Field of Schemes

Archives

Older Entries

January 01, 2006

The Top Ten Dumbest Reasons to Build a Stadium of 2005

The annual Dumbest Reasons to Build a Stadium awards return this year from hiatus, and we couldn't have picked a better year to do it: The last 12 months have featured a cornucopia of dumb reasoning, lame excuses, and bizarre explanations for why taxpayers should be spending public dollars on private sports facilities. Our Dumb Reason cup runneth over so much, in fact, that this year we present not just the usual top ten list, but an additional "honorable mention" category of those officials who were almost, but not quite, dumb enough to make the cut.

10. PENNIES FROM HEAVEN
Minnesota Star-Tribune columnist Jim Souhan wrote of plan for a $478 million Twins stadium: "The deal is proportionate. Twins owner Carl Pohlad will pay $125 million. You'll pay less than you leave in the tip jar at Dunn Bros." The actual cost to Hennepin County taxpayers: an average of $320 per resident, or $353 million total. As Minneapolis sports economist Kenneth Zapp later testified before the Hennepin County commission: "For about 40 percent of what you propose to spend, you could buy the team."

9. AMERICA-HATERS ARE EVERYWHERE
When Cablevision, owners of Madison Square Garden, aired TV ads opposing city funding for a New York Jets stadium nearby in midtown Manhattan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg snapped: "New York City has been picked by the rest of America to represent them and go to the world and say, 'Let us host the Olympics.' And this company says, 'To hell with all of America. We don't care. We've got a monopoly, and we're going to try to keep it.'" When a poll the following week revealed that a majority of New Yorkers opposed the Jets plan as well, Bloomberg waved off the results, saying, "There are always a handful of people that don't want it."

8. WE'D LOVE TO STAY, WE MUST BE GOING
Miami city manager Joe Arriola said the Orange Bowl might be torn down and replaced with a new stadium, if it was discovered to have suffered structural damage from Hurricane Wilma: "We're looking at all our options. We might tear it down and build a new Orange Bowl." The same day, he told reporters the 68-year-old stadium was in fine shape: "I don't believe there's anything wrong. Our engineers said there's nothing wrong." Explained Joe Sanchez, chair of the Miami County Commission: "He just got back from vacation. Maybe he's just jet-lagged or something."

7. ROYAL FLUSH
Asked at a Bronx community board meeting why the New York Yankees can't refurbish Yankee Stadium instead of the public spending $400 million to build a new stadium in a public park, New York City Economic Development Corporation vice-president Hardy Adasko said that in a renovated stadium, it would be impossible to provide "an adequate number of ladies' rooms." Somebody must have forgotten to tell the Boston Red Sox: Recent renovations have gotten the even older and more cramped Fenway Park to the point where team officials bragged it now "leads the league in restrooms."

6. CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
When Washington, D.C. officials realized that expanding a nearby Metro station as planned wouldn't fit in their $535 million stadium budget, they quickly explained that forcing too many people to squeeze through too few turnstiles would be a good thing. "We're trying to balance the desire to move people in and out with the idea that we want people out on the street," D.C. mayoral development director Steve Green explained. Economic development consultant Bruce Hoch told the Washington Business Journal: "Anytime you get a crowd of people standing around with nothing to do, that's good. It's the whole notion of impulse buying."

5. HOMELESS, PLEASE HELP
Florida Marlins president David Samson (see "Lifetime Achievement Award" below) sent a letter to state house speaker Allan Bense that if the state didn't provide $60 million in sales-tax funds toward a new stadium, the team would be left with nowhere to play. "Our landlord has informed us that it will not, under any circumstances, extend or renew the current lease; thereby, giving the Marlins no place to play in South Florida after that time," wrote Samson. "This entire transaction, and in fact the future of baseball in South Florida, hinges on securing a sales tax rebate from the state." Shortly thereafter, landlord Wayne Huizenga informed reporters that, in fact, the expiring lease wasn't a problem: "Let's say for some reason or another they didn't get their thing done and they wanted to stay. OK, fine. That's not the end of the world."

4. WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' DEMOCRACY (four-way tie)

New York Post columnist Eric Fettmann wrote that a voter referendum on a New York Jets stadium would be a copout, since "that's why we choose a mayor - to use his or her knowledge, judgment and experience to make those tough choices. That's what being an executive is all about (besides, it's not as if the issue is [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg's to decide all alone, with no other governmental input)." This after the mayor's office announced a complicated financing plan involving under-the-table payments between the state and city, in order to evade having the city council or state legislature vote.
St. Paul Pioneer Press writer Bob Sansavere on the Twins stadium bill: "These legislators need to suck it up, deal with the Twins' bill, and then head home. And let's not hear that they're concerned about procedure. The stadium bill passed through two committees in the House but hasn't gone through a single Senate committee. [Twins president Jerry] Bell believes that a desire to follow the traditional process could be stalling some legislators from wanting to act and, if that's true, it's a lousy excuse."
At a Bronx "town meeting," Borough President Adolfo Carrion lectured local residents who were booing plans for a new Yankees stadium, "The purpose of a public hearing is for people to ask questions!" A few minutes later, Carrion called the meeting to a close and fled the podium, with at least twenty audience members who'd sign up still waiting to ask their questions.
When several city councils in Minnesota's Anoka County passed resolutions calling for a county-wide vote on raising sales taxes to pay for a Vikings stadium, county stadium czar Steve Novak retorted that the call for a public vote is "an organized diversionary tactic that is not necessarily helpful and useful to the overall debate."

3. THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
Florida Marlins president David Samson on the state legislature's refusal to give his team sales-tax rebates on top of $198-million-plus in city and county funds: "It's disappointing that the city would hold up a sign during the World Series parade that said, 'If we build it, will you come?' and it was merely an election strategy and not a desire to listen to what constituents really want." A poll of Florida voters earlier in the year found that 80% of voters - and 70% of self-identified Marlins fans - were opposed to spending public tax dollars on a new stadium.

2. IT'S ALSO A DESSERT TOPPING
Weston, Florida Mayor Eric Hersh and City Manager John Flint proposed a way for their state to kill two birds with one stone: Build a super-strong stadium for the Marlins, and stock it with emergency supplies so it could double as a hurricane shelter. The Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel reported that the pols would also "suggest President George Bush consider the concept nationally to help sports teams fund venues while avoiding future problems similar to what happened during and after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans." If it occurred to Hersh and Flint that many of the problems in the wake of Katrina stemmed from housing hurricane victims in a sports stadium, they didn't mention it.

1. ON A MISSION FROM GOD
James Caldwell of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, a new community group that has backed developer Bruce Ratner's plan for a Nets basketball arena, called Ratner "like an angel sent from God" and said, "If this thing doesn't come out in favor of Ratner, it would be a conspiracy against blacks." It was later revealed that BUILD's entire $5 million budget for 2005 and 2006 was to be supplied by Forest City Ratner, the Nets owner's development company.

HONORABLE MENTION:

With a new stadium plan before the state legislature, Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad announced, "Now we are committed to stay here." Asked if his team would remain in Minnesota even without a new stadium, Pohlad replied: "That's a question I don't want to answer until I am presented with the question."
Sacramento Kings co-owner Joe Maloof said that spending their own money on an arena would put him and his brother Gavin at a disadvantage when it came time to sign free agents. "What's going to keep us competitive is making sure we sign the best players and you can't do that if you're paying interest on your facility," said Joe. "Interest costs eat you alive."
At a press conference announcing plans to tear down Yankee Stadium and replace it with a newer model across the street, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that the Yankees "have needed a new ballpark for some time" because the current House That Ruth Built "fails to reflect the glamour of the club."
Bloomberg said that without a new stadium, the city would have to spend "hundreds of millions of dollars" on upkeep of Yankee Stadium, but did not provide specifics. A city official later revealed that this was the cost of upgrading Yankee Stadium to be "on par with other first class major league baseball facilities located around the country" - in other words, the cost of renovation, not maintenance.
Yankees president (and former city deputy mayor) Randy Levine insisted at a public hearing, "We love the present Yankee Stadium," but "it's not going to last ten years" - conveniently ignoring the findings of the city's own buildings commissioner in 1998 that "there's no reason why Yankee Stadium can't be around for another 75 years if it's maintained properly."
In pushing plans to spend $687 million on a new Indianapolis Colts stadium, city mayor Bart Peterson warned that otherwise the city could be forced to stop hosting the annual NFL scouting combine, which has an annual economic impact for the city of $3 million. Actual projected annual tax revenue from the scouting combine: $120,000 a year, for a stadium that would cost the public about $40 million a year.

SPECIAL LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Florida Marlins president David Samson appears twice on this year's top ten list, but that's not enough for baseball's most quotable stadium-grubbing middle manager. The stepson of team owner Jeffrey Loria spent early 2004 setting deadline after deadline for finalizing a stadium deal in South Florida - "The deadline is firm, it's not flaccid," said Samson of a March 15 drop-dead date, before later moving it to May 1, then May 6. By the end of the year, he and other team officials had jetted to Las Vegas to meet with local officials, in hopes of throwing a scare into Florida politicians. (Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman later reminisced: "I asked them if they were married, and if I should bring the showgirls along with me.")

Samson picked up where he left off in 2005, first insisting that giving state tax money to a baseball team was not a subsidy, but rather a "rebate"; then he announced that "baseball is no longer assured in South Florida [and] we're going to seriously explore all of our options, including those in other markets," and promptly set off on another trip to Las Vegas. But Samson's true genius is in his bizarre explanations, such as the one he gave to ESPN's Jayson Stark assessing the chances of getting a new stadium built in Miami: "It's like the great Billy Crystal line from 'Princess Bride.' It's mostly dead. And by mostly dead, that means it's somewhat alive. So there are some situations that are still percolating. But you need a stethoscope to hear the heartbeat, because it's so faint."

Samson was careful to omit the next part of the Princess Bride quote: "With 'all dead' there's usually only one thing you can do: Go through his clothes and look for loose change."