From that point, Bowser said in an interview Friday, she decided, “we were going to put our foot on the gas.” Over the next several months, periodically over drinks at the Waldorf Astoria, Bowser would quietly work to bring Leonsis back to the negotiating table, sweetening D.C.’s offer just as Leonsis’s plans were falling apart in Virginia’s General Assembly. She insisted for months publicly that D.C. remained in the game. Few shared her optimism at the onset.
But on Wednesday, Bowser got her ultimate told-you-so moment, turning what could have been a legacy-wounding loss of two professional sports teams into a defining career feat as she appeared with Leonsis to announce a $515 million deal to keep the teams at Capital One Arena until at least 2050.
“She went from friend, mayor, cheerleader for D.C. to, ‘I can deliver the city council … and then I can deliver the rest of the city, and [Deputy Mayor Nina Albert] will coordinate it.’ And it crescendoed,” Leonsis said in a Friday interview. “That’s literally how I see it happening, at a time when Virginia was not as integrated. I had Alexandria and Richmond and the governor’s office, and they were not singing the same tune. Well, D.C. really was.”
The deal the mayor and Leonsis signed is more comprehensive and favorable to Leonsis compared with the $500 million offer put forth in December, as he was already preparing to make his announcement with Youngkin. It’s expected to allow Leonsis to expand Monumental Sports & Entertainment’s footprint at neighboring Gallery Place by 200,000 square feet, offering a significant boost to the city’s downtown business landscape in the process. And among other perks it beefs up security around the arena, requiring 17 police officers patrolling two hours before and after games.
Bowser had been criticized for failing to deliver a more significant offer to Leonsis last year until the 11th hour — but now Bowser says that was the kick in the pants city leaders needed to regroup with a more focused approach.
“I’ll be candid, I learned some lessons with the last approach,” Bowser said of her failure last year to keep Leonsis from trying to take his teams across the Potomac River to Virginia. “And I think that the council and I have been in lockstep ever since December about how to move forward together.”
Bowser and Leonsis’s rekindled negotiations started with a chance encounter at the Waldorf Astoria in mid-January, about a month after Youngkin and Leonsis announced the move. Leonsis’s investment company, Revolution Growth, was holding its annual conference at the glitzy hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from Bowser’s office at the Wilson Building. After remarks from Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Leonsis stepped out of the ballroom into the lobby — “and I literally walk into the mayor,” Leonsis said.
“Ted!” she exclaimed.
“I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” Leonsis recalled. She’d come to the hotel for an unrelated meeting. “I said, ‘Oh, let’s sit down — I haven’t seen you in a while,’” Leonsis said — not since he told her he was moving to Virginia.
As Bowser tells it, the two embraced before sitting down to talk.
“At the conclusion of that conversation, we made an important decision: The two of us were going to talk directly. No interference, no helpful support from our staff, just us,” Bowser said. “I think that was a turning point into us both understanding his vision and needs, and me communicating to him where the city was going.”
It was the…
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