Some updates on yesterday’s news about Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers proposing giving $290 million in state money to the Milwaukee Brewers for stadium upgrades:
- While the new transfer of state funds would indeed amount to $290 million, which would be taken out of Wisconsin’s current budget surplus, there’s still $70 million sitting in the team’s old stadium reserve fund, which was funded 70% by regional sales taxes and 30% by the team. So if Evers’ plan goes through, the Brewers will have access to a whopping $360 million to play with for renovating their 22-year-old stadium.
- The funds will actually go to the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District, which owns the stadium and leases it to the Brewers. But team owner Mark Attanasio will be able to tap into it for “needs ranging from boiler work and safety compliance to new scoreboards or broadcast renovations,” according to the Wisconsin State Journal, which apparently is unaware of both how much boilers actually cost and how false ranges work.
Exactly what Attanasio intends to do with his stadium slush fund is a mystery, but it would have to be something pretty huge: Typical past upgrade spends have been a few million here, a few million there, even for the public stadium district’s biggest expense, the retractable roof.
The one caveat to all this: The Brewers do have a dread state-of-the-art lease clause requiring that they get anything needed to keep their stadium “on a par [with] at least 75 percent” of other MLB stadiums. And while that clause expires with the current lease in 2030, Attanasio has an option to extend it to 2040, so he could continue to drain that reserve fund for another 17 years, and the state would need to come up with money to replenish it.
There’s a caveat to the caveat, though, which is that Attanasio’s only recourse if the state didn’t pay for all the new gewgaws that the guy down the road has would be to break his lease — which would only be useful if he had another place to go. So we’re down to the usual game of chicken, where a sports team owner is using the (typically idle) threat of leaving town to bully government officials into ladling money onto him, and said government officials are giving in because that’s just what they do.
This is the familiar tale of how new stadiums become gifts that keep on giving, as the public provides money to build a new stadium to ensure the team stays in town, only to have the team owner turn around and demand more money a few years later, or else he’ll bolt anyway. Elected officials who foolishly agree to state-of-the-art clauses are in part to blame for this — okay, in large part — but it’s now an essential part of the stadium grift that funnels billions of dollars a year from public treasuries to the pockets of billionaires. The only two real solutions are some sort of national legislation to outlaw these kinds of corporate subsidies, or electing local leaders who will respond to sports subsidy demands with “Just because we’re sports fans doesn’t mean you get a blank check anytime you want.” Neither of those looks to be happening anytime soon, but either is possible, in a better world.
There has to be more to the governor’s desire to manifest these upgrades — or at least the handover of such huge money to a team that hasn’t explained what they would do with it — beyond a simple desire to see his favorite team stay in the state. That doesn’t feel like it’s enough explanation for him trying to manifest this, seemingly without any prompting.
(In line with that, I had not previously conceived of personal sports fandom as a conflict of interest politically, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense…)
I mean, they don’t all have to be sports fans so much as fans of places where they can be invited to throw out the first pitch. It sounds like a dumb way to run a democracy, I know, but all evidence is that this is pretty much how it works.
I love me some caveat on a Ritz.
Ritz?
Triscut or bust!