A bizarre dispute has broken out in D.C. between the Washington Nationals and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority about who’ll pay for subway service after games that run late, with dozens of fans left stranded after one extra-inning game last week.
The squabble first came to public attention after Monday’s rain-delayed game against the Braves went 13 innings, and fans emerged from Nationals Park to find that the Metro had stopped running at midnight, as it’s usually scheduled to do. It turned out that for the past two years, Metro has required entities wanting trains to run late to agree to pay the $29,500 per hour it costs to keep the system open. But while the Capitals and Redskins have agreed, the Nats have balked at signing the deal.
Three days later, city officials revealed that the Nats owners are asking the city to pay for late Metro service — and also additional police and street closures if the team makes the postseason, as expected. City officials are meeting with the team, but have made no promises.
I’m still trying to find out how this works in other cities with train lines that shut down at midnight — it looks like in Boston, they just tell fans that the last train is leaving, so like it or lump it — so in the meantime, let’s leave it to Washington City Paper’s Alan Suderman to put this in context:
Let’s take a moment to consider how insanely greedy the request that taxpayers foot the Metro bill is. This request is coming from a business that wouldn’t even have a stadium to play in were it not for the forced generosity of the District’s corporate taxpayers. To finance the Nats’ stadium, the city had to take out more than $500 million in bonds. To pay for those bonds, the city instituted a gross-receipts tax (an insanely unfair type of tax) on businesses making more than $5 million a year. (That’s not profit, that’s just total receipts. So a business that makes $5 million in revenues but only $1,000 in profit pays the tax, while a company that made $4 million in revenues with $3.9 million in profit would not.)
The city then takes a cut of the utility taxes paid by every non-residential taxpayer (including the same businesses that have ponied up the gross-receipts tax) and puts that toward paying off the bonds. And then the city collects rent from the Nats and has a special sales tax for stadium-related purchases (tickets, merchandise, etc.). LL is awaiting the most recent data, but in past years the tax on businesses and utilities—i.e. businesses with nothing to do with baseball—have ponied up the lion’s share of money to pay the stadium bond, while the club’s rent has paid a fraction of the overall cost. A 2008 projection from the CFO’s office had the gross-receipts and utility taxes bringing in more than $30 million to pay for the bond in 2012, while the Nationals only pay $5 million to lease the stadium.
Paying $29,500 would seem like chump change to a major league baseball club — it’s about what Jayson Werth makes in one at-bat. But then, you don’t get to be the kind of billionaire who owns a major league baseball club without haggling over the bills.
Boxing and horse racing are dead and so would baseball if it was not for all the tax money supporting the sport at every city in this country. They talk about why women leagues dont make it, but if you build a park for a womens team in the middle of downtown with free train service thats half the battle to profit.
Owners are frequently like this, greedy, greedy, greedy. I once had an owner let my friends and I use a box when we were high school students. I had done some work for his brother, and he heard we were going buy general admission tickets to an event. He knew he and his brother (the owner) were likely uninterested in so they generously offered to let us use the suite.
So we go in and there is the nice metal bucket with ice in it and about 20 sodas. Being a bunch of high school kids we drink some (say a dozen) of the sodas. Then maybe a month later I get an invoice in the mail for over $200 for the sodas. I called to see if it was a joke, it wasn’t. Keep in mind I am making around $10/hour doing manual labor and these are just sodas sitting out with no price tag or label.
I couldn’t believe it. The tickets for general admission would have cost maybe $40…
Having been at Fenway when they shut the T down before the game ended, this is a potential major issue. I’ll never forget how few people actually left after that announcement. And then the sight of many people on the sidewalk not knowing how to get home…Hopefully the Nats can resolve this
This can’t be surprising, municipalities give in on point after point and the franchises expect to always get what they want. Not the time to spare the rod and spoil the child, if the others can cough up the operating costs so can the (G)Nats…
Sports stadiums aren’t the only things being poorly subsidized by the taxpayers via our benevolent governments. Transportation is one of the biggest subsidized industries in the world… as if no private organization could do it better or cheaper. I always find it darkly humorous when two government-nursed industries have a quarrel between them that stems from the fact that they’re both government-nursed and thus incompetently managed. When will we learn?
Is anyone actually surprised by this disgraceful request?
It was obvious from the beginning that, like all sports subsidies, the Nats would use their boondoggle stadium windfalls to overpay players (Werth, et al). The only real surprise is that the Nats are actually good, because they certainly haven’t done much in the way of team building until recently (after their multiple high first round picks reached the majors). I’m sure that will be rectified once their draftees hit free agency.
Other than that, it’s been farm the subsidy… and take every opportunity you can to put more of your expenses onto the taxpayer. Business as usual.
Washington should say no. Just as it should have said no when the total requested subsidy for the stadium topped $100m. The only thing subsidies do is inflate the cost of stadia. If the Nats (or the Yankees or…) had had to build using only their own money, you’d see far more modest new facilities being built. They’d still be new, and they’d be nice compared to the old ones. But they’d cost no more than a third of what these gold plated palaces do.
Wes, saying a government is benevolent implies that they are giving away their own money. They are not. The amount they give away does not negatively affect their incomes one iota.
If I could bill someone else for everything I give away (plus a service fee, generally), I’d be a way better tipper….
To answer your last question, I suspect we never will…
John Bladen, my “benevolent” comment was intended entirely as sarcasm. I’m fully aware of the short-comings of the state. Hence my comment. Perhaps I should’ve put the B word in quotations originally, though. Apologies for the confusion.
“Boxing and horse racing are dead and so would baseball if it was not for all the tax money supporting the sport at every city in this country.”
No. There’s plenty of money in the business so that they could build their own stadiums if they had to. Stadiums would be less expensive and salaries would dip a little, but baseball would be fine. It’s extortion, not support for a dying business.
“The only real surprise is that the Nats are actually good, because they certainly haven’t done much in the way of team building until recently (after their multiple high first round picks reached the majors).”
That’s a little harsh. MLB ran the Expos into the ground during the days of league ownership so that the Nats’ owners may have inherited the worst farm system in the history of baseball. They rebuilt that farm system before spending the big bucks on free agents. Plenty of local fans complained about the team not spending sooner, but they did it the right way. (Too much Redskins influence around here. Folks don’t understand that you can’t turn around a baseball team as quickly as a football team.)