Sports columnist
DAVE ZIRIN reports from Washington, D.C., on how cities and states have
been ripped off to build sports stadiums and arenas.
IN THE weeks before
the state legislature’s vote on funding for a new baseball stadium, the
Minnesota Twins ran a TV commercial featuring a ballplayer visiting a
boy in the hospital. A voiceover announced, “If the Twins leave
Minnesota, an 8-year-old from Wilmer undergoing chemotherapy will never
get a visit from [Twins infielder] Marty Cordova.”
It turned out that
the boy had already died by the time the commercial aired. Whoops. But
lying about a cancer-stricken child is small potatoes when it comes to
the depths pro sports owners will sink in their drive for publicly
funded stadiums.
Pro arenas paid for on the public dime now dot the country--monuments to corporate welfare.
The process is
outright extortion: A major sports owner threatens to move his or her
team, and demands that city or state taxpayers put up hundreds of
millions of dollars to build a stadium that would be owned not by the
city, but by the team’s owners. Imagine if you wanted to move to a new
town and demanded that your neighbors build you a home for the
privilege of having you move in, and you begin to see the insane logic.
Over the last 20
years, working people in this country have paid an average of more than
$500 million a year in stadium construction and upkeep costs, for a
total of more than $7 billion spent on new facilities by 2006. And this
doesn’t include the $600 million that Washington, D.C., just pledged to
build a baseball stadium for the newly named Washington Nationals
(formally the Montreal Expos).
D.C. just laid off
300 public school workers, closed its only public hospital and has an
infant mortality rate that is worse than every country in the Western
Hemisphere except Haiti. The proposed site is an impoverished section
of the city called the Anacostia Waterfront. Building the stadium will
involve destroying low-income housing and homeless shelters under what
is called, without irony, “fair use.”
The D.C. stadium
swindle moved forward even though 70 percent of the city oppose the
proposal, and more than half strongly oppose it. These numbers cross
all ethnic and racial lines in this heavily segregated city.
This opposition
remained consistent even though Major League owners--and their shill,
D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams--continue to sell the fiction that the
stadium will provide major economic benefits. This is pure folly, not
only in D.C. but around the country.
According to a
report by the Brookings Institute, “No recent facility has earned
anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent
facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax
revenues...[T]he economic benefits of sports facilities are de
minimus.”
As Roger Noll, co-author of the book Sports, Jobs and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, put
it, “Any independent study shows that as an investment, it’s silly. If
they’re trying to sell it on the grounds of actually contributing to
economic growth and employment in D.C., that’s wrong. There’s never
been a publicly subsidized stadium anywhere in the United States that
had the effect of increasing employment and economic growth in the city
in which it was built.”
Cleveland is
another loser in the stadium swindle. This former industrial city was
once used as an example for how publicly funded stadiums could turn
cities around.
In 1990,
Cleveland’s Central Market Gateway Project promised in full-page
newspaper ads that a new sports complex would generate “$15 million a
year for schools for our children.” Instead, the Cleveland Teachers
Union has calculated that tax breaks given to the project drained $3.5
million a year from the Cleveland school system, which is now in
receivership. Cleveland was also recently named the poorest big city in
the U.S., with a poverty rate of 50 percent and unemployment hovering
at 33 percent.
The truth is that stadiums help nobody but the sports bosses and their political cronies.
When Baltimore
Ravens owner Art Modell secured funding for his $300 million playpen,
he commented--in a rare moment of candor--to reporters, “The pride and
presence of a professional football team is more important than 30
libraries.” Maybe for Modell, but growing legions of people disagree.
The owners’ friend in the White House
THEY
DIDN’T think he was good enough to be their commissioner, but Major
League Baseball’s cabal of billionaire owners ponied up the dough to
keep George W. Bush in the White House.
A
recent Associated Press article found that Bush--a former co-owner of
the Texas Rangers baseball team--had his palm greased by over half of
the 30 major league teams. Seven owners even hold the distinction of
being “Bush Rangers”--meaning they raised at least $200,000 each--and
six are “Bush Pioneers,” signifying $100,000 a piece.
Owners
love Bush for a more complex reason than the usual ardor that
billionaires have for their tax-cutter-in-chief. They all want to get
taxpayers to pay the tab for new state-of-the-art stadiums--and no one
ever fronted a stadium swindle better than George W. Bush.
Bush
set the standard for large-scale extortion when his ownership group got
the state of Texas to pay for the Ballpark in Arlington. After an adult
life of professional incompetence, Dubya had finally gotten his dream
job as a managing partner of the Rangers. For an initial investment of
$600,000--borrowed, of course--the then-president’s son endured the
toil of attending home baseball games and smiling a lot for the cameras.
As
Bush smirked his way through his forties, the owners behind him (think
a dozen Dick Cheneys in ten-gallon hats) threatened to move the team if
the city of Arlington didn’t pay for a new park. The local government
caved. In the fall of 1990, it guaranteed that the city would pay $135
million out of an estimated cost of $190 million. The remainder was
raised through a ticket surcharge. In other words, local taxpayers and
baseball fans footed the whole bill. This plan was sold to Arlington
voters with Bush’s glad-handing help.
At
the end of the day, the owners of the Rangers, including Bush, got a
stadium worth nearly $200 million without putting down a penny of their
own money.
But
the scam didn’t end there. As part of the deal, the Rangers’ ownership
was granted a chunk of land in addition to the stadium--land that, of
course, increased in value as a result of the stadium’s construction.
To make this happen, Democratic Gov. Ann Richards signed into law an
extraordinary measure setting up the Arlington Sports Facilities
Development Authority (ASFDA), which had the power to seize privately
owned land deemed necessary for stadium construction.
“Never
before had a municipal authority in Texas been given license to seize
the property of a private citizen for the benefit of other private
citizens,” wrote investigative journalist Joe Conason. “On November 8,
1993, with the stadium being readied to open the following spring, Bush
announced that he would be running for governor. He didn’t blush when
he proclaimed that his campaign theme would demand self-reliance and
personal responsibility rather than dependence on government.”
Bush
held onto his stake of the team as governor, and by the time he cashed
out in 1998 for $15 million, Bush’s return on his original $600,000
“investment” was 2,400 percent.
So
the next time someone complains about the “greed” of pro athletes, tell
them that if they want to get bent out of shape about someone’s
undeserved wealth, they should take a detour to the upper deck and boo
outside the owner’s box.
Organizing against these rip-offs
WHEN
SPORTS owners and their media prizefighters are confronted with the
mountains of statistics showing that publicly funded stadiums are
fool’s gold, they say, “People want their sports, and we’re just giving
it to them.”
True,
sports are insanely popular in the U.S. But ordinary people have shown
time and again that they can distinguish between loving a team and not
wanting to be taken to the cleaners by the billionaire bosses.
Polls
show that up to 80 percent of people oppose public subsidies for
stadiums. Stadium funding referendums have been defeated in both “red”
and “blue” states, from California to Minnesota to Virginia.
But
since polls and public opinion haven’t been enough to shut the gaping
maw of the ravenous stadium beast, organizations--ranging from lobbying
operations to grassroots protest movements--have popped up around the
country to fight against these temples of corporate greed. The groups
(courtesy of the Web site fieldofschemes.com)
include: Save Fenway Park! (Boston); People for Fair Development and
Develop Don’t Destroy (Brooklyn); No Jones Tax (Dallas); No Stadium Tax
Coalition (Minnesota); Taxpayers Against an Anoka County Vikings
Stadium (Minnesota); hellskitchen.net (New York); Hell’s Kitchen/Hudson
Yards Alliance (New York); New York Association for Better Choices (New
York); Coalition Against Public Funding for Stadiums (St. Louis); and
No D.C. Taxes for Baseball (Washington, D.C.).
Fighting
stadium giveaways can raise big questions for people about the
priorities of a system that will spit shine sports arenas while schools
and hospitals crumble. All people who believe in human need over
corporate greed should join the fight.
Read the Edge of Sports
You can read Dave Zirin’s weekly column on sports at www.edgeofsports.com on the Web. And look out for his upcoming collection of sports writing, What’s My Name, Fool: Sports and Resistance in the United States, to be published by Haymarket Books.