Speaker 1: Do you want to be in a Manican scout's long
Speaker 1: back at It's seven hundred WW on the coldest winter morning.
Speaker 1: We had a long time six inches of snow over
Speaker 1: the weekend Saturday. It was beautiful if you watch it
Speaker 1: yes day, a little chili, especially ahead of the Bengals game.
Speaker 1: We had warnings danger with the cold tempts which means
Speaker 1: hypothermi and frostbite.
Speaker 2: Let me lay it out for you. The coldest day
Speaker 2: ever at pay.
Speaker 1: Course Stadium yesterday, and you ask fans to get up
Speaker 1: early to clear the ice and snow from your driveways,
Speaker 1: clear the ice and snow off your cars, buy extra clothes,
Speaker 1: probably drive on icy roads, pay to park, pay for seats,
Speaker 1: and the county taxi as well. They just shelled out
Speaker 1: over two hundred million dollars to upgrade. You get to
Speaker 1: the stadium for the Bengals Ravens tilt and then you
Speaker 1: have to clean your seats off yourself and sit with
Speaker 1: your feet and butts on more snow and ice to
Speaker 1: watch them lay a twenty four to nothing lopsided egg
Speaker 1: against Baltimore to be officially eliminated from playoff contention. Now
Speaker 1: for the third year in a row, what am I
Speaker 1: missing here? I don't think I'm missing anything. It is
Speaker 1: seatgate on this Monday morning on seven hundred WLW, we
Speaker 1: have Alisha Reese here and clean your own seat day
Speaker 1: at pay Corpse Stadium.
Speaker 2: Yesterday Alicia, welcome.
Speaker 1: We just paid two hundred and twelve million dollars, gave
Speaker 1: the Bengals counting money, taxpayer money to redo pay Corps
Speaker 1: and here we go again.
Speaker 2: You got to clean your own seats off. Now what
Speaker 2: are we doing here?
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, Sloan, I would
Speaker 3: hope that the media this is what frustrates me when
Speaker 3: they report this. In terms of the Bengals Least deal,
Speaker 3: it was not unanimous. I've voted against it. I did
Speaker 3: not support the two hundred and eleven million dollars last Tuesday,
Speaker 3: which has seemed really rushed. I said, now, what are
Speaker 3: we rushing to pay this two hundred and eleven million
Speaker 3: plus dollars to the Bengals when the least is eleven
Speaker 3: years and we passed that. I did not support it.
Speaker 3: I didn't vote yes as that was passed before. We
Speaker 3: have passed the balanced budget that we have to do.
Speaker 3: We have the budget, the People's budget, which is due
Speaker 3: this week. We have to pass that by by Thursday.
Speaker 3: But it seemed to be a rush before this game
Speaker 3: to hurry up. We had to sell notes, check out
Speaker 3: more debt which comes with interest, and it was a rush.
Speaker 3: And we normally vote on Thursdays, but they were rushing.
Speaker 3: We got a payer, we got to upgrade the stadium
Speaker 3: for the future, and I kept saying, well would we
Speaker 3: do this before? Right now we got a budget where
Speaker 3: Prosecutor office may be laying off people. We haven't balanced
Speaker 3: it yet. We have a budget right now because of
Speaker 3: this lease that I voted against. The property text for
Speaker 3: homeowners is going to go up next year in a month,
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks, they're going to get their bills,
Speaker 3: and you didn't want to give the homeowners a break.
Speaker 3: But there seems to have been this rush or to
Speaker 3: vote on a Tuesday, I believe, or Thursday. They were saying,
Speaker 3: talk about it on Tuesday. But the rush a week
Speaker 3: before the budget is due to be passed to give
Speaker 3: the Bengals over two hundred million dollars. And then we
Speaker 3: we have Sunday with this situation where the seats aren't
Speaker 3: you know, the seats aren't aren't cleaned. Everyone else was
Speaker 3: making sure the city and everyone else was trying to
Speaker 3: make sure that the streets and all those things were clean.
Speaker 3: Because this wasn't like a surprise snow right.
Speaker 2: We saw this, We saw this coming, We saw this coming.
Speaker 2: He was coming.
Speaker 1: We had to clean our driveways, our cars. But the
Speaker 1: good news here is that according to the team in
Speaker 1: the NFL rule book, by the way, says that you're
Speaker 1: required to remove snow from the entire seating bowl before games.
Speaker 1: The NFL said, well, the Bengals did the bare minimum
Speaker 1: to meet that requirement. But it's not the first time
Speaker 1: this has happened. Happened a year I think two years
Speaker 1: ago where the seats weren't cleaned off. That is a
Speaker 1: fan safety issue during severe weather. And so what what
Speaker 1: enforcement mechanisms does a county have. Do you have any
Speaker 1: any saying their their ability to keep fans safe.
Speaker 3: Well, keywords you said was bare minimum, and that's what
Speaker 3: we've seen. There's been a bare minimum, and then it's
Speaker 3: on the backs of the taxpayers. One of the things
Speaker 3: I want to make sure because you always got to
Speaker 3: read the fine print when I get down to back
Speaker 3: down to the office, I wanted to ask the administrator.
Speaker 3: I want to make sure there's no small print or
Speaker 3: any written clause that turns it back on the taxpayers
Speaker 3: of Hamilton County, because a lot of things that in
Speaker 3: the in these leases, they've been very uh you know,
Speaker 3: being an ownership has been very good at flipping things back.
Speaker 3: Uh you know that has any cost association, it gets
Speaker 3: slipped back to the county. So you one of the
Speaker 3: reasons I've been one of waits to hear from our
Speaker 3: administrator because I don't want to have something that he said, oh, well,
Speaker 3: you know in this over here it was a little
Speaker 3: line and we agreed to pay for it, because there's
Speaker 3: a lot of things in that lease that in other
Speaker 3: other owners other markets, they you know, the team pays
Speaker 3: forwards the ownership, and in our market there seems to
Speaker 3: be a lot of things that fall on the tax payers.
Speaker 3: And so I want to make sure before speaking definitively
Speaker 3: that that hadn't slipped in somewhere and all of a
Speaker 3: sudden it becomes you know, miss counties.
Speaker 1: Well, the good news is that I have a copy
Speaker 1: of the master agreement here and it is on page
Speaker 1: nine thirty seven, Paragraph twenty eight, sub Section eleven double E.
Speaker 1: It says that any finds levied by the National Football
Speaker 1: League relative to snow removal shall be under the sole
Speaker 1: province and paid exclusively. Commissioner Alsia reesea Hamlin County.
Speaker 2: What do you make it?
Speaker 3: I know they love to hear that. That's why I
Speaker 3: said no.
Speaker 2: To this, least, no to the least at.
Speaker 3: Least put it on. It's always and also don't want
Speaker 3: as they say, well, now you know, because we got
Speaker 3: these new changes and we'll slip it in and and
Speaker 3: that's what I hear. A lot of it always flips
Speaker 3: back to the to the taxpayers, and so that's where
Speaker 3: I have some concern and making sure, yes we do
Speaker 3: have facilities people, Yes we do have those things, but
Speaker 3: we should not be paying for all of the extras.
Speaker 3: And that's what usually happens to to uh, to us,
Speaker 3: what I've seen in my years of you know, my
Speaker 3: few years of being down there, it has been shocking
Speaker 3: to me. But but no, it was a flap of
Speaker 3: the face to to the to the fans, and we knew.
Speaker 3: Everyone knew that this weather was coming. They knew when
Speaker 3: the snow was falling. They even reported when it was
Speaker 3: going to stop falling. They knew that the the that
Speaker 3: it was going to get colder and all those kind
Speaker 3: of things. And at this at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: you have the word bear minimum. And that's what's been going.
Speaker 2: That's the subject on my show today. We'll get after
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk more about the bare minimums because
Speaker 1: that really is what what the driver here is.
Speaker 3: UH.
Speaker 1: With with the legendary cost cutting measures of teams have
Speaker 1: during the negotiations during contracts, have you ever raised concerns
Speaker 1: with team ownership about a pattern of prioritizing profit and
Speaker 1: expenses over fan experience.
Speaker 3: Well, we started with that. I said, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: because remember I was on your show and there were
Speaker 3: some concerns about the seats that are not in the
Speaker 3: club level where they can make more money. Remember I said,
Speaker 3: what about the seats up at the top when they
Speaker 3: were redoing seats brought broken the broken escalator. We were
Speaker 3: talking about that. So I have constantly been on fan
Speaker 3: experience when they come down there, whether they're coming down
Speaker 3: for a game or another event, but fan experience. And
Speaker 3: then remember they we got these reports about we we
Speaker 3: you know, the stadium didn't get good. Uh, didn't get
Speaker 3: good grades nationally. As the talk, they even went into
Speaker 3: the food. Remember they talked about the food for the
Speaker 3: for the team players families and uh, they also talked
Speaker 3: about help we got food. Remember for disability, a gentleman
Speaker 3: couldn't get to the restroom because it's not just it's
Speaker 3: not accessible throughout the whole stadium. I even talked about
Speaker 3: going into the stadium. They would have people. Uh they
Speaker 3: would say, well, no, you got to go all the
Speaker 3: way to the other side of a person walking with
Speaker 3: a walker trying to get to the sensibilities area. And
Speaker 3: I said, listen to all areas this twenty twenty, you
Speaker 3: know five all areas should be accessible in this day
Speaker 3: and climate. And so those were some of the things
Speaker 3: that we keep hearing that we are always doing the
Speaker 3: bare minimum with the top dollar on the taxpayers. Even
Speaker 3: in this deal, they come in and say, well, we're
Speaker 3: gonna do the bare minimum for the homeowners, even though
Speaker 3: the homeowners were promised thirty percent were gonna do the
Speaker 3: bare minimum, and they went to four percent. So it
Speaker 3: seems to be a pattern of the bare minimum. I said, hey,
Speaker 3: we want to have more events there. Remember we wanted
Speaker 3: to have the WWE. I believe it was the smack
Speaker 3: Down Summer Summer swam right, they went to Cleveland. We
Speaker 3: at that time we hadn't even applied. So I came
Speaker 3: on your show you mentioned it. I said we should
Speaker 3: apply once again. We do the bare minim. Well, we
Speaker 3: have one event a year, and you know that's good enough.
Speaker 3: So it has been the bare minimum, bare minimum on
Speaker 3: their end, but the top dollar on the tax pair end.
Speaker 1: No Commissioner Lisha resh on this year, we're talking about
Speaker 1: shovelgate at pay Corpse Stadium and acting like this is hey,
Speaker 1: this is a rare weather circumstance. I mean, we've known
Speaker 1: about this for days in advance, and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: get bitterly cold temperatures on Sunday.
Speaker 2: That forecast was accurate.
Speaker 1: You plan for that kind of stuff, and we act
Speaker 1: as if or the response has been, well, it's like
Speaker 1: a while, it's a big deal. You got to stay
Speaker 1: in ice and snow. It's not like we don't get
Speaker 1: ice and snow in Cincinnati. And there are the cold
Speaker 1: weather stadiums, and I consider it's a cold weather stadium
Speaker 1: this time of year that they you don't see that happening.
Speaker 1: You know now, if you get an event where it's
Speaker 1: snowing an inch an hour, it's gonna be awfully tough
Speaker 1: to clear. We understand that we've seen that before. But
Speaker 1: the storm it ended, plenty of places were cleared off.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be that much to ask if they were
Speaker 1: clearing it as the snow fell before it turned to ice.
Speaker 1: How do you make sure that doesn't happen again? And
Speaker 1: I say that because I think it was the last
Speaker 1: time the Bengals were in the playoffs three years ago.
Speaker 1: I recall or maybe the year before, where the same
Speaker 1: thing happened. The snow fell and there was no adequate
Speaker 1: planning place to remove the snow, and they said, I
Speaker 1: we'll do better next time. Your contemporary there on the commission,
Speaker 1: Stephanie Summer Dumas, said that we need to do a
Speaker 1: better job for next time. Well, this is the next
Speaker 1: time after three years ago. It doesn't seem like they
Speaker 1: care or the messages have been received. Do you have
Speaker 1: any influence in your position to make that happen?
Speaker 3: Well, I believe that the influence that the county commissioners
Speaker 3: had is when we went into the negotiation, and that's
Speaker 3: why everything in negotiation needed to really be on the
Speaker 3: table with you know, some type of penalty, because you know,
Speaker 3: if someone goes in there and say they fail, you know,
Speaker 3: then there's a liability that could you know, fall on
Speaker 3: the county as well, the county taxpayers. When they filed
Speaker 3: that lawsuit about the restroom, they didn't just put the Bengals,
Speaker 3: they put they put Hamilton County. And then the Bengals
Speaker 3: ownership wanted to remove themselves from the lawsuit and leave
Speaker 3: it to the taxpayers. And so really these type of things,
Speaker 3: that's why I went to know on the on the deal,
Speaker 3: you've got to really and then be enforceable. It can't
Speaker 3: be well, they made a call to the administrator and
Speaker 3: now he comes and we don't get to talk to
Speaker 3: each other. Three of us are on the county commission
Speaker 3: of to talk. That would be a majority, so there's
Speaker 3: only one person who can talk to all three of us,
Speaker 3: and so we end up saying one thing, and then
Speaker 3: he has a meeting and then they come out and
Speaker 3: then the next thing, I know, well we're okay with it.
Speaker 3: We should have you know, we've got it again. If
Speaker 3: we hadn't rushed last week to do the two one
Speaker 3: hundred and eleven million dollars. We'd had some leverage, but
Speaker 3: it's hard to have leverage if you've given them the
Speaker 3: checkbook and you've written a blank check.
Speaker 2: That's over.
Speaker 3: I tried to have some Yeah, you talked about seat
Speaker 3: gate has been homeowner gate. I mean there's been a
Speaker 3: lot of gates down there. I mean, it's a lot
Speaker 3: of things going on. But you got to take care
Speaker 3: of it. My god, you're negotiating the check book. That's
Speaker 3: where you have the power.
Speaker 2: I don't know how you hold it.
Speaker 1: Most I would say almost every other NFL team save
Speaker 1: maybe one except I don't know if there's an exception
Speaker 1: or not to that would look at in the public
Speaker 1: outcry going. Man, you know what, it's the fan experience.
Speaker 1: It's a bad look for the team. It's a bad
Speaker 1: look for the city and the franchise because things like
Speaker 1: this happen, not not frequently, but enough to establish a
Speaker 1: pattern if you go back in time, that they simply
Speaker 1: will do the bare minimum and don't care what the fans,
Speaker 1: or the media or anyone else thinks for that matter.
Speaker 1: They only care about what their opinions are inside pay corps,
Speaker 1: in the front office, and typically other teams would look
Speaker 1: at this and go, yeah, this this gives our franchise
Speaker 1: a bad look. We better clean this up and fix
Speaker 1: it for next time. I think almost every other NFL
Speaker 1: team thinks that way, except the Bengals.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I can't tell you how they think. I just
Speaker 3: know that when I look at the actual deal. And
Speaker 3: when you have a chance, remember had to have a
Speaker 3: free watch party, Sloan, you and I. They said let's
Speaker 3: do what. It came from a It came from a
Speaker 3: fan that said let's do it. They were once said
Speaker 3: we can't do it, and then the next thing I know,
Speaker 3: they came back with it. We found a way to
Speaker 3: do it. Now we want to do it for ninety
Speaker 3: nine dollars. We wanted to have some free to get
Speaker 3: back to the fans. Every time we want to do
Speaker 3: we want to have something to get back to the homeowners.
Speaker 3: And they said, now we want all the money, and
Speaker 3: now we only can do you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: So anything that doesn't make money, from what I've seen,
Speaker 3: it's always we'll put it on the If it costs money,
Speaker 3: the tax players, we want you to pay. If it
Speaker 3: makes money, then again then it's okay for them. And again,
Speaker 3: there was so much pressure to pass this two hundred
Speaker 3: eleven million dollars right before. I don't know if they
Speaker 3: knew that the season was going to end or something,
Speaker 3: but it was, you know, the administray said, we got it,
Speaker 3: we gotta got this is an eleven year deal. Why
Speaker 3: we gotta do it so quick? We gotta do it,
Speaker 3: even before we balance the budget. We gotta do it.
Speaker 3: And now they've done it, and uh, it's two hundred
Speaker 3: eleven million dollars out a three hundred and fifty million
Speaker 3: we don't put. That's a pretty big front load. And
Speaker 3: now here we are, not even a week later, and
Speaker 3: now we're talking about well, wait a minute, the seats
Speaker 3: wasn't well was it removed from seat?
Speaker 1: You feed enough pigeons, you get fat, happy pigeons.
Speaker 2: That's what you get.
Speaker 1: Commissioner Lisha Reese on seatgate this morning on seven hundred
Speaker 1: W and there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 2: It's over.
Speaker 1: But uh, it helps I think collectively to complain.
Speaker 3: No, I think it's you know, we got to bring
Speaker 3: these things up and and I'm gonna ask the administrator
Speaker 3: to see what really can be done, and it should
Speaker 3: be done. But I want to make sure Swan thank
Speaker 3: you for having me on. But I hope these media
Speaker 3: when they write, they keep saying commissioners passed two hundred
Speaker 3: and eleven million dollars. I didn't vote yes, Please Pa
Speaker 3: it was two to one.
Speaker 2: We know, we know you made your case.
Speaker 3: We got it.
Speaker 1: I told you so, the I told you so, the
Speaker 1: I told you so. Alisha, I always appreciate you coming out.
Speaker 1: I have a great day. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know this, but Alisha Reese did not vote for She
Speaker 1: always brings the heat, and God knows we need some
Speaker 1: heat this morning, especially if you suffered through yesterday's If
Speaker 1: you suffered through yesterday's game uh and happened to go there,
Speaker 1: I'll bump you the top of the call list here
Speaker 1: because we're going to examine, from top to bottom, the
Speaker 1: central idea of the segment of the show this morning,
Speaker 1: from Alicia to your calls coming up next AFTERNOWS, and
Speaker 1: that is the bare minimum, Bengals, the bare minimum. And
Speaker 1: if you just do the bare minimum, do you ever
Speaker 1: expect to win a championship in your lifetime. We'll get
Speaker 1: to that next on the show right after this, on
Speaker 1: seven hundred W