February 24, 2003
Portland weighs stadium-for-casino plan
Into the fray over where to move the Montreal Expos has stepped the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, a consortium of coastal Oregon Indian tribes that is offering to back the cost of a $350 million stadium if the state lets them build a mammoth casino nearby. As Derek Zumsteg of Baseball Prospectus points out, while it's at least not as ill-conceived as Northern Virginia's pie-in-the-sky economic projections, government-by-baksheesh is still an ugly prospect. (It's also worth noting that casinos, like stadiums, can fall victim to the "substitution effect" whereby casino spending cannibalizes other local consumer spending - so that Oregon's tax base could end up carrying the load of a casino-financed stadium anyway.)
