June 27, 2004
"Don't worry - I'm going to build it myself"
Long article in today's Washington Post on Bud Selig's history of stadium-grubbing for his Milwaukee Brewers, and what it likely means for D.C. and Northern Virginia in their quest to land the Montreal Expos. Among the highlights:
- Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, now U.S. secretary of health and human services, refuses to attend games at Miller Park, the stadium he helped get built with taxpayer money, after various run-ins with Selig. "There were just so many misleadings and mischaracterizations," Thompson told the Post.
- Selig originally promised, according to Thompson, "I'm building a new stadium, and I wanted you to know. Don't worry about it. I'm going to build it myself." Almost the entire $413.9 million cost would end up being footed by taxpayers.
- At one point, Thompson appointed Milwaukee Journal CEO Robert Kahlor to chair a stadium task force while he was simultaneously registered as a lobbyist for the stadium issue.
- A recent audit by the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau revealed that annual $3.85 million payments from taxpayers to the Brewers, targeted for stadium maintenance, have instead been used to service $50 million in the team's outstanding debt. (The annual payments had been the final piece of the funding puzzle that effective reduced Selig's contribution to zero.)
- "I would be very, very nervous if I was a taxpayer in the Greater Washington, D.C., area," Wisconsin state senator Michael Ellis told the Post. "Nobody is better equipped to show people how to fleece the taxpayers into building them a new stadium than Allan H. [Bud] Selig. He could write a textbook on how he committed the taxpayers of Wisconsin to build a stadium at no cost whatsoever to the Seligs."
—Neil deMause
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