Tomorrow is the day the necessary panels will be voting on the Orioles lease agreement

Hello, friends.

There are now 102 days remaining until Orioles Opening Day 2024.

Unless there is a last-minute reversal, we have finally arrived at Orioles Lease-mas Eve. Tomorrow is the day where first the Maryland Stadium Authority executive board and then the Maryland Board of Public Works will have to formally approve the second version of the agreed-upon lease that settles the Orioles in Camden Yards for hopefully at least another 30 years.

As you know if you’ve been reading this space, I was increasingly skeptical that anything would actually get figured out before the current lease officially expires at the end of this month. Foot-dragging that seems like it was largely due to the behavior of John Angelos made everything take this long, and once that first version of the deal was blown up before it could even be publicly announced, I wondered if it would be so easy to find an alternate plan.

Staring down the deadline, the negotiators picked back up and made the necessary adjustments to leave Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson satisfied. His concern was the 99-year ground lease to some adjacent state-owned land in the first deal.

The one that will be voted on tomorrow does not have the real estate development issue settled – there is a four-year period to continue negotiating about that, and any arrangement will have to be approved by a panel of state lawmakers, so there’s no question of the land being given away without some legislative oversight of any subsequent agreement.

Whether Angelos can come up with something to satisfy that panel is something that, given how these lease negotiations went, will probably still be getting figured out late in 2027. That’s a long time from now! Most of the current roster will have hit free agency by then. Even Mike Elias might be gone, depending on how things go. I’ll be glad when this wave of lease drama is officially done with.

Around the blogO’sphere

What’s in the new proposed lease and development deal for the Orioles (The Baltimore Banner)
One way to sum up the lease proposal that’s on its way towards votes for its approval is that the sides have agreed on a 15-year lease while punting the question of development of nearby real estate for up to four years. If the development is figured out, it’s a guaranteed 30.