Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  Two days later, the stadium bill easily passed both houses of the legislature. The revised lease, Rowland announced, would cut the state’s annual guarantee from $17.5 million to $13 million. In cutting the price on club seats, Rowland and Kraft had also reduced how much money the ticket tax would generate to pay off the stadium bonds—but if anyone noticed, they never brought it up on the floor of the legislature.

  The Peat Marwick studies and the revised seat guarantee had provided valuable political cover for legislators who wanted to switch their votes—but from all accounts, it was good old-fashioned arm-twisting that got the job done. A state representative from Mansfield, according to Sevigny, later told a public meeting that “the day of the vote, at around noon, they had enough votes to defeat it. And by three o’clock that afternoon, things totally turned around. She said there was just so much arm-twisting and threatening going on—people saw their political careers going down the toilet, so they held their noses and voted for it.”

  But if the backroom deals were effective in ramrodding a stadium bill through, they also awakened public outrage at the inability to have a say on the proposal. As 1999 dawned, the newly formed Stop the Stadium’s phones were ringing off the hook with people offering to help collect a hundred thousand signatures calling for repeal of the stadium bill.

  “I think the opposition will just get louder and louder,” said Sevigny in early March. “The low-income housing assistance is being cut again for the third year in a row. A report just came out that thirty to thirty-five schools in Hartford alone are not up to safety codes. They have leaky roofs, no heat; kids are wearing coats all day in school. Where’s the priorities here?”

  The stadium debate rumbled on into the spring of 1999, until April 29, when Rowland and Kraft huddled in the governor’s office in Hartford amid reports that environmental problems could delay the stadium’s opening until the year 2003. Emerging from the meeting to meet the press, a grim-faced Kraft would say only, “Our goal has always been to play in a new stadium in downtown Hartford in the year 2002.” Rowland reiterated: “My goal and the Patriots’ goal is to open the 2002 season here in Hartford. As I’ve said so many times before, it will happen. Failure is not an option.”

  The next afternoon, even as the Hartford Courant’s front-page headline declared “Kraft, Rowland Reassure State Deal Is Still Alive,” the word came down: The deal was officially dead. In place of the $374 million-plus promised by the state of Connecticut, Rowland was set to return to Massachusetts, where political leaders were finalizing a plan to provide $70 million in roads and sewers for a new stadium to be built by Kraft in Foxboro with his own money. “That’s bankable money the team could count on for the next thirty years,” sports consultant Marc Ganis said of the Connecticut package. “The idea of walking away from that without having another deal firmly in hand is unbelievable.”

  The reasons for Kraft’s stunning turnaround were many. Difficulties with relocating the steam plant, concerns about pollution, and a miscalculation that might have forced one corner of the stadium to be suspended over a major highway all helped convince the Patriots’ owner to take a lesser deal in Massachusetts. Possibly more important: In March NFL owners began putting their own pressure on the Patriots to reconsider their move to Hartford, which would have left the league without teams in three of the largest TV markets in the country. To help ease the pain of staying in Massachusetts, the league offered Resolution G-3, a new incentive plan for teams in the nation’s top six media markets (Boston is sixth): guaranteed loans from the NFL itself to pay up to half the cost of any new stadium. Kraft himself chaired the league finance committee that introduced the G-3 plan.

  Still, the Stop the Stadium activists take some credit for helping derail Hartford’s stadium push. “I really believe that if we hadn’t forced disclosures about all the loose ends in this deal, it might not have fallen apart the way it did,” says Donovan. “I think everyone who carried our petition or signed a petition can take some credit for getting Connecticut back on track.”

  What the Future Holds

  In all, public financing proposals for sports facilities won five and lost four in 1998, with several more contests headed into overtime as the year drew to a close. Along the way, several new economic studies had confirmed the findings of earlier researchers, uncovering no indication of any economic boost to cities that had built new stadiums.When the city of Phoenix attempted to counter these studies with its own report on increased sales tax revenues around the new downtown Bank One Ballpark, it was discovered that at current rates these would fully pay off the stadium’s $253 million public cost in a mere 358 years.

  Yet if the tide had turned, sports team owners had apparently not gotten the message, for their demands were only growing larger: Hartford’s failed offer to the Patriots would have been among the most lucrative deals in history but still paled in comparison to the billion dollars-plus being proposed for stadium projects in New York, Boston, and Mesa, Arizona. And by early 1999 the list of stadium suitors had grown to include the St. Louis Cardinals (stadium built 1966, renovated 1996), the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (stadium built 1990, renovated 1998)—and the Chicago White Sox, whose owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, began lobbying for a new ballpark just eight years after his new Comiskey Park uprooted a neighborhood at $150 million in public expense.

  “I used to be a lot more idealistic,” says San Diego’s Chris Michaels while awaiting word from the city about what he hopes will be a fair offer for his home and studio. “The way the world really works is that cities do break the law, when given the opportunity to do so. They’re not always working in the interests of the people that voted them there. I really see how when you get people with money and power together, each on their own they’re nothing, but together they can really do terrific things or scary things.”

  “I think people have been kicked around so much,” says Connecticut’s Donna Donovan. “I think we have like a battered-citizens syndrome going on in this country, where people sort of lay back and say, ‘Well, he promised not to do it again.’ They feel like they are powerless to change things. But once you get to a certain point where ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore,’ if you give them the information, and you give them the vehicle for change, and you give them hope that they can effect change, they are inspired and they pack their bags and they walk out the door and they don’t turn back.”

  Notes

  1. The Spurs ultimately got their new arena in 2002, when the $175 million SBC Center opened, funded primarily by county hotel and car rental taxes.

  13

  The Art of the Steal Revisited

  We don’t want a new building just to have a new building. We would just stay where we are. If we’re using the revenue to build the building, then we’re not getting the revenue, and we’re right back where we started, and why do we have a new building? —Orlando Magic vice-president Cari Coats

  If I set you up in a business, and give you the key to the door, and you don’t have to pay rent, and you get to keep 100 percent of everything that gets in the door, it’s much more lucrative. Excuse me for being a cynic, but that’s what this game is all about. —Former Orlando Arena director John Christison

  The million-plus readers of the Beijing Evening News must have gotten quite a shock one May day in 2002 when they opened up the paper to read that the U.S. Congress was threatening to move out of Washington if it didn’t get a new Capitol building. “If we want to stay competitive, we need to upgrade,” the article quoted House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt as saying. “Look at the British Parliament. Look at the Vatican.… Without modern facilities, they’ve been having big problems attracting top talent.” If a new building with more bathrooms and better parking wasn’t erected, the article said, then U.S. lawmakers were prepared to pack up and move to Memphis or Charlotte.

  The story, of course, was a joke: An inattentive Beijing Evening News editor had lifted it verbatim from a U.S. newspaper, wit
hout noticing that the paper he was plagiarizing was the satirical weekly the Onion. That his bosses utterly failed to get the joke—the Evening News editors later ran a brief correction bemoaning how “some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money”—is a sign of just how prevalent these sorts of “if you build it, we won’t go” threats had become by the dawn of the twenty-first century.

  Since the previous edition of Field of Schemes was published in 1999, the case against putting public funds into private sports facilities has only grown stronger. The piles of economic studies showing that sports facilities are a net drain on public coffers have now grown into towering stacks. With the end of the economic boom of the 1990s, and once-flush city and state coffers drained, legislators can no longer blithely write checks for $300 million without having to worry about fiscal impact. Popular opposition to stadium deals has mounted, forcing teams to step up campaign spending to secure passage of stadium referenda. And after a decade-plus of breakneck construction, the list of teams left without new homes has grown shorter and shorter.

  Yet the stadium juggernaut has rolled on. In Minnesota, where the Twins and Vikings were still making do with the more-than-two-decade-old Metrodome (and complaining about it every step of the way), the two teams kept up their pressure on the state legislature, even as the combined price tag rose to $800 million. New York City, long a holdout in the stadium chase, was making up for lost time with a staggering $3.6 billion in proposed stadium projects, about $2 billion of which would be paid for by taxpayers. And even some beneficiaries of the current stadium boom simply went back to the head of the line for more subsidies, with the owners of the Chicago White Sox and Seattle Sonics leading the way in demanding additional money to rehab or replace facilities that were built or renovated barely a decade earlier.

  Meanwhile, new cities rushed in to fill the stadium vacuum: Las Vegas, Memphis, and other smaller metropolises eager to attain “major-league” status at whatever the cost. When the New Orleans Hornets, only recently arrived in Louisiana after bolting Charlotte for a new-arena deal in 2002, were displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Oklahoma City jumped in with an offer of free rent; prepaid arena operations; housing, office, and training-camp costs; and a promise to reimburse the team up to $10 million if it fell short of the previous year’s profits—all just to be the temporary home of a team that had finished dead last in its conference the year before.

  Every year, it seems, there are predictions that the stadium boom has run its course—either because local officials have gotten tougher about resisting team demands, or because the pool of franchises seeking new homes is destined to soon dry up. And every year, they’re proven wrong as another crop of new buildings breaks ground. In part, it’s because teams have been able to keep finding virgin territory, or at least newly elected political leaders with short institutional memories. And nearly two decades into the stadium boom, they’ve learned that the most important ingredient is patience: Unlike on the field of play, it takes only one win to bring home the grand prize, with a payday big enough to make up for an awful lot of past losses.

  Take Minnesota. In 2006, after eleven years of beating his head against public opposition, Twins owner Carl Pohlad finally succeeded in winning nearly $400 million in public stadium funds, after portraying the team’s requested 0.15 percent sales tax hike as merely “three cents on a $20 purchase.” (It might just as fairly be called $320 per man, woman, and child in Hennepin County, but stadium boosters were careful not to frame it that way.) “In ’97 we shut down the capitol switchboard, there was so much opposition,” recalled state senator John Marty. But since then, “stadium fatigue” had built up, both among residents tired of the fight and among legislators who just wanted the issue to go away. “We’re all sick of the issue, so one of the lobbying efforts that’s very effective is ‘the only way this issue will ever go away is if we pass it,’” said Marty. At the same time, Ricky Rask, the reverend who had spearheaded the opposition that had flooded the state capitol switchboard in 1997, was ill with a brain tumor when the final Twins stadium debates began, and never got involved.

  The Twins executives, meanwhile, with the lure of a multimillion-dollar payday, didn’t get fatigued—nor did the $15 million worth of lobbyists they hired over the years to talk up their stadium plan. “Minnesota rightly has a reputation of being a cleaner state than most, and I’ve never suggested that the problem with the legislature is vote-buying,” said Marty. “The problem is they don’t buy votes, they buy access and goodwill. If I give you a thousand bucks, you don’t have to know anything about me—you’re probably going to like me a little better, even if it’s subconsciously.”

  In the waning days of the Twins’ stadium campaign, Marty noted, two polls of Minnesotans found more than 2–1 opposition to spending public money on a baseball stadium. “Because of lobbying, most legislators don’t believe that,” he said. “‘This may be true statewide, but not in my district.’ Because they spend all day talking to the lobbyists, the Twins executives; the teams are constantly running ads on television, at the games, telling people ‘contact your legislator.’ So they are convinced the public opinion is split, and angry on both sides, but basically favors this.” The incessant lobbying, he said, “warps our perspective of what’s going on in the world.”

  Marty noted grimly that Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor, asked if once the Twins and Vikings got new homes he’d be next in line, would say only that it wasn’t politically prudent to mention that yet. “As soon as we pass these stadiums, give them two years. They’ll be here,” Marty predicted.

  The Twins’ ultimate success, after years of Minneapolis’s being the textbook example of a city holding firm against stadium-subsidy demands, is a sign that team owners have become expert at rotating through the playbook that we laid out back in chapter 4—if the carrot of an “economic renaissance” doesn’t sway the populace, perhaps the fear of losing their team to a more free-spending municipality will do it. On the rare occasion that some team exec does dream up a new twist on an old tactic, you can practically hear the pen scratches as the rest of the sports industry rushes to take notes.

  Home-Field Disadvantage

  The first weapon in the stadium arsenal remains “obsolescence”: The old place has been around for years, and who would begrudge us a new one? What has changed markedly is that “old” doesn’t mean what it used to.

  When the new-stadium boom first began in the 1980s, the shelf life of a sports facility was generally considered to be thirty to forty years. Now, that seems positively ancient, as buildings barely out of their teens are routinely marked for the wrecking ball. In 2004, Toronto Blue Jays general manager J. P. Ricciardi declared the then fifteen-year-old SkyDome to be “obsolete,” saying the artificial turf field “may have been state of the art fifteen years ago, but it’s old now” and the fifty-thousand-seat capacity was “too big for baseball now.” Added Ricciardi of the building that cost Ontario taxpayers a then record $600 million in 1989: “If the dome’s open and it’s a nice night, it’s doable, but that’s about it.”

  For basketball and hockey arenas, the life cycle has become even shorter. Of the new arenas opened for NBA expansion teams in 1988 and 1989, the Miami Arena was abandoned in 1999, and the Charlotte Coliseum in 2005; Orlando Magic owner (and Amway billionaire) Rich DeVos has bitterly complained for years that the Orlando Arena’s twenty-six skyboxes and built-in TV studio are inadequate, and demanded that taxpayers pony up for a $250 million replacement. By the early years of the twenty-first century, both the Sacramento Kings’ Arco Arena and the Milwaukee Bucks’ Bradley Center (each opened in 1988) had been declared hopelessly antiquated as home courts. And when the Vancouver Grizzlies moved to Memphis in 2001, it was contingent on that city’s constructing a replacement for the Pyramid—built way back in 1991.

  The problem isn’t that modern-day engineers are somehow unable to construct buildin
gs to last. Rather, sports stadiums and arenas are undergoing a sort of planned obsolescence. The breakneck pace of new sports facilities, each with more revenue-generating luxury suites and ever-vaster concessions concourses, has left owners scrambling faster and faster to keep up with the Joneses.

  “Some of it is just ego: The guy down the street’s got a bigger, better, faster, flashier arena than I do, which may be one or two generations ahead, and therefore I want one too,” former Orlando Arena director John Christison observed in 2001 of the arena class of 1988-89. “When those buildings all came off the construction pallet, they were pretty much state of the art. And they’re still damn fine buildings. The question is, do they generate enough income for the teams?”

  Washington State University sports economist Rod Fort was more blunt. “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year. It’s an expensive way for him to get out of a lease—but not expensive to him.”

  Faking a Move

  Between 2000 and 2006 the list of teams that dropped hints they’d hightail it out of town unless their demands for a new home were met grew to include the Buffalo Sabres, Florida Marlins, Vancouver Grizzlies, Minnesota Vikings and Twins, New Orleans Saints, Sacramento Kings, Pittsburgh Penguins, Montreal Expos, Oakland A’s, Kansas City Chiefs, Seattle Sonics, Charlotte Hornets, San Diego Chargers, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, and innumerable soccer teams and minor-league baseball and hockey franchises. Of those, the only teams that actually moved were the Expos, Grizzlies, and Hornets—but several of the others had positioned themselves to get new or upgraded facilities at home.

  Occasionally, it’s still team owners themselves levying the warnings, usually in the form of the non-threat threat. “We’re not a threatening type of ownership,” Bob Vander Weide, president of the Orlando Magic (and son-in-law of Rich DeVos), said when a new arena was on the legislative agenda. “But if another opportunity came along, we’ve got to look.” Seattle Sonics (and Starbucks Coffee) owner Howard Schultz insisted, “We want to stay in Seattle. We would think it would be tragic if we had to leave,” mere weeks after he said he’d seek “other alternatives” if the state legislature didn’t come through with $200 million to renovate KeyArena. “If there’s no renovation of the sports complex, one or both of these franchises will be gone,” Kansas City Chiefs team chairman Clark Hunt told local officials in 2005; county sports authority chief Mike Smith promptly told reporters, “It’s got me real nervous. I would not take it as a threat but as a message.”