by Neil deMause
The following week, Post baseball columnist and longtime baseball-for-DC booster Thomas Boswell would write approvingly that one prospective ownership group, led by former Nixon aide Fred Malek, had “helped convince the mayor that his only chance to get the Expos, and use them as part of his urban development initiatives, was to demand of baseball, ‘What are your exact terms?’ And then stun baseball by meeting them.”
Schools versus Stadiums
The response to the pending arrival of the Nationals was not all red-and-white caps and hosannas. In 2003 a group of city nonprofits and local residents, noting the mayor’s escalating stadium-subsidy offers, had banded together as the No DC Taxes for Baseball Coalition. This group would now do battle with the combined forces of Major League Baseball and their allies in the mayor’s office.
The group’s Web site laid out its credo: “The DC area is the largest metro area without a team and one of the wealthiest in the nation. Major League Baseball should be begging to come here rather than making outrageous demands. The District is struggling to meet basic needs—in environmental protection, education, libraries, health care, and other areas. It should not put in a baseball stadium before other investments that could do a lot more to improve the quality of life for DC residents and businesses.” A poster was plastered along the streets around City Hall featuring the familiar bowtied figure of Mayor Williams handing over a baseball marked “$440 million” to a top-hatted plutocrat, flanked by rundown schools and shuttered hospitals.
Unlike in some other cities, where the overriding concern of local activists was saving a landmark ballpark or fighting tax hikes, in DC the primary concern was how the city was spending its scarce resources. One of No DC Taxes’ founders was Ed Lazere of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, a good-government group focused on spending priorities; another, Chris Weiss, was head of DC Friends of the Earth, not normally a group expected to be at the forefront of a stadium battle. “One of the reasons an environmental group got involved in this,” explains Weiss, “was because our biggest problem is funding environmental initiatives. Like any group, it comes down to ‘where’s the money going?’”
As the mayor and other baseball boosters staged support rallies—one was sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, run by Tommy Thompson, who was Wisconsin governor when Selig ran the Milwaukee Brewers—No DC Taxes for Baseball countered with rallies of their own. “We did a million of them, it felt like,” says Lazere. “What I mainly did was walk through the flyer we did: DC pays for all the costs of construction, all the future capital costs—we essentially paid for everything, including the risk of cost overruns. Meanwhile, MLB got all the benefits—all the revenue from tickets, from naming rights, from parking, from advertising, from TV.” Lazere recalls giving his presentation to his own organization’s board, which included a local labor leader who sat on the pro-stadium metro labor council: “He just turned ashen—he couldn’t believe how bad it sounded.”
Ninety economists from across the country signed on to an open letter to the DC council, stating that the “vast body of economic research on the impact of baseball stadiums suggests that the proposed $440 million baseball stadium in the District of Columbia will not generate notable economic or fiscal benefits for the city.” No DC Taxes for Baseball conducted a poll of DC voters, finding that two thirds were now opposed to using any public funds for a baseball stadium. (A Washington Post poll a few weeks later confirmed this figure and further found that 60 percent of district residents thought the mayor’s plan in particular was “a bad deal.”) Meanwhile, Marion Barry, the former mayor who was one of the three new council members waiting to take office in January, declared, “I’m going to stop this baseball stadium and take the money and spend it on housing and schools”; Barry would later call the deal “the biggest stick-up since Jesse James and the great train robbery.”
“We say to this mayor and some members of the city council that you will not get this stadium when people are sleeping on the streets and schools are crumbling,” declared veteran civil rights activist Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace at a No DC Taxes rally outside City Hall. “You are not going to have an easy way to get this stadium through.”
Still, the stadium deal looked like a fait accompli, largely because of the document that Mayor Williams’s staff and MLB negotiators had hammered out and signed in a matter of days back in September. The Ballpark Agreement, as it came to be known, was a direct challenge to the council’s power of the purse; at every turn, Mayor Williams insisted that that the city had a “contract” with MLB and couldn’t back out now. DC council member Adrian Fenty told the Post, “Where else are they going to go? They’ve already left Montreal. And no one else has a stadium ready,” and called for the city auditor to review the mayor’s financing plan. In response, his pro-stadium colleague Jack Evans, who’d helped broker the Expos deal, snapped: “Are you willing to kill baseball?… We do not play at RFK. It’s not on the table. That’s been negotiated away. It would break the contract.”
Meanwhile, Williams was heavily lobbying fence-sitting council members to back his plan. How heavily was revealed when the Post got ahold of the list of tens of millions of dollars worth of quid pro quos that the mayor had promised to various council members in order to secure their votes for his original stadium proposal. Among them: $45 million in library funding in council member Jim Graham’s district, $40 million for commercial development in Sandy Allen’s district, and $2 million in laptops for high school students and $10 million for a hospital feasibility study in Vincent Orange’s. “Everybody understands that this occurs,” opposition council member David Catania said disgustedly. “What makes it incredible is that they would put it in writing. Everyone realizes votes are bought off, but this takes it to a new level.”
“Our chances, if we had a vote today, are pretty slim,” conceded Lazere in October. Added Fenty: “At this point, I don’t think that there’s going to be enough to stop it. The mayor and some council members are so far out on a limb on this one, almost nothing could stop it.”
A Million Here, A Million There
And then, the bills started arriving. On October 28, as the council prepared for its only scheduled public hearing on the stadium plan, DC chief financial officer Natwar Gandhi unearthed an extra $91 million in road and infrastructure expenses, pushing the total cost to more than $530 million. Council chair Linda Cropp, already a lukewarm backer of the stadium plan, began wavering, suggesting that it might be cheaper to build near the existing RFK Stadium, instead of the site near the Navy Yard that Williams (and MLB) preferred. Meanwhile, angry e-mails continued to pour into city council in-boxes, and raucous stadium hearings dragged on long into the night. At one, an angry resident waved his checkbook at Evans, demanding to know, “How much money does it take to buy back this city council?”
Eight days later, Cropp dropped a bombshell: She would propose a bill to instead build a new baseball facility on land near the existing RFK Stadium, a move that, so she claimed, could save the city an estimated $83 million. The mayor, predictably, was furious. “This is going to blow the thing up,” fumed Williams, adding: “The dream of having baseball back in Washington is at risk.… We have waited 10, 20, 30 years for this and now it is in jeopardy.” Post sports columnist Michael Wilbon called Cropp “a complete fraud” guilty of “bait-and-switch idiocy,” with a detour to lash out at “the stupid junk I read from academics who spin their silly obstructionist excuses on what stadiums don’t bring.”
The following week, unable to secure council support for her plan, yet unwilling to support the mayor’s proposal, Cropp abruptly cancelled a scheduled stadium vote. It looked like the wheels were coming off of the sure thing.
The impetus that turned the council chair from one of those singing with Williams at the September press conference into an opponent of the stadium deal, it turned out, was the swiftly escalating cost of construction. According to Cropp, even the DC CFO’s new estimates were
too low; the true cost, she believed, would be closer to $600 million. A Post investigation soon confirmed these fears: Items like expansion of the Navy Yard Metro station, which could handle only a fraction of the tens of thousands of baseball fans expected to pour into it on game nights, would raise the total bill to $614 million, putting it in the running for most expensive baseball stadium ever built. (DC baseball aide Stephen Green promptly suggested—presumably with a straight face—that overcrowding would actually be a good thing, as it would force fans to walk from the next station and possibly patronize nearby stores and restaurants.)
Cropp seemed determined to propose a counter-plan that she could claim had gained concessions for the District; what that plan was, though, changed almost daily. She soon gave up on the RFK site, instead suggesting a deal that would use $350 million in “private financing” to help pay the stadium’s soaring price tag. This, it soon turned out, was mostly a shell game: It would not be private funding—no developer in their right mind would invest in a project where all the proceeds were already guaranteed to the team owners—but rather that a private developer would pay for construction, and get repaid by the city with tax money from tickets, concessions, and parking. Meanwhile, thanks to a convoluted leasing scheme whereby DC would effectively sell its depreciation rights to the developer (governments can’t take advantage of depreciation because they don’t pay taxes), about $10 million a year in expenses would be deflected from DC area businesses to federal taxpayers. The combined benefits would magically generate about $250 million in tax savings for the developers, without significantly affecting the cost to the District.
When that plan went nowhere, Cropp changed sides again, announcing that she planned to vote for the stadium—and then promptly sent a last-minute letter to her council colleagues offering still more changes to the bill. An initial vote—in DC, council legislation must be approved in two separate votes, two weeks apart—squeaked through by a narrow 6–4 vote, but stadium boosters worried at the three members, including Cropp, who’d ominously voted “present” and asked Williams to go back to MLB to seek more concessions.
The day of the deciding stadium vote finally arrived on December 13, 2004. Cropp had promised the mayor she would vote to approve the deal without major changes, but somewhere during thirteen hours of council debate, she changed her mind yet again. When the vote came, she insisted on inserting a provision to add a last-second clause that at least $140 million in stadium costs would have to be privately financed: “My basic belief is that there are too many public dollars going into this. This will make the mayor seek private dollars more than anything else.”
Cropp Blinks
What had happened soon became clear. A letter from MLB responding to Cropp’s request for modifications to the original stadium deal had made it into the council chair’s hands in the middle of the hearing. When she determined that MLB had essentially refused to make significant concessions, Cropp spent time madly scribbling at the dais—at one point turning over the hearing to council member Jack Evans to run while she consulted with her staff—and finally emerged with the private-financing requirement, stunning Williams, who thought Cropp was an assured “yes” vote.
MLB flew into a carefully stage-managed rage. DuPuy issued a harshly worded press release that declared the council vote to be “inconsistent with [the] carefully negotiated agreement and… wholly unacceptable to Major League Baseball”; in a new twist on the move non-threat, DuPuy wrote: “Because our stadium agreement provides for a December 31, 2004, deadline, we will not entertain offers for permanent relocation of the club until that deadline passes.” A scheduled press conference to introduce the team’s new uniforms was hastily called off; the team store, which had opened just days before, was shuttered; fans who’d bought tickets were encouraged to request refunds. Friendly sportswriters, meanwhile, took aim at the council chair with both barrels: Post baseball columnist Tom Boswell moaned, “The bits of charred ash and shattered fragments that you see falling from the sky are the remnants of the destruction that Cropp wrought,” while at the Washington Times, sports columnist Tom Knott dubbed Cropp “the Grinch who stole baseball” and asked, “Does the W in your middle initial stand for Weasel?”
Cropp blinked. The following week, the council reconvened for its final scheduled meeting of the year—and this time, under Cropp’s direction, approved the stadium by a vote of 7 to 6. The “private-financing” provision was now a suggestion, not a requirement. The only concession achieved by Cropp’s last-minute grandstand play: The city’s costs would be capped at $535 million, plus an additional $50 million for cost overruns. Anything above that, and it was back to the drawing board.
Stadium boosters at the council hearing, many wearing brand-new red baseball caps—the same as those they’d donned three months earlier, but now representing the brand-new Washington Nationals instead of the Senators—broke into another round of “Take Me out to the Ballgame.” On December 29, Mayor Williams signed the stadium bill into law. Four months later, the Nats would take the field at RFK Stadium for the first time. The price had been steep—“Of course it’s not the world’s greatest deal, but that’s what it takes to bring baseball here,” admitted Williams—but Washington DC had its baseball team.
It had all been a bizarre bit of gamesmanship, given that Cropp’s “private-financing” scheme would hardly have been a hardship for baseball; in fact, the option ended up being quietly dropped the following spring after the council belatedly realized it wouldn’t really save the public any money. MLB, meanwhile, had seemingly risked everything: Without DC, it would have been back to the drawing board, and with Virginia not an immediate option either—the state’s stadium authority was set to go out of business on December 31, the same day that the DC baseball agreement would lapse—Selig and DuPuy would have been forced to turn to their motley crew of Portlands and Norfolks. This, most dispassionate observers agreed, was never going to happen; as baseball business writer Maury Brown later observed, noting the $450 million sale price MLB was expecting to fetch for the Expos in the nation’s capital: “If it had been a smaller market, maybe they would have talked about pulling out of there, but there were 450 million reasons that they would never have left DC.”
If it was MLB that had been backed into a corner, though, city officials never realized it. The city council “definitely didn’t think they had any leverage,” says Lazere. Local elected officials, he says, “would say on the one hand that we are the best place for baseball to be—look at our demographics, our population, our income.” Yet—aside from council members Catania and Fenty, who had written in the Post that DC’s frontrunner status should have put it “in a strong bargaining position, a position that should allow it to compete for a team without offering substantial stadium subsidies”—they never thought of this as a hammer for extracting concessions from baseball. “Even the people who voted against the stadium were pretty confident that that could kill the deal, and that’s why it was so contentious,” says Lazere. “The message we tried to get out, that rejecting this deal wasn’t saying no to baseball, it was saying no to this deal, is not a message that ever really connected.”
The Fat Lady Sings
And yet, unbelievably, this still wasn’t the end. In March 2005 city finance chief Natwar Gandhi sent up a warning flag, revealing $46 million more in land costs, bringing the total to within $4 million of the $585 million cap. To many, it was a suspiciously convenient number. Choosing his words carefully, Lazere says: “He clearly was under a lot of pressure, and if he had gone $1 million over the $165 million and killed the deal, it would have been a very hard life for the CFO.”
Then, in December, as the council prepared to debate the Nationals’ lease on their new stadium, the other shoe dropped: Gandhi issued a report that the true stadium cost would be a whopping $667 million, thanks in part to the cost of upgrading the Metro station, rising land values, and especially the soaring price of steel in the wake of Hurricane Katri
na. A DC government source admitted to the Post that the mayor’s office had intentionally low-balled contingency costs in its initial estimates, to make the deal more palatable to the council.
With council support flagging—the No Ballpark Three were in place by now—Williams pulled the stadium lease from the council’s agenda to make what he called “small technical changes,” and never put it back on. DuPuy threatened to take the dispute to binding arbitration, though only the Baseball Agreement, not the as-yet-unsigned lease, contained an arbitration clause—and as the council hadn’t signed the Baseball Agreement, it was unclear if it was even subject to its provisions. Rumors of the Nationals moving yet again started back up, and even talk of contraction, once owners were allowed to bring it up following the 2006 season—though as one unnamed baseball official told the Post, “They’re not going to contract. We’re not talking about the Expos anymore—losing $40 million a year in Montreal. We’re talking about a team worth $450 million, that made $10 million last year.”
The denouement at last came on February 7, 2006, sixteen months and countless council hearings after Mayor Williams had first declared his pursuit of the Expos a success. The council voted 8 to 5 to reject the lease, with the three new members, Marion Barry, Vincent Gray, and Kwame Brown, joining holdover dissidents Jim Graham, Phil Mendelson, Carol Schwartz, David Catania, and Adrian Fenty.
And then, as newspaper reporters filed their stories declaring the stadium dead—Tom Boswell posted a story on the Post Web site that declared that “the interaction between Major League Baseball officials and District politicians was a marriage made in hell” and now “the future of baseball in DC is on the verge of going to the devil”—a knot of legislators huddled in the council chambers with city administrator Robert Bobb. A short while later, they emerged with a stunning announcement: Four council members were switching their votes to endorse the stadium lease, so long as the city’s bond costs were guaranteed not to exceed a final number of $611 million. The vote switchers included all three of the newly elected “anti-stadium” members, plus Carol Schwartz, who the previous winter had said that the then $535 million stadium deal would “give the store away.”