Hartford Yard Goats opening day is just two weeks away, and Hartford is finally getting ready to welcome its new Double-A baseball team, just one year late after various catastophic construction screwups, and finally getting ready to have money rolling in instead of just going out. Right? Okay, maybe not:
Financial estimates show that professional baseball is a costly investment for Hartford and initial promises of new development surrounding the $71 million stadium have failed to materialize.
Projections show Hartford is expected to operate at a net loss on the downtown north development during the first and second year the stadium is open. The city will lose about $2 million this year and $3.5 million next year.
Uhh, okay, that’s new. And worse yet, the losses aren’t limited to the first two years — those are just the only years that the city has calculated so far, meaning losses could continue indefinitely.
The reason for running at a loss is that construction costs were supposed to be paid for with tax revenue from new development around the stadium, and instead nobody’s been building nothing except for some hotel-room conversions. So this is the same $63 million (plus free land) subsidy we’ve been talking about for more than a year, only counted out one year at a time instead of as a lump sum.
At least the stadium will be open, and Hartford residents will get to drown their sorrows in quality two-levels-below-the-majors baseball without driving 15 whole minutes to New Britain like the used to. I know it’s not much, but take your silver linings where you can get them, you know?
“At least the stadium will be open, and Hartford residents will get to drown their sorrows in quality two-levels-below-the-majors baseball without driving 15 whole minutes to New Britain like the used to.”
But really…who can put a price on *that*?
You can paste this story to at least a 100 plus towns across the USA.
Any idea why losses the second year would go up that much? $2 million to $3.5 million is a huge increase. And since most of these stadium deals use pie-in-sky numbers that are unrealistically rosy who knows how much they’ll truly lose.
A minor league team loses money and the MLB wonders why baseball has the youth in urban areas are skateboarding from the sport. I forecast that we will see the professionalized youth sports bubble implode in the nest 25 years.
“like the used to” should be “like they used to”