by Neil deMause
The November referendum campaign officially kicked off with a pep rally in the East Village neighborhood where the new stadium was to be built. Padres outfielders Tony Gwynn and Steve Finley spoke at the event, as they and other players would continue to do throughout the vote drive. So did third-base coach Tim Flannery, who warned of dire consequences if the referendum wasn’t approved: “You don’t want to be, five years from now, watching players that were once Padres playing in a different city and you say, ‘Golly, I didn’t know that was going to happen.’”
It was to be a constant refrain in the summer and fall of 1998. “If we don’t build it, Padres will be gone,” a San Diego Union-Tribune headline stated. “Time running out,” read another. But the emphasis was on more than just the team. Emphasizing the ballpark “district,” the referendum campaign’s official slogan was “Yes on C—redevelopment works for all of us.” Proposition C, campaign literature promised, was the “final jewel in the crown of downtown redevelopment.”
Such claims may have defied common economic wisdom. By the end of August, Standard & Poor’s, the Wall Street rating agency, had lowered the city’s fiscal outlook from “stable” to “negative,” citing the potential impact of the ballpark project on the city’s general fund.
Area residents also began raising concerns about the fiscal wisdom of a publicly funded stadium. Chris Michaels, a photographer, had moved into the East Village area in 1997 as part of the city’s drive to bring residents to a former industrial neighborhood. When he and other locals realized their homes and livelihoods were in the bulldozers’ path, they formed Strike Three on Proposition C (STOP-C) to try to combat the stadium referendum.
The city’s approach infuriated Michaels. “They went out of their way to rename this area East Village in 1996 to make it more residential-friendly,” he says. “So, where’s the village in a forty-six-thousand-person stadium, high-rise hotels, office towers, and parking lots? I feel betrayed. They invited me here.”
Outspent nearly a hundred to one, STOP-C waged a grassroots effort to educate San Diegans about the risks involved in the massive public expenditure—and about the tremendous profit the Padres stood to make from a new facility. (One popular bumper sticker: “Stadium? Thanks, got one. A library I could use.”) But their uphill battle was made more difficult as the Padres found themselves in pennant contention for the first time in years.
“As much as I wanted to see the Padres do well in the Series,” says Michaels, “I really feared what it would do to our campaign.… Especially during the Series, we were considered practically anti-American,” he continues, recalling bumper stickers ripped off the cars of those daring to proclaim their opposition to the new ballpark. “I’d say the Series was probably good for 5 percent of the vote. The feeling I got was that people here had difficulty distinguishing between the stadium and the performance of the Padres.”
Said Mayor Golding after the stadium passed with nearly 60 percent of the vote on November 3: “We’re getting a chance to make this the best downtown in the country.” And there’s no doubt that the new district will be a good one for John Moores and friends. By committing to aid in downtown redevelopment, Moores effectively gave himself and his colleagues first dibs on prime land. A Moores-controlled company, the San Diego Reader noted, had purchased a half-block piece of property near the stadium site the day after the successful referendum vote—property expected to appreciate in price by millions of dollars once the ballpark is constructed. “Not only did John Moores get a huge subsidy for his team,” says Chris Michaels, “but if the redevelopment works he’ll also be able to cash in on significant control of a third of downtown.”
It didn’t take long for the city’s baseball euphoria to lose some of its post-election glow. Despite profits and values likely to soar with a new facility, the Padres weren’t able—or willing—to match the highest bidder on new contracts for their popular players. By early 1999 the Padres had lost stars Ken Caminiti and Kevin Brown to free agency. Steve Finley, who’d wondered aloud about the Padres playing in a different city if Proposition C was defeated, instead signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks as a free agent. Fans were outraged, even more so when the team traded popular slugger Greg Vaughn to Cincinnati. “How do you think the players in the [Padres] locker room feel?” asked a stunned Vaughn, speaking for many when he found out about the trade. “They’re told how competitive we’ll be as a team when we get the stadium, and then when we get the stadium, we’re gone.”
The Path of Lease Resistance
The Padres weren’t the only team whose drive for a new stadium was aided by on-the-field heroics. After years of frustration and near misses, the Denver Broncos took home a Super Bowl victory in 1997—and promptly told local residents the team might be forced to leave town if it didn’t get a publicly funded replacement for fifty-year-old Mile High Stadium.
The Broncos have consistently sold out the seventy-six-thousand-seat structure. But in 1987, reportedly in need of quick cash, team owner Pat Bowlen sold control of Mile High’s luxury boxes to Penthouse Suites Ltd. for $18 million. He also agreed to a lease that gave the city all concession and parking revenues, in addition to the revenues from scoreboard advertising. The thirty-year lease was considered particularly strong by many in the business. It also left the flamboyant millionaire out in the cold compared to many of his fellow NFL owners.
Now, years later, Bowlen was loudly comparing his team’s facility to Coors Field, the new, publicly funded home of the Colorado Rockies baseball club. Bemoaning his inability to remain “competitive” in the NFL without a new stadium, Bowlen pushed hard for an extension of the sales tax that funded Coors Field. “What I say is, the tax is minimal,” he said in 1995. “It’s an insignificant amount of money, in my mind. If you’re against that, what you’re saying is you don’t give a shit about the Broncos.”
The Broncos stadium campaign was particularly surreal: In order to build a new stadium, the city had to figure out a way to break its solid lease with the team. With no apparent irony, the Denver Post reported on August 7: “City officials announced a deal Thursday that will keep the Broncos in Denver for 25 years if a new stadium is built. As part of the deal, the city would release the Broncos from the franchise’s lease at Mile High Stadium, which does not expire until 2018.” Among the provisions of the new lease: the new stadium was not to cost more than $360 million, with a $270 million cap on public funds ($395 million with interest), to be paid for from an extension of the sales tax used to pay for Coors Field; the Broncos would receive almost all stadium revenues; and the new facility would feature a twenty-seat luxury box for the Metropolitan Football Stadium District Board—the entity ostensibly created to represent taxpayers in negotiations with the Broncos. Board member Joy Burns defended the perk, saying, “Someone has to take care of our visiting dignitaries.”
“Incredibly, while our negotiators gave away the farm to Pat Bowlen on our behalf, they managed to salvage something for themselves and their friends,” responded Ray Hutchins, the spokesperson for the newly formed Citizens Opposing the Stadium Tax (COST). COST was a vocal presence in the months leading up to the November referendum—holding spirited rallies, loudly demonstrating at local meetings, and filing a federal complaint against Jacor Broadcasting, the radio home of the Broncos, which COST members charged had prevented them from stating their case on the air.
After a triumphant 1997 season, the Broncos continued their winning ways in ’98. This proved to be bad news for stadium opponents in Denver, much as the Series had in San Diego. On November 3 the referendum passed by a full 14 percentage points. Pollsters estimated that the team’s undefeated record as the November election approached could possibly sway as much as a third of the electorate.
Big dollars had to help too. Bowlen contributed $1.98 million of his own money to the pro-stadium lobbying group Citizens for a New Stadium. It was the biggest single donation to an issue campaign in the city’s history.
Dome
d to Failure
The Toronto Blue Jays didn’t win anything in 1998. (Their ace starter, Roger Clemens, did win the Cy Young Award but then immediately demanded a trade to a better team.) But as recently as 1994, the Jays had been two-time defending World Champs, with a ballpark, SkyDome, that was the envy of all of baseball.
The “world’s greatest entertainment centre” (as its builders dubbed it) opened to a packed house on June 3, 1989, and saw its tickets sold out for years thereafter. In 1990 the Blue Jays became the first team in baseball history to sell four million tickets in a year; they would top this mark in both of the next two years. And even as team owner Labatt Breweries funneled a portion of the resulting windfall into player salaries—the Jays’ two championships in 1992 and 1993 came largely on the backs of high-priced acquisitions like Jack Morris and David Cone—the team’s value soared to an estimated $180 million, trailing only the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys in all of pro sports.
For this, Labatt could thank the province of Ontario, which had agreed to finance a $150 million stadium in 1985—and kept on writing checks as the cost ballooned to $600 million. A large chunk of the inflated price tag was traceable to a hotel and health club that were tacked on during construction—not to mention the dome’s retractable roof, which at least actually worked, unlike its equally expensive predecessor in Montreal. But the true reason for the staggering cost overruns was an official mystery. Bruce Kidd, the University of Toronto athletics director who was appointed to help investigate the mess, recalls that although there was talk of a public inquiry, “we thought it was more productive to just get out of the damn thing. And the people we had been negotiating with may well have been embarrassed by a public inquiry, and we needed their cooperation.”
As a result SkyDome opened with a $300 million mortgage, payable entirely by the people of Ontario. In its first year, the dome brought in $17 million in revenues—and had $40 million in debt service. (To fully pay off its debts, it was estimated, the dome would have to be in use six hundred days a year.) The dome’s revenues weren’t enough even to pay interest on the debt—meaning the debt was actually growing every year. Realizing it had been stuck with a fiscal lemon, the province sold off SkyDome to private investors in 1994 for a bargain-basement price of $151 million, writing off some $262 million in remaining debt as a loss to taxpayers.
But the dome’s woes were far from over. In 1994 the Blue Jays sank into the cellar for the first time in a decade. The dome, meanwhile, celebrated its fifth birthday, the traditional end of a new ballpark’s “honeymoon period” with fans and tourists, just as a strike wiped out the final third of the baseball season, creating tremendous anger and resentment among fans. The combined effect was enough to drive yearly attendance below three million for the first time in SkyDome history, and there it remained, the once-jammed stadium now half-empty much of the time.
And so, in late October 1998, as the city of Toronto was overseeing the removal of seats from Exhibition Stadium, in preparation for the building’s planned December demolition, a $50,000 check arrived from the Toronto Blue Jays. The ownership of the Jays, who had spent twelve and a half chilly years at the Ex before SkyDome was built, delivered the check along with a startling request: Don’t tear it down; we might want to move back in.
The pundits had a field day—Jays coach Nick Leyva compared returning to the Ex to “riding a bicycle after driving a Mercedes”—but the gambit worked: By the end of November, SkyDome management had agreed to a new lease that would divert an estimated $72 million in dome revenues into the team’s coffers. As this would leave SkyDome itself without enough money to pay its costs, the dome’s management promptly declared bankruptcy.
Even as the dome was readied for sale yet again, this time by the bankruptcy court, the groundwork was being laid for still one more raid on the public treasury. Asked how the dome’s fiscal problems could possibly be remedied, SkyDome CEO Patrick McDougal replied, “We pay in excess of $12 million in [property] taxes a year.… There’s a tremendous amount that would have to change. But one of the major things is the tax situation.”
“Touchdown!”
In the end 1998’s biggest stadium story took place not under the bright lights of the Big Apple or Southern California but in a smallish northeastern city without a big-time professional team to its name. The Hartford Whalers, Connecticut’s only big-league team, had relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1997 in exchange for a new publicly funded arena. (While waiting for their new home to be readied, the new Carolina Hurricanes played two seasons in distant Greensboro’s arena, to some of the most abysmal crowds in recent NHL history.) Tiny Hartford (ranked twenty-seventh among U.S. TV markets) was left with only the women’s pro basketball New England Blizzard and the minor-league hockey WolfPack to fill the twenty-two-year-old Hartford Civic Center. Connecticut’s capital was shut out of the ranks of “big-league” cities—from all indications, for good.
Up in Massachusetts, meanwhile, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots football team, was getting nowhere in attempts to persuade the state to help finance a replacement for his team’s stadium in suburban Foxboro. House Speaker Thomas Finneran insisted throughout the summer that the state would spend no money on construction or land acquisition (he did offer $52 million for highway and infrastructure costs), and when the state house and senate failed to agree on a joint proposal, the stadium bill died. Finneran bragged that his firm line against subsidies would be “the second shot heard round the world.”
On November 19, Connecticut governor John Rowland dropped his own bombshell: The Patriots were coming to Hartford. As part of Adriaen’s Landing, a $1 billion convention-and-entertainment complex that had been bandied about in the state legislature for years, the state would construct a $350 million football stadium. The team’s only contribution: a 10 percent tax on ticket sales for the course of the thirty-year lease.
The announcement of the Patriots move came as a particular shock because Rowland had never once mentioned the possibility during his just-completed reelection campaign. “It would have been the key issue in the race, I think, if we had known prior to the election that John Rowland was already negotiating with Bob Kraft,” says local Reform Party activist Donna Donovan, who became one of the key members of the grassroots activist group Stop the Stadium. According to Donovan, these negotiations had been going on for months or even years, brokered by Jay Malcynsky, a lobbyist with Gaffney Bennett, the state’s largest lobbying firm.
The reaction of the local media was appropriately restrained. “Touchdown!” blared the front-page headline on a special edition of the Hartford Courant printed specially for the occasion. (The paper would later offer framed copies of the front page for sale to its readers.)
“The Connecticut media, especially the Courant and major TV stations, were pretty awful,” says Tom Sevigny of the Connecticut Green Party, who helped found Stop the Stadium. At one point in January 1999, Sevigny recalls, Hartford radio station WTIC ran a commentary attacking the Stop the Stadium leadership, claiming their figures were outdated, their arguments weak. “Half an hour after that commentary, WTIC makes a grand announcement that they will be the home of the New England Patriots in the coming football season.”
The stadium project, meanwhile, was rapidly growing beyond its initial $350 million estimate. An investigation by the New Haven Advocate’s Carole Bass revealed that although the stadium construction cost was capped at $280 million, the additional $70 million in site cleanup was only an estimate—and one that could soar if the former industrial site turned out to be more polluted than expected. The initial estimate also missed $100 million in highways and parking spaces to be provided by the state; the undetermined cost of relocating a steam-generation plant that was still operating on the proposed stadium site; and the Capital Improvement Fund of $115 million (plus an inflation allowance) that the governor had agreed to provide for stadium improvements over the course of the thirty-year lease. I
t also omitted perhaps the most controversial piece of the stadium agreement: a guarantee by the state that the new stadium’s 125 skyboxes and six thousand club seats would sell out for the next ten years. If they failed to do so, the state would reimburse the team up to $17.5 million a year for the lost revenue.
Rowland promptly commissioned frequent stadium consultants KPMG-Peat Marwick to conduct an economic study of the project, one that reported that the state would break even on the deal. The report became a staple of stadium boosters’ public pronouncements—until the consultants turned out to have been under a mandate to design not an economic projection, but a scenario under which the stadium would break even. A Connecticut Office of Fiscal Analysis study reported that the state’s losses could amount to as much as $257 million over the course of the deal.
Meanwhile, as the state legislature had already shut down for the year, Rowland called an emergency session to vote on the stadium package. The day of “public hearings” quickly turned into a fiasco, with stadium advocates (including both Rowland and Kraft) filling the afternoon invitation-only session, and $8-an-hour paid “line waiters” ensuring that much of the evening open-mike session was taken up by speakers handpicked by Gaffney Bennett’s lobbyists. Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, who had been invited by one state representative to testify on the lack of economic benefits of stadiums, sat cooling his heels throughout the entire hearing and was never allowed to take the floor.
The following weekend, the governor and top legislators huddled to hammer out a compromise deal: The state’s suite guarantee would be limited to half the cost of all boxes after the first fifty, and the price of club seats would be lowered from $5,000 to $4,000—which would still be far above the league average. “For the first time today, I can say I’m confident the plan will pass in the Senate,” declared Senate president Kevin Sullivan. “We can tell our colleagues we listened to their concerns.”