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 after the deal did not go forward in the General Assembly.
A Monumental spokesman said this month that Tribbett pitched the arena-casino idea to Monica Dixon, a company executive. When Dixon questioned how Lucas could support such a deal, Tribbett noted that Lucas was clear in her posts on X that she opposed an arena in Potomac Yard — not an arena elsewhere, the spokesman said.
Tribbett told The Post that he was only passing along buzz about the plan to Dixon, saying she’d asked him to keep her in the loop on arena gossip. He said he spoke to Dixon on behalf of Surovell and never suggested that he could deliver Lucas if the arena were paired with the casino.
“In my conversation with Monica, I probably said at least 10 different times, ‘To be clear, I’m not speaking on behalf of Louise Lucas. I don’t know if this will get you Louise or not,’” Tribbett said. “I spoke to Monica to be helpful to what Scott was trying to push forward and to see if there was a way that Scott’s idea would get any legs.”
Lucas, who had received $100,000 from Clemente days before last fall’s election, denied knowing anything about the casino alternative in an interview over the weekend. The octogenarian lawmaker instead shot back on social media late Wednesday, once the arena plan had collapsed and JBG Smith had released Kelly’s statement amid celebratory memes on her social media feed.
“This is a freakin legendary smackdown so now the incompetent losers behind the effort are out telling lies and conspiracy theories,” she wrote on X, “instead of just admitting they got their asses kicked by an 80 year old (affectionately called) ghansta legislator.”
On Thursday, House Speaker Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth), who had also faulted Youngkin for keeping legislators out of the loop, told a reporter for the Virginia Mercury that he sees Kelly’s comments as a “racist smear” that shouldn’t be amplified; Lucas made a similar suggestion on social media. Both he and Lucas are Black, and Kelly is White. (An aide to Scott said he could not be reached for comment.)
Surovell, who held JBG Smith at fault for not working out an agreement with labor unions, stopped short of those charges but brushed off Kelly’s allegations as well.
“They didn’t get it done and now they’re busy pointing fingers at everyone else and trying to deflect blame for their shareholders,” he said. “JBG is busy seeing ghosts.”
Amid all the public brawling, Wilson said in a Thursday interview that Lucas had raised a valuable point: Virginia needed to change its existing structure for vetting economic development deals, which relies on closed-door meetings of leading lawmakers to review projects that might require state incentives — often before they are announced publicly.
The Major Economic Investment Project Approval Commission unanimously voted in favor of the arena proposal in December. But that was before historic turnover in the state legislature led to retiring lawmakers giving up their seats on the commission to other ascendant legislators — Lucas among them.
“Having them bless a deal and then having the new General Assembly deal with it — that’s a broken process,” Wilson said.
Within Alexandria itself, there seemed to be less discord — or at least less public disagreement — even with competitive primary elections that have already seen the arena plan take center stage.
All members of Alexandria City Council, which would have been required to sign off on the plan, had appeared onstage at the initial announcement more than three months ago. But with momentum building against the plan from residents concerned over the impact on their neighborhoods and labor unions standing in opposition, too, both leading candidates for mayor began turning against the idea.
Vice Mayor Amy Jackson (D) released a statement in mid-March opposing the plan. On Tuesday afternoon, council member Alyia Gaskins (D) said there was not enough information to take a stance but seemed to indicate the plan’s days were numbered.
“It seems extremely unlikely that we will be offered such a deal” to consider the plan, she wrote in an email to supporters Wednesday afternoon. “If that turns out to be the case, it will be time for us to move on.”
Less than two hours later, the city had put out its announcement: Alexandria’s arena plan was dead.
Laura Vozzella and Gregory S. Schneider in Richmond contributed to this report.
