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Mayor and finance director present new budget

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Mayor and finance director present new budget

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – Charleston’s $113.5 million budget was presented to the finance committee on Monday. Mayor Amy Goodwin said the current budget won’t include any tax or fee increases and will aim to build upon necessities.

“Making sure that our city services, salt, refuse collection, police, fire, maintaining our park and recreation facilities,” Goodwin said. “This is the meat and potatoes of what we do.”

Outside of funding city services, Finance Director Andy Wood said they will work to give a pay raise to city employees. The city is in year three of a four-year plan.

“Continuing the plan to achieve the $15 minimum starting wage for city employees and maintain the city as a robust employer with a good benefits package available to employees,” Wood said.

Mayor Goodwin said the city put in almost $20 million for road repairs, a decision she believes will keep the city safe.

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“If we’re sending an ambulance to your house, by golly it’s getting there. If we’re scraping and salting your roads, our trucks are able to get there,” Goodwin said.

Wood said the city will likely deal with PEIA rates going up for employees and Charleston will soon be without a landfill, forcing the city to use a private company’s transfer station.

“The disposal fee that we pay currently will be more than doubling, so that will have about a $1.5 million impact,” Wood said.

Mayor Goodwin said after looking closely at different departments and their budgets, this year has been one of the hardest to work through because everything costs more.

Wood said the next step is for City Council to vote on this year’s budget at the next meeting in two weeks.

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Finance

Aerodrome Finance Hit by ‘Front-End’ Attack, Users Urged to Avoid Main Domain

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Aerodrome Finance Hit by ‘Front-End’ Attack, Users Urged to Avoid Main Domain

Aerodrome Finance, a leading decentralized exchange on Coinbase’s Base network with $400 million in total value locked, was targeted in a front-end attack late Friday, prompting urgent warnings for users to avoid its primary domains.

The incident appears to be a DNS hijacking of Aerodrome’s centralized domains, which allowed attackers to reroute users to lookalike phishing sites designed to trick them into signing malicious wallet transactions to separate them from their funds. Users are advised to instead rely on Aerodrome’s decentralized domains. Aerodrome has asked My.box, the domain provider, to contact them over a potential exploit of their systems.

These attacks do not compromise the underlying smart contracts, which manage user funds and protocol logic on-chain. At the time of writing, it’s unconfirmed whether the attack has led to any losses or how many users have been affected. Liquidity pools and protocol treasuries remain intact, according to Aerodrome.

Aerodrome’s team has been posting real-time updates on X, urging users not to access the compromised domains, aerodrome.finance and aerodrome.box, and instead use decentralized ENS mirrors like aero.drome.eth.limo. To reduce risk, the team recommends revoking recent token approvals using tools like Revoke.cash and avoiding signing any transactions from unverified domains.

New attack

Aerodrome has experienced similar front-end attacks before, including two in late 2023 that resulted in approximately $300,000 in user losses.

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This latest attack comes just days after Aerodrome announced a merger with Velodrome, consolidating liquidity across Base and Optimism under the new “Aero” ecosystem. Despite the disruption, the AERO token price remained stable at around $0.67, up 2% over the last 24 hours.

The investigation is ongoing.

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Incredible year-long spending experiment exposes mistakes you’re probably making

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Incredible year-long spending experiment exposes mistakes you’re probably making
The forthcoming book follows her journey of one year without buying anything new and how it changed her relationship with money and her self-worth. (Source: Emma Edwards/Instagram)

Financial behaviour specialist Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, is sharing her radical personal finance experiment: a whole year without buying a single item of clothing.

No new outfits, no second-hand finds, not even rentals. What began as a no-buy challenge soon became a powerful lesson in self-worth, resilience, and the surprising freedom of living with less.

In the exclusive extract below, Emma shares the six buying patterns we get trapped into thinking we actually need.

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The impact of our consumption habits creates an environment where we’re cornered from every angle. We have a collection of clothes that don’t work together, don’t make us feel good and don’t allow us to express ourselves the way we want to, which leaves us looking externally for what we’re not getting. The problem is, when we look externally, we buy more and more of the same.

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Unravelling that idea of what can happen when we’re in a ‘yes’ state, a state of openness to consumption even though our intentions might suggest otherwise, got me curious about some of the unhelpful buying cycles I’d been stuck in. I really leaned into understanding how I ended up with the wardrobe I currently had, and what I could learn from the mistakes I made over and over again.

I realised that if I could establish the mistakes I was making and the ways I was buying the wrong things, I’d stop feeling compelled to buy more and more over time. Here are some of the patterns I uncovered in my wardrobe, and that I’ve seen in others’ too.

Once I liked something in one colour (often black), I’d giddily run out and buy it in another colour, thinking I was making some kind of ultra-smart decision and capitalising on what I loved. I’m going to give you a piece of advice now that I hope you’ll remember for many years. If you ever utter the words ‘I’m going to go and get this in another colour’ – run. It’s a trap. You probably won’t like the other colour, and it’ll just sit in your wardrobe and collect dust.

There are certain things in my wardrobe that I struggled to wear confidently outside of one specific outfit silo. Usually, this is a sure-fire sign that I’d bought it in a very specific context, like copying or replicating an outfit I’d seen someone else wear.

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Financing Sports’ Future: Private Credit Steps Into the Arena

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Financing Sports’ Future: Private Credit Steps Into the Arena

Today’s guest column is by Joseph Glatt, co-chair of the global Private Credit Group at Paul, Weiss.

The business of sports has evolved into one of the most sophisticated capital markets in the world. Franchises that once relied on wealthy patrons now operate as global enterprises with complex balance sheets, diversified revenue streams and brand portfolios that span continents. Behind the scenes, a quiet transformation is taking place. Private credit has become the financing engine powering the next phase of the industry’s growth.

For decades, the financial architecture of sports was narrow. Teams depended on a mix of owner equity, bank loans and broadcast advances. That model worked when sports was seasonal, media rights were centralized, and stadiums were used a few dozen times a year.

Today the business is more complicated. Digital engagement has replaced ticket sales as the primary growth driver, broadcast rights are fragmented across platforms, and venues have become year-round entertainment ecosystems. Private credit brings structure, speed and sophistication to a business that is increasingly complex and ever-evolving.

The appeal is obvious. Sports franchises have matured from passion assets into performance assets. Media rights, sponsorships, premium seating, licensing and real estate all provide recurring cash flows—a profile that looks less like entertainment and more like infrastructure. For credit investors searching for yield with tangible downside protection, it’s a natural fit.

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What distinguishes the current wave of sports lending is its focus on assets. Lenders are financing discrete pieces of the ecosystem rather than entire teams—broadcast receivables, naming rights, arena redevelopment or ancillary real estate. A stadium backed by long-term contracts and naming agreements can support senior debt that behaves much like project finance. The economics are stable, the security is visible, and the exposure is detached from game outcomes. It’s a structural rather than sentimental approach to sports finance.

This shift has attracted institutional capital on a scale that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Pension funds, insurers and global asset managers now view sports as a legitimate component of their private credit portfolios. The logic is straightforward. The sector offers infrastructure-like cash flows with entertainment-driven growth. European football clubs have refinanced legacy debt with private credit facilities. North American franchises have used direct lending to fund media rights and working-capital needs. Even emerging leagues and women’s sports organizations are turning to private lenders to build facilities and extend reach. The flow of capital is both a cause and a consequence of the sector’s institutionalization.

The sophistication of these transactions reflects a growing recognition that sports carries unique risks. Revenues can fluctuate with team performance or media cycles, and valuations can move with public sentiment.

The best lenders manage this through structure rather than pricing. Deals often include covenants tied to attendance, sponsorship renewals or season-ticket deposits. Some of them link pricing to revenue performance or secure cross-collateralization between real estate and media income. The emphasis is on aligning capital with the rhythm of the underlying business, not imposing a one-size-fits-all template.

The opportunity extends beyond the professional leagues that dominate headlines. Collegiate athletics, youth sports and ancillary service providers are entering a commercial era of their own.

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The legalization of name, image and likeness rights has turned college programs into fully commercial enterprises that now require working capital, facilities financing and sponsorship advances. Private lenders can design structures suited to that environment—secured against receivables, ticket income or local partnerships—where traditional financing models fall short.

Youth and amateur sports tell a similar story. The sector generates tens of billions of dollars in annual spending, yet capital formation remains fragmented. Financing of complexes, tournaments and training facilities have become scalable credit opportunities, driven by durable demand rather than speculation.

Real estate has also become inseparable from the business of sports. Stadiums are now anchors of mixed-use developments that include hotels, retail and housing. Teams are monetizing their brands across hospitality, content and data ventures. That convergence between physical and intangible assets creates a dual source of collateral. A stadium’s concrete and steel can be valued like infrastructure, while its media contracts and licensing revenue resemble corporate cash flows. Private credit thrives in precisely this intersection, where structure can integrate both sides of the balance sheet.

This new market is maturing quickly. The challenge now is discipline. Not every team or league deserves institutional credit. The fundamentals must be right: diversified revenue, credible governance and transparent capital structures. The most capable lenders operate more like strategic partners than passive financiers. They help management teams optimize balance sheets, monetize non-core assets and think creatively about liquidity. The value in these relationships lies in partnership, not just pricing.

Looking ahead, the next decade of sports capital will likely involve consolidation and securitization. Portfolios of sports-backed loans may be packaged into rated vehicles, widening access to institutional investors. Cross-border ownership will further globalize the ecosystem, blending European clubs, American franchises and Middle Eastern sovereign funds into a single capital network. That will require not just financial innovation but also regulatory fluency and geopolitical awareness.

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Private credit’s entry into sports is not a passing trend. It marks a structural evolution in how capital supports one of the world’s most powerful industries. Sports is now a platform business, and platform businesses demand flexible, sophisticated financing.

The investors leading this transformation think not in seasons but in cycles. They understand that the scoreboard measures only part of the game. The real competition is for capital efficiency, and those who master it will define the future of sports finance.

Glatt has over 25 years of experience in private practice and in-house at one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers, with a particular focus on complex transactions, strategic product innovation and capital raising for asset management firms and financial institutions.

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