December 15, 2004
D.C. council approves stadium, maybe, sort of
After all the twists and turns that the Washington, D.C. stadium controversy has taken, we should have known it wouldn't end simply. Last night, after 13 hours of contentious debate over what was to be the final vote on building a publicly funded stadium for the Washington Nationals (nee Montreal Expos), the D.C. council voted 7-6 to approve the $580 million stadium bill.
Except that half an hour earlier, council chair Linda Cropp had thrown the entire proceedings into confusion with an unexpected amendment that would require $140 million - half the construction cost of the stadium itself, not counting land and infrastructure - to be privately financed, or else the stadium would not be built. Cropp, who held the deciding vote in the tightly divided council, said she'd vote against the overall stadium bill unless her amendment was approved; the council then voted 10-3 to add the private-money provision, with hard-line pro-baseball councilmembers Jack Evans, Harold Brazil and Vincent Orange the only dissenters.
As to what this "private financing" provision actually means, no one seems exactly clear. Previously Cropp had proposed a non-binding option that meant only private financing, not private funding; while a private investor would have borrowed the money, it still would have been paid off by using public tax revenues. Last night, though, Cropp seemed to imply that she was now seeking private funds, not just private financing, saying: "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."
Still, the uncertainty surrounding Cropp's amendment had MLB officials scurrying to decide their next move. Nationals/Expos president Tony Tavares told the Washington Post that a planned event to introduce the team's uniforms this afternoon would likely be cancelled. Media speculation ran rampant about what MLB would do now, with some suggesting the team would play in Washington for 2005 while baseball re-opened the city search process. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell, meanwhile, threw a full-on hissy fit in today's paper, charging that: "The question of whether baseball will now jerk its franchise out of Washington is not a question at all. It is a foregone conclusion."
Evans, who's spearheaded the stadium push on the council, seemed not to know how to react himself, first lashing out at Cropp, "Without that guarantee [of a publicly funded stadium], I don't see baseball staying here," and suggesting that "we'll have until the end of the year to change this" provision. (The council has another meeting scheduled for next Tuesday.) By this morning, though, Evans was telling WTOP news radio that the private-financing provision is "not by any means a deal-breaker" and "it's not something we can't deal with as we go forward." As usual with this whole Expos-to-D.C. saga, only one thing's for sure: No one knows.
