Legislators, community groups say Wisconsin should slow the hell down on Brewers renovation spending

Trimming the public cost of Milwaukee Brewers stadium renovations from about $507 million to about $471 million may have won over a bunch of local Democrats including Milwaukee’s mayor and county executive (who would be the ones getting the savings). But as the bill heads to the state senate after passing the assembly, the Wisconsin Examiner wants to use the interviews it’s piled up with stadium subsidy opponents to point out that there are still stadium subsidy opponents:

• Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee), who FoS readers may remember as the guy who had me on his Zoom town hall last week, says there should be no rush to give money to Brewers owner Mark Attanasio given that his stadium lease isn’t even up until 2030, and that it’s “ludicrous” that the Brewers “would be moved to the front of the line at the public trough, when there’s so much else we should be investing in, in terms of public education, in terms of health care, mental health, and then even supplying school meals for students.”
• Sen. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown) joined Larson in calling for an audit of the stadium district’s finances, given that just three years ago the original sales tax surcharge that was paying for the stadium was allowed to sunset because it was supposed to have raised enough money to maintain the building. Said Larson, “If that happened in the University System — [if] they said, ‘Oh, we have enough reserves to last us 10 years,’ and then three years later, they said, ‘It’s all gone, and we need an influx of $500 million before the end of the year,’ politicians would be asking a lot more questions than they are with this.”
• Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) said he opposes the stadium funding because it would provide little return to taxpayers, and could set “the state up to spend more at the end of the lease when it comes time to fund a brand new $1 billion-plus stadium project.”
• A group of local organizations including Citizen Action of Wisconsin, Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, Voces de la Frontera/Voces de la Frontera Action, Kids Forward, and WISDOM issued a statement last week stating that “There is plenty of time to slow down the process, receive full public input, and make full use of the State of Wisconsin’s leverage to negotiate the best possible deal.” The statement also says that MLB and the Brewers are “falsely claiming that this massive public subsidy is economically beneficial to Wisconsin and Milwaukee” and that the city being held up as a possible Brewers relocation target, Nashville, “has no stadium subsidy in place” and “is being used by Major League Baseball as a cudgel in an attempt to force stadium subsidies in multiple cities, including Chicago. Not all of these teams can move to Nashville.”

As for what the opponents would like to see, other than everybody just cooling their damn jets and putting off a deal until there’s more time to discuss it, Larson, Knodl, Nass, and Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) have said they’d support a ticket tax on stadium events as a way to raise money for renovations. Though Larson also called this “a sales tax that’s added on all activities that happen at the stadium and in the parking lot,” which would be a significantly different thing: As I explained at the town hall, ticket taxes are generally thought to end up being paid out of team owners’ pockets — for slightly wonky economics reasons that you can read about here — but that’s not the case with sales taxes on things like buying hot dogs, so a broad stadium sales tax could end up costing Wisconsin taxpayers almost as much as shoveling in money from the general fund.

The state senate takes up the Brewers subsidy bill on Wednesday, so we’ll be able to see then not just what amendments are being offered, but also whether the level of bipartisan opposition is enough to make the bipartisan proponents consider it more than just a speed bump. Given that spending the initial $400 million on the Brewers’ stadium was so controversial that it required a private arm-twisting session by the governor to get the vote of the last required senator, who then became the first legislator in state history to be removed from office by a public recall, it’s a little surprising that $471 million just to zhuzh up the place seems to be less controversial, but we were warned after all.