Fear not, D.C. taxpayers. Even the D.C. Council’s biggest proponent for returning the Redskins to the District knows the city can’t actually spend money on building a training facility to lure the team back within city lines.
Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans was asked about the possibility Friday on WAMU radio’s “Politics Hour” show, where he said it’s no secret the Redskins want to relocate because their current facility in Ashburn is “one of the worst in the league.”
But even Evans knows that throwing money at the owner of one of the NFL’s richest teams just doesn’t sit right.
“It is not possible for the city to put one dime into building a new sports facility,” Evans said. “Our debt cap puts us in a position where we cannot. … The city would not be able to pay for this.”
Instead, he likened it to when the District gave land to Abe Polin on the cheap so he could build the downtown sports arena now called the Verizon Center.
“The city presented to Abe Polin a clean site and he built on top of it,” Evans said.
As reported by The Washington Examiner and other media outlets last fall, an NFL training facility in the District would likely be in the form of a sportsplex near RFK Stadium, an area called Reservation 13. The spot that was marked more than a decade ago for redevelopment, but even those who have clamored for the city to remove the homeless shelters and methadone clinics in that spot and bring in the promised mixed-use development are wary of building a sports complex that would be a benefit to the Redskins but not necessarily the community.
Evans reiterated on Friday that building a facility near RFK is still hypothetical at this point.
“There’s no agreement — there’s no nothing as far as the training facility coming to the District of Columbia,” he said.
