Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  Legislators, by and large, agreed; the tax-increment scheme garnered little support. At the last minute, stadium proponents frantically tried to fashion a different bill that would pay for the new stadium entirely with “user fees”—profits on the future sale of the Twins by the foundation, higher parking and sales taxes at the ballpark, and surcharges on player salaries and sports broadcasts. But even as the baseball players union and local broadcasters screamed bloody murder, that plan ran into a still more imposing obstacle: the money raised wouldn’t be nearly enough to pay construction costs. A new stadium, just as Robert Baade and his fellow economists had predicted, couldn’t pay its own way.

  The calls that poured in to the capitol switchboard were running 3–2 against stadium funding; Minneapolis voters, meanwhile, overwhelmingly approved a $10 million cap on city funding of any new ballpark. Finally, on November 13, the legislature threw in the towel, with the House voting 87–47 to reject the last-ditch proposal, then adjourning the special session for good. “On November 13, professional baseball died in Minnesota,” proclaimed House stadium-bill sponsor Loren Jennings.

  Yet Pohlad, who had earlier insisted that his sale of the team would kick in if the legislature adjourned without passing a stadium bill, still hesitated. “Everybody says it’s dead,” he said after the House vote. “I don’t know if it is or not.” The November 30 deadline passed with the future of the Twins, and the stadium, still undecided.

  San Francisco: If at First You Don’t Succeed…

  San Francisco’s history with sports owner demands has been particularly epic—involving “ten years, five mayors, four referenda, four cities, and one earthquake,” as one observer put it. It began in 1984, when then San Francisco Giants owner Bob Lurie, who had bought the team eight years earlier to prevent it from being moved to Toronto, declared that he would sell the team to out-of-town interests if he didn’t get a new stadium. Candlestick Park, the team’s home since moving west from New York in 1958, was best known as the coldest and windiest place in the Bay Area (Giants pitcher Stu Miller was once blown off the mound by a gust of wind), and Lurie was determined to get a replacement at public expense.

  San Francisco, however, has a very different means of approving public expenditures than do most U.S. cities. Virtually all city bond issues are subject to approval by the electorate (this was true even before Proposition 218 passed new statewide restrictions on issuing bonds in 1996), meaning the Giants would have to subject their stadium demands to a public referendum.

  The first such referendum was Proposition W, in 1987, which called for an $85 million stadium in the South of Market warehouse district. Held during a mayoral election in which three of the four candidates opposed the initiative, it went down to a 53 percent to 47 percent defeat. Two years later, having swayed new mayor Art Agnos to climb aboard the stadium bandwagon, the Giants tried again with Proposition P. By this time, the price tag had risen to $115 million, the site had shifted several blocks to the San Francisco waterfront—and the margin of defeat was 1 percent, helped along by an electorate more concerned with rebuilding from the previous month’s earthquake than with upgrading a ballpark that had remained standing throughout the temblor, beneath the feet of sixty thousand fans waiting for a World Series game to begin.

  The following year Lurie tried a new strategy: Sick of San Francisco voters, he pitched a multi-city funding effort to build a new stadium south of San Francisco, near San Jose. This time the Giants managed to win one vote—but lost three others, sending the complicated funding scheme down to defeat. In 1992 yet another referendum, this one limited to San Jose, crashed and burned when 55 percent of city voters declined to hand over $185 million in utility taxes for a new ballpark.

  Every time Lurie had come back to the public asking for money—more and more money each time, in fact—he had presented the upcoming vote as the “last hope” of keeping the Giants in the Bay Area, and it was understandable if the citizenry was beginning to suspect he was crying wolf. But then Bob Lurie did what no baseball owner had done in twenty years: He sold his team to a group of investors from the Tampa Bay area. The team, it was announced, would begin play in Florida in 1993. Finally, it seemed, an owner had been pushed too far; without public subsidies you really couldn’t guarantee that a sports team would stay put, even in a populous area like San Francisco.

  The National League owners voted to reject the sale.

  The reasons were complex. A Giants move might help spread fear in other cities faced with pending stadium legislation, but it would also take Tampa Bay out of the running as a locale for other teams to move to—as several teams were then threatening to do. The San Francisco Bay Area was the nation’s fifth-largest TV market; Tampa Bay ranked fourteenth, meaning a potential loss of network TV revenue for the whole league when the national broadcast contract came up for renegotiation. And finally, there was a local ownership group, led by Safeway supermarket magnate Peter Magowan, ready to buy the team and keep it in San Francisco, albeit at a slightly lower price than what the Tampa Bay group was offering. The league told Lurie to take the Magowan bid; Lurie took it. All those referenda, it turned out, hadn’t been the last hope of retaining the Giants but merely the last hope of retaining Bob Lurie.

  Magowan immediately set out to secure the new ballpark that Lurie had failed to get, with one major difference: This time, the Giants were prepared to foot the bill themselves. The Giants would build and own the planned $255 million waterfront ballpark, with almost the entire cost paid for out of a private bond issue and the sale of naming rights and luxury boxes. Proposition B passed in May 1996 by a two-to-one margin, and the Giants at last had their ballpark.

  The San Francisco story to this point has become near-legendary among anti-stadium activists: the little electorate that could, calling the bluff of the leagues and getting to keep their team and their money, too. Even the $1.2 million a year in hidden subsidies later approved for Magowan’s privately funded ballpark (for relocating a Port of San Francisco maintenance yard on the same China Basin site rejected in the 1989 referendum), and the $15 million in public tax-increment financing (in which the city would divert property taxes on the land into the construction fund) didn’t dim enthusiasm: The Giants were still building the first privately funded baseball stadium in three decades, largely because voters had indicated loud and clear that they had no intention of footing the bill.

  The Giants controversy would pale, though, in comparison to the next demand placed before the San Francisco electorate. The Giants had a cotenant at Candlestick Park: the immensely popular 49ers football team. And 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo had decided it was time to cash in on the sports-welfare gold rush.

  Mall in the Family

  The 49ers management set out to prove that, done right, even the most anti-subsidy city in the United States could be forced to cough up money for a new stadium. Then they proceeded to do almost everything wrong.

  The first rumblings came in late 1996, as the aftershocks of the previous year’s move of the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore and the announced shift of the Houston Oilers to Tennessee were still reverberating in the ears of football fans. Team owner Edward DeBartolo, a multimillionaire real-estate developer, warned that the team, which had turned a $19 million profit in 1995—tops among NFL teams—and was fresh from its fifth Super Bowl victory in fourteen years, could no longer field a “competitive” team without the help of a new stadium. “Given the fact that there are many cities that would build them a new stadium at no cost, it’s a real tribute that the 49ers have moved from asking the city for money to looking for some kind of alternative,” said Jack Davis, who the 49ers hired to lead their campaign for a new stadium.

  Davis and the 49ers didn’t look very hard. By February 1997 the team was asking for $100 million in public subsidies for a new stadium on the Candlestick Park site. The referendum—actually two referenda, Propositions D and F, one to approve the funding and the other to ease zoning restrictions—would
go before the voters in June.

  The first thing DeBartolo and club president Carmen Policy did was to insist (as the Miami Heat had in their campaign for a “waterfront park” the previous year) that they weren’t really asking for a stadium at all. The new 49ers stadium, they announced, would be but a mere portion of a planned mall development to be built by Mills Corp. If eight days of football a year—plus the three Super Bowls over the next thirty years that NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue was dangling as an incentive for the city to build a new stadium—wouldn’t generate enough economic activity to make the public investment worthwhile, what of a giant shopping mall, drawing consumers from all over the region? And where $100 million might look like a lot to invest in a $325 million stadium, it would be a mere fraction of the cost of a $525 million “entertainment complex.”

  “For every $4.25 that the 49ers put on the table,” Davis told the press, “the city puts $1, and the dollar is not a dollar that comes out of the budget for police and fire. When the public takes a look at the deal, it’s clearly and convincingly about jobs and economic opportunity.”

  The first member of the public to take a close look at the numbers disagreed. On February 7, San Francisco Board of Supervisors budget analyst Harvey Rose released a study claiming to show that the city would lose $4.6 million a year on the new stadium, and possibly more if the mega-mall drew off shoppers from other retail outlets in the city. City controller Ed Harrington promptly issued a competing report claiming that the new mall “should generate new revenues sufficient to pay all, or a substantial portion of” the construction costs—and Harrington’s report, unlike Rose’s, would be included in the official city voter guide for the referendum.

  The next obstacle for the team came from the stadium’s opponents. The anti-49ers campaign was being led by Joel Ventresca, a veteran of the successful fights against subsidizing the Giants, but it was a pair of local individuals who would cause the biggest uproar. Taking advantage of a San Francisco law allowing residents to buy space in the city voter guide to argue for or against ballot measures, the pair paid $269 for a satirical ad in favor of the stadium project. “Opponents call it ‘Candlestick Pork’ and ‘corporate welfare,’” wrote local attorney Dan Larkosh and self-proclaimed “aspiring millionaire” John Hlinko. “Perhaps. But when you’re from Ohio, making money in San Francisco means expensive flights, paying for dual housekeeping staffs, limo drivers, etc. This adds up!” Larkosh signed the missive, “Multimillionaires for Corporate Welfare.” Critics charged the pair with making a “laughingstock” of the election; Larkosh responded, “If the truth is funny, so be it.” The ad wound up being kicked into the “con” section of the voter guide but not before the ensuing public uproar had introduced millions of area newspaper readers to the arguments within.

  The biggest fiasco of all, though, was brought on by the 49ers’ campaign director himself. DeBartolo was determined to keep himself and his $600 million net worth out of the limelight, and Policy was less than silver-tongued with the public. (In first announcing the team’s desire for a city-funded stadium the previous fall, Policy had declaimed, “Once the mayor gets into the posture where he believes and sees you’re not trying to milk the cow dry, but only enough to fill the glass so you don’t choke on the cookies, can we proceed.”) So the team hired Jack Davis, a well-known local political operative who had managed the Giants’ referendum campaign the year before, to make their case before the voters.

  Davis looked like the perfect choice for the job. A former campaign director for Mayor Brown and other prominent area politicians, he kept a low personal profile while pushing the 49ers’ stadium project at every opportunity. Until, that is, May 3, when Davis threw himself a fiftieth birthday party to which he invited Mayor Brown, 49ers president Policy, and other local luminaries. That wasn’t the story; the entertainment was: a performance artist who, dressed in a Native American headdress, had a colleague carve a satanic star into his back, urinate on him, and sodomize him with a whiskey bottle.

  It was hardly the sort of thing the team wanted associated with its PR specialist. “The Party” dominated headlines for days, with reaction ranging from ridicule to outrage. Denni Woodward, director of Stanford University’s American Indian and Alaska Native Program, summed up the performance as “combining [an indigenous culture] with some kind of cheap horror movie. I think he’s probably offended everybody from the Apache Mescalero to the Satanists.”

  The 49ers responded with a flurry of new promises in an attempt to drive the Davis party uproar from the front pages. One day the team was announcing that it would provide health benefits to domestic partners of gay employees; another it was taking out an insurance policy (a legally toothless one, it turned out) against the city’s having to pay any money out of general funds. The new stadium, it was promised, would provide jobs for the impoverished residents of nearby Hunters Point. By the end, DeBartolo himself had entered the fray, defending the stadium deal with every argument he could muster.

  “Candlestick is almost to the point where it’ll be condemned,” he told a group of undecided women at a “For Women Only” pro-stadium event in May. To renovate it, he insisted, “would cost too much—$180 million.”

  “Is that your estimate or someone else’s?” asked one woman.

  “Look, you’d be throwing good money after bad,” DeBartolo replied. “The key thing is the economic benefit to the city. People don’t understand why the mall is there, but it’s the engine that runs the train.”

  Going into the June 3 vote, public expectation was that the two propositions would go down in defeat, just like the four attempts by the Giants at public funding. The team’s threats to take the team to hated rival Los Angeles had been met more with derision than concern: “Threatening to go to Los Angeles is like holding a gun to your own head and threatening to kill the hostage,” quipped one newspaper columnist. The last poll, taken two weeks before the election, had shown the stadium initiative trailing by nine percentage points, with little sign of change during the months of lobbying by the team and the mayor.

  Instead, it squeaked to victory by a little more than a thousand votes. Huge margins of victory in Hunters Point led to allegations of voter fraud, especially after it was reported that polls had been opened at city-run housing projects in that neighborhood several days before election day. City employees, it was further revealed, had been pressured (“encouraged,” insisted the mayor’s press secretary) into taking off the day of the election to do pro-stadium campaigning.

  The deal, however, was done. After spending more than $2 million on the pro-stadium campaign—$33 per yes vote—including $1.25 million of DeBartolo’s family fortune, the 49ers had their stadium funds. “The guy upstairs must really have wanted for this to happen,” exclaimed Policy at a jubilant post-election party for the 49ers and their backers.

  Presumably, he wasn’t talking about DeBartolo.

  The Stadium Merry-Go-Round

  In June 1997 Your Money magazine ran a list of all the major-league baseball, football, and basketball franchises and their stadiums and arenas; an asterisk marked each team that was seeking a new building. Out of seventy-four teams, there were twenty-nine asterisks: from the Boston Red Sox to the San Diego Padres, the Sacramento Kings to the Charlotte Hornets. And that didn’t include the twenty-one teams already playing in new or newly renovated facilities, or the fourteen that had new buildings under construction. It also left out an entire country (Canada) and major sport (hockey), which would have accounted for perhaps a dozen more stadiums and arenas, in progress or under negotiation.

  Despite all the concrete that has already been poured, the new stadium craze shows no signs of abating—in fact, it has spread to such places as England and Australia, where publicly funded soccer stadiums increasingly dot the landscape. In North America there are more stadiums and arenas going up each year than at any time in history. The sports industry seems to be settling into an equilibrium where at any given time on
e quarter of major-league teams is playing in a new building, one quarter is awaiting the construction of one, another quarter is lobbying to get one built—and a final quarter is waiting in the wings for its turn at the plate. And once those teams have gotten their new toys, it will be time for the last round of stadium-beggars to line up again for another handout, for their stadiums will be slipping into “economic obsolescence.”

  “If you go into building a new stadium now and aren’t prepared for major changes by that second decade,” Mark Rosentraub told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in the midst of the Twins fight, “you’re being Pollyannaish about it.” As San Franciscans can attest, if you don’t build a new stadium now, just wait a couple of years—someone will doubtless make a new pitch for one then.

  Notes

  1. Van Dyk and Citizens for More Important Things reemerged in 2006, during debates over a new arena for the Sonics basketball team, when the group sponsored a referendum to block city money from being spent on private sports facilities unless the public was guaranteed a return on its investment. The measure passed overwhelmingly—at which point Sonics owner Clayton Bennett declared that while he still hoped to remain in King County, “Seattle will now be relegated to a second-tier status.”

  2. By the time Safeco Field, named for an insurance company, opened in July 1999, the total cost had soared to $517 million. Though the Mariners’ owners had promised to pay for all cost overruns, team execs now declared that the added expenses were actually “unanticipated capital costs,” not cost overruns, and should be paid by the public. After a threatened lawsuit went nowhere, the team finally agreed to pay the additional $100 million out of its own pocket—in exchange for promises that the county would be on the hook for all future upgrades to the stadium.

  10

  The Bucks Stop Here

  The loyal rooters never doubted for a moment that their beloved Bums were as much a part of their heritage as Prospect Park. They discovered they were wrong. The Dodgers were only a piece of merchandise that passed from hand to hand. —Baseball owner Bill Veeck