LEESBURG, Va. — While the future home of the Washington Commanders is still uncertain, some leaders in Loudoun County said they don’t want it.
Tuesday night, Leesburg Town Council voted six to one to send a letter to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors opposing a Washington Commanders stadium and commercial complex in Loudoun County.
“We’re concerned about the traffic that this stadium and the attached development with it will incur in the area,” Leesburg Mayor Kelly Burk said. “We’re concerned about the overdevelopment of that particular area, so we’re most certainly concerned about the implications of any sort of development along those lines but we are adamantly opposed to any tax money going to the stadium.”
Vice Mayor Fernando Martinez said he was the sole vote against sending a letter of opposition to the board of supervisors. He told WUSA9 he doesn't believe the town took a good look at the economic advantages a stadium could bring.
There’s a bill making its way through the Virginia legislature that would pay for the new Commanders stadium through a billion dollars’ worth of government bonds. The lawmaker sponsoring the bill claims this would not use direct taxpayer money.
The idea of a stadium in Loudoun County is something some people believe could make enrich the county both financially and socially.
“As an economist, we’ve actually done a lot of studies that show there’s a significant economic impact that the community realized associated with these types of events and these types of occurrences,” Nels Pearsall said. “It would be a very strong benefit for the community as well as the tax base.”
However, the Mayor said the team’s track record for stadiums raises a red flag.
“We feel very strongly that this is a company that can most certainly pay for itself. It is not creating many jobs. It has a history of going places, having the tax payer pay for their stadiums and when they’re tired of it they leave. Look at what they’ve done at RFK, look what they did at Largo, look what they did to Loudoun County years ago when they had a practice facility here and we paid them $250,000 a year to have Loudoun County be their summer headquarters and they ended up going to Richmond,” Burk said.
“Our citizens pay enough taxes as it is and we want to use them correctly, and the right way, and we feel very strongly the right way is not to pay for a stadium for a team that we don’t even know how long it will be here,” Burk said.