operating deficits once the Spurs left in 2002, covered by hotel tax. First profit: 2023.
Broken
The pitchA home for the NCAA Men's Final Four.
The deliveryDelivered, five times over: 1998, 2004, 2008, 2018, 2025. More than any other venue has hosted.
Kept
The pitchThe $186M build cost, paid back many times over.
The deliveryA 2013 claim that four Final Fours alone recouped it was publicly disputed as unverified at the time. The city's real answer, a decade later, is the $4B figure above, a third of it modeled, not counted.
Disputed
What that looks like year to year, where the city's own budget disclosures give real numbers: mostly red, with one recent exception, and a four-year stretch the city hasn't shown its work on at all.
Loss (hotel-tax subsidized)
Profit
Where the real money went
The $109M is the easy stuff: eighteen new suites, elevators and escalators, restroom renovations, a roof patch scheduled for 2028, a scoreboard six years old getting swapped anyway, most of it tied to hosting the 2025 Men's Final Four, funded through hotel-tax revenue and revenue-backed certificates, not new taxes anyone voted on.
The renovation that would actually matter is a different number entirely. The city's own CFO, Ben Gorzell, has told council a comprehensive Alamodome overhaul now runs north of a billion dollars, and it's been pushed out to roughly 2035, safely behind the new Spurs arena in the funding line. There was already a revenue stream earmarked to help pay for it: a state Project Finance Zone the city set up around the Alamodome and convention center in 2023, projected to capture $222M in tax revenue over 30 years. By 2026, that money had reportedly been redirected toward the new arena district instead.
built the fund for the dome. spent it on the arena.
UTSA football has played there since the program's 2011 debut, on a lease the city extended through 2035. There's no official plan to replace it. The idea surfaced once, in a 2020 UTSA student newspaper op-ed calling for an on-campus stadium, and the same columnist reversed himself a year later, arguing UTSA should stay put. Nobody's asked since.
A proposal, not a plan
Here's one this file will float, since nobody in office has. And to be clear, this isn't a campus consensus, just an idea: stop treating an aging, already-subsidized dome as a sunk cost you keep feeding on the promise it'll eventually pay off, and start treating it as a site. Once the obligations already on the books are met and the dome has earned out what it owes, tear it down and build UTSA a stadium it owns outright.
And require the Spurs, who spent three decades in a building the city built and financed, to help fund whatever replaces it for UTSA, as a term of any new arena deal, not a favor offered after the fact.
The Alamodome's own founding logic, in 1993, was build it and they will come: a dome big enough that the NFL would finally notice. The pitch-vs-delivery list above says how that went: never. Try the opposite bet this time. Don't build something hoping a league notices. Build it because it's owed: a program that fills the dome every fall finally getting a stadium that's actually its own. If this city ever really wants to be an NFL city, that argument does more work than another speculative venue ever did.