As previously noted here briefly, Pawtucket’s new USL soccer stadium is wildly over budget and Mayor Don Grebien says the only way to make it happen is to add $30 million in funding to the $46.2 million Rhode Island is already providing for the project. And now Grebien has a novel idea for how to do it: Redirect $20 million that was supposed to go for infrastructure to support the surrounding development and pour it into stadium construction instead.
Gov. Dan McKee, Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien and developer Fortuitous Partners want to shift most of the public financing for infrastructure, shops and housing around the stadium to the soccer ground itself.
But they need approval from the Commerce Corporation Board of Directors, and after nearly three hours of discussing the plan Tuesday, the board members, all appointed by prior governors, had reservations…
“We are kicking that can down the road,” said Commerce board member Michael McNally, referring to the non-stadium elements of the project. “I am all for this project. It needs to happen…. But we need to know how big the issue is. I am afraid we will end up with the stadium and nothing else.”
Yeah, having a stadium and nothing else would be a problem, since the whole justification for subsidizing a $40 million soccer stadium with $46.2 million in state money was to get developers to add a $360 million mixed-use development as well. (Whether this makes any sense — whether developers interested in a mixed-use development on the site really would have balked without a pricey soccer stadium for an as-yet-nonexistent minor-league team in use maybe 20-25 days a year as the centerpiece — is another story, but that was the stated rationale, anyway.) This is maybe more accurately described not as “kicking the can down the road” but as “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” but whatever the metaphor, it would leave the project with the same budget hole, just for a different part of the project.
The current plan appears to be to go back to the state legislature for more money to fill that new hole. Larry Berman, the spokesperson for House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi (but misidentified in the Providence Journal as “House speaker Larry Berman,” congrats on the promotion, Larry!), said, “After reviewing all the details, Speaker Shekarchi will consider additional resources that may be needed for Tidewater Landing next year,” which is less than a promise but still far from a hard no.
In addition to the $20 million state money shuffle, there’s also an additional $10 million that the city of Pawtucket would be putting in to cover the whole $30 million added cost. Grebien claims this isn’t really a cost because the team will pay $10 million in property taxes on the stadium, which initially was going to be tax-exempt; the Journal points out, however, that the deal with developers Fortuitous to have them pay property taxes included a $15 million tax break, so maybe that should be a cost too? Given that the latest reports are that the cost of the $40 million stadium has gone up from $84 million to $124 million, maybe the best thing is just to treat all numbers as at least partly fictitious anyway, and accept that the only thing we know is that the USL developers want moar.