Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  But for all his friends in high places, the mayor still lacked the money to build his dream ballpark. Giuliani announced that he would raise $600 million by extending the city’s commercial rent tax—a staggering sum of money, especially in a city whose schools were literally falling down. City council president Peter Vallone, planning his own race for the governor’s office that fall and spotting a popular issue on which to take on the mayor, declared that no stadium money would be spent without a public referendum. With the mayor and council deadlocked, the council wrote its own budget—without the stadium funding—and passed it over the mayor’s veto for the first time in history. For at least one more year, George Steinbrenner would have to wait to escape the Bronx.

  Meanwhile, across town in Queens, the New York Mets announced plans for their own new facility. Featuring a retractable roof, seventy-five luxury boxes, forty-five hundred club seats, and a facade vaguely reminiscent of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ old Ebbets Field (if twice the size), the new park would be “one of the most fantastic stadiums that’s ever been planned,” according to Mets co-owner Fred Wilpon. Possibly its most fantastic element: a retractable field in a “bathtub” of dirt and sod, which would roll out into the parking lot to leave a hard floor for basketball games or boxing events. Estimated cost: $500 million.

  Wilpon, the Daily News reassured its readers, “definitely would contribute an unspecified amount” toward construction.

  The Tide Turns?

  Two hundred miles to the northeast, another historic ballpark was quietly fighting its own battle against the wrecking ball. Fenway Park had long been considered not just a baseball stadium but a baseball shrine: the home to Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and Wade Boggs, its “Green Monster” outfield wall and jury-rigged dimensions had been copied by many nouveau “old-time” parks like Jacobs Field and The Ballpark at Arlington. Despite the presence of view-blocking pillars and seating that could only charitably be described as “cramped,” fans had proven their loyalty to the eighty-six-year-old ballpark: attendance was near capacity even in years the Red Sox were cellar-dwellers, making Fenway the number-one tourist attraction in the entire state.

  For the Red Sox, however, Fenway’s charms paled in comparison to the luxury seating and expanded food courts afforded by new ballparks. (Though ranked among the top ten baseball teams in terms of overall revenue—thanks to both their generous television contract and the highest ticket prices in the nation—the Red Sox placed only thirteenth in “venue revenue” in 1997.) And so in April the team let slip to the media that they were pursuing plans to build a new stadium across the street—forcing the relocation of dozens of businesses—while demolishing most of the existing ballpark, leaving only the Green Monster and a small slice of grandstand as museum pieces.

  The Boston Globe quickly jumped on board, editorializing that Fenway was “too cramped and unprofitable to allow the team to thrive in the high-priced baseball environment of the 1990s.” Sox fans were less enthusiastic, with one turning up at an early May game at Fenway with a placard reading, “If you build it, we won’t come.”

  “The Red Sox have done a pretty good job of managing the issues,” says Steven Rubin of Save Fenway Park!, which had been founded in the fall of 1997 to explore ways to renovate and expand the existing ballpark. “If you’re a preservationist, it bothers you terribly; why tear down the real thing and then build it across the street and go through all that aggravation for a replica? But if you’re an average fan, and you like the experience, except the seats are bigger, it sells pretty well. The average fan totally misses that they’re going to get screwed, because they’re not going to get seats in the new place.”

  While Bostonians argued that their existing ballpark was more than adequate for the Red Sox, residents of Birmingham, Alabama, pondered funding a facility for a nonexistent team. In 1998 Birmingham faced a $703.2 million proposal called MAPS (Metropolitan Area Projects Strategy), a laundry list of development projects whose centerpiece would be a seventy-thousand-seat domed football stadium. The brainchild of one Rick Horrow, a sometime Harvard sports law professor and NFL stadium consultant, MAPS was to be funded with a countywide one-cent sales tax hike, raising the rate to 10 percent in some parts of the county.

  Birmingham’s MAPS was a near-replica of a similarly named project that Horrow had successfully sold to Oklahoma City in 1993, declaring it “a defining moment in Oklahoma City’s quest to become a major league region.” That city’s $238 million collection of museums, downtown canal and “riverwalk,” renovated convention center and state fairgrounds, minor-league baseball stadium, and hockey arena had a bumpy ride from the beginning—among other things, the new ballpark’s architects underestimated the amount of steel necessary by 50 percent—and city officials were soon debating whether to extend the sales tax hike into a sixth year or instead trim some of the projects. Worse yet, when the NHL issued its choices for four new expansion teams in 1996, Oklahoma City didn’t make the cut; city leaders conceded that the town’s meager population (forty-third among all TV markets in the country) had doomed their bid, new arena or no.

  Horrow, though, had by then collected his $67,500 consultant’s fee and had moved on to pitch MAPS plans to Hampton Roads and Norfolk, Virginia—and Birmingham. Birmingham residents were polled the fall before Horrow’s arrival, and just 35 percent backed spending public money on a domed football stadium, ranking it next to last among thirteen suggested projects; only a new library system, improved transportation, and zoo expansion were supported by a majority of respondents. Horrow’s solution—lumping together popular and unpopular projects—had worked in Oklahoma City; in fact, Oklahoma City mayor Ron Norick had later bragged that “if we would have voted on that piece by piece, we would have gotten [a new library and new dams on the North Canadian River] and that would have been it.”

  To counter Birmingham’s $1 million MAPS campaign, headed by such local movers and shakers as the CEOs of HealthSouth and Alabama Power, a hastily organized group called “RAPS” (Real Accountability, Progress, and Solutions) presented a three-pronged argument: the regressivity of the sales tax hike; the unprecedented powers of the MAPS authority that would be created, including exemption from many competitive-bidding rules; and the lack of evidence for any positive economic impact from stadium projects. “It sprang full-blown from a group of men who obviously could afford this themselves, and they made horrible missteps with all the money they had—it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel,” says RAPS activist Alice Durkee. Among the missteps: underestimating the amount per person that the project would cost (the MAPS proponents said $44 a year; the actual number was closer to $250), and hiring as a political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, a former aide to Dick Morris on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. “That doesn’t play in Alabama,” observes Durkee.

  When the August 5 vote was tallied, the results showed 57 percent opposed, 43 percent in favor. Mayor Richard Arrington, who had spearheaded the campaign for MAPS, conceded defeat, saying there was no plan B to revive the project. “It’s the voters who make the decisions,” he said, “and we’ve done that tonight, and that’s all we can ask for.”

  Plans for a publicly funded new facility were also put on hold in San Antonio, Texas, where popular sentiment had long run against subsidizing an arena for the Spurs basketball team. San Antonio built its Alamodome in 1993 for an NFL team that never materialized. The dome had since been pressed into duty as a home for the basketball team, but team owner Peter Holt had consistently argued that a new profit-friendly venue was necessary to make money in small-market San Antonio—and to keep high-profile players like young superstar Tim Duncan.

  The city sales tax used to fund the Alamodome remained unpopular in San Antonio, and earlier rumblings about using a similar tax to fund a new arena had met with quick and loud public opposition. “I do not believe the city should build an arena,” then-mayor Bill Thornton told the San Antonio Express-News in 1996, when the team wa
s voicing threats to move up the road to Austin. “That’s a short sentence, with small words that are clear.”

  So Holt and company presented the city with a new plan: Build an 18,500-seat arena in an abandoned rock quarry in the northeast part of the city, using tax-increment financing. (TIFs, the same mechanism used to help fund the San Francisco Giants’ new park, are intended to avoid the controversy of raising new taxes by instead diverting existing property taxes to pay for the cost of a construction project.) The Spurs would kick in a mere $20 million for a project estimated at $157 million, and San Antonians, it was promised, would have a basketball team for years to come.

  There would be no need for a citizen campaign against the TIF plan, as it turned out. The Spurs’ proposal needed approval not only from the city and county but also from the East School District that faced losing up to $18.5 million in revenue to TIFs. When the district board’s meeting ended in the wee hours of December 15, it voted 5–2 to withdraw from discussions of the plan, effectively killing it.1

  “I’ll go out and tell people how important the Spurs are to San Antonio,” Bruce Bennett, the school board president, said at the time. “I just don’t think education dollars should be spent for an arena.”

  Twins or Triplets

  In every city where there is backlash against stadium subsidies, the same warning can be heard: Vote it down, and you risk losing your team. In 1998 that threat was put to the test in Minnesota. The previous November, the Minnesota Twins had been declared all but gone from Minneapolis following the state’s decision not to replace the fifteen-year-old Metrodome. All eyes then turned to a field in tiny Kernersville, North Carolina, where local businessman Don Beaver hoped to build a forty-thousand-seat ballpark to bring about the first Major League Baseball franchise shift in twenty-five years, luring the Twins south to be reborn as the Carolina Triplets.

  But Carl Pohlad’s supposedly ironclad deal to sell the team to Beaver was starting to run into choppy water. Pohlad’s fellow owners, who had enthusiastically backed his demands for a new stadium, began to get cold feet when faced with abandoning the nation’s fourteenth-largest TV market for an ill-defined region around Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point known as the “Triad”—one often confused by out-of-towners with the seventy-five-mile-distant “Triangle” of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. One member of baseball’s Ownership Committee, which must approve all franchise relocations, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “If you’re going to move a team, it should be Pittsburgh or Montreal, who continue to fail to draw, even when they have winning teams. The Twins drew 3 million people in 1992.”

  Down in North Carolina’s Guilford and Forsyth counties, meanwhile, voters were preparing to go to the polls May 5 for the ballpark vote—and they didn’t look too happy about it. As the vote neared, polls were running more than two to one against a 1 percent tax on restaurant meals and a 50-cent ticket tax to fund two thirds of a $210 million stadium. (The sale of naming rights would take care of most of the “private” portion.)

  Vote Yes for Major League Baseball, the pro-stadium campaign bankrolled by such local corporate heavy hitters as R. J. Reynolds and Wachovia Bank, had hit snags from the start. An initial plan for restaurant chains Wendy’s, Subway, and Pizza Hut to provide information on the stadium campaign to customers collapsed after managers were deluged by angry phone calls from customers, who pointed out that they would be endorsing a tax on their own products. Plans for a “bottle hanger” promotion on bottles of Pepsi were canceled when local supermarket chains complained. The Guilford County Board of Commissioners voted 6–5 to oppose the plan, calling the food tax “repulsive.” Said commissioner Chuck Winfree, following the vote, “The economics of baseball have gotten to the point where they simply need taxpayer support to make it feasible. That doesn’t justify that taxpayers actually have to do it.”

  Still, the stadium campaign forged ahead, running a slew of radio and TV ads, including several featuring popular racecar drivers touting the benefits of a baseball stadium. Behind the leadership of Walt Klein, whose resume included stints managing a U.S. Senate campaign and the successful push for Coors Field in Denver, the Vote Yes for Major League Baseball campaign quickly locked up the endorsements of the mayors of all three Triad towns, and Governor Jim Hunt.

  In the end, Vote Yes won the spending battle but lost the war: Despite outspending stadium opponents $716,000 to $26,000, the stadium backers were defeated soundly at the polls. In voting more than twice as heavy as at a typical primary election, Forsyth County rejected the stadium bid, with 59 percent opposed; in Guilford, 67 percent opposed it. As local newspaper columnist Lenox Rawlings quipped, “The [Winston-Salem] Warthogs would have done better against the Yankees.”

  Minnesota state senator John Marty, who had helped block the Twins’ stadium push the previous year in Minnesota, declared the referendum’s defeat “a victory not only for taxpayers in North Carolina but for taxpayers up here and elsewhere.” Marty noted that while the landslide vote should serve as a “wake-up call” to baseball owners, “the problem is, it’s like the snooze button on the alarm—they keep hitting it over and over.”

  Thirteen days later, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, released a feasibility study on building a baseball stadium to lure the Twins, even as polls showed 63.6 percent of residents opposed to using public money on a new ballpark.

  It’s stories like these that have led many observers to wonder if the free ride for sports teams may be nearing an end, as both the public and elected officials tire of throwing money at increasingly wealthy owners for increasingly elusive benefits. But the danger, as always, is that it’s hard to keep a bad stadium idea down. In Pittsburgh, where voters had banned using new tax dollars for sports stadiums in November 1997, local elected officials quickly arranged to circumvent the public vote by dedicating existing tax dollars to new stadiums for the Pirates and Steelers. With the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles also in search of new stadiums, the controversy soon spread statewide. It would end in early 1999 with a vote by the Pennsylvania legislature to provide the state’s four baseball and football teams with a $320 million “loan” to help with construction costs—a “loan” that the teams would be allowed to repay out of state taxes collected at and around the new stadiums.

  Quipped Pittsburgh representative Thomas Petrone following the vote: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”

  More Than a Ballpark

  The 1998 World Series will be remembered as the exclamation point on an unforgettable year in baseball—the year of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s home-run race, the year that the New York Yankees won 114 regular-season games and coasted to a world championship. But the ’98 Series was also a historic pairing of two teams that were aggressively pursuing new facilities in their hometowns. And while the Yankees may have easily won the Series, it was the San Diego Padres who scored first in the new-stadium sweepstakes.

  The fate of San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium—renamed Qualcomm Stadium in 1997 in exchange for an $18 million naming-rights fee—was first challenged by the San Diego Chargers in the early 1990s. As a condition of renegotiating his long-term lease with the city, team owner Alex Spanos insisted that the stadium be expanded and renovated. In May 1995 the Chargers signed a new lease with the city, which, mindful of its bid to host the 1998 Super Bowl, agreed to $60 million in renovations. It was as part of that deal that the Chargers received their controversial ten-year seat guarantee from the city of San Diego, which agreed to reimburse the team for the face value of every unsold general admission ticket in any game in which fewer than sixty thousand such tickets were sold. The difference would affect the team’s annual rent payment to the city, sometimes dramatically so—after a miserable 1998 season that saw few fans go to games, the city faced extending some $3.8 million in rent credits to the Chargers.

  With more than ten thousand new seats, dozens of new luxury boxes, and an upgraded scoreboard added to Qualcomm Stadium—all
for the benefit of the Chargers—the Padres were next in line to cry foul. Houston software tycoon John Moores had purchased a majority share of the Padres in 1994, alongside new team president and minority owner Larry Lucchino, who as CEO of the Baltimore Orioles had led that team’s push for Camden Yards. Lucchino and Moores’ complaints were familiar ones: Qualcomm was ill suited for baseball, the team was in financial trouble, and the need to remain competitive on the field and in the boardroom necessitated a new ballpark. But Moores and company had a new weapon on their side: This wasn’t to be any old new ballpark. This was to be a new ballpark district.

  The $411 million project, Mayor Susan Golding announced, would include a new stadium and new offices, hotels, and stores in the immediate area—twenty-six square blocks of the city’s East Village. The deal promised $225 million in public bond money, to be paid back by yet-to-be-generated funds from the local hotel occupancy tax, plus $50 million from the city’s redevelopment organization and $21 million from the San Diego Unified Port District. Stadium boosters pointed to the team’s $115 million commitment to the project, plus its reported $300 million commitment to developing 850 new hotel rooms, 600,000 square feet of office space, and 150,000 square feet of retail space, as proof that this was no swindle.

  Critics were quick to point out, however, that the team’s promises had little cold cash behind them. Included in the $115 million, for example, was money from naming rights; another piece would come from credits given them for the value of concessions fixtures and utilities put into the new stadium. And as for Moores’ private-development plans, wrote Don Bauder, a business columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Why should San Diego give $275 million for a ballpark we don’t need in return for $300 million-plus of development that is largely unrelated?”