In case you haven’t noticed by the flood of posts on this site of late, we’re in the midst of a sports subsidy demand boom, with a record number of team owners seeking public money for either new or renovated stadiums and arenas. And that’s been especially the case with baseball, where in the last three years alone we’ve seen: the Cleveland Guardians owner get $285 million for stadium upgrades; the Milwaukee Brewers owner get $471 million in renovation money; the Arizona Diamondbacks owner demand either a new or renovated stadium, they still can’t decide; the Baltimore Orioles owner get $600 million in stadium renovation money plus $150 million in tax breaks and development rights plus a potentially bottomless pool of money for future upgrades; the Oakland A’s owner get $600 million toward a new stadium in Las Vegas; the Kansas City Royals owner push for $1 billion in public money for a new stadium; the Tampa Bay Rays owner demand $1.5 billion in cash and tax breaks and discounted land; and the Chicago White Sox owner demand $2 billion toward a new downtown stadium project.
And now, the Riverfront Times has discovered, we can add another baseball baron to the list: Bill DeWitt Jr., owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, whose son and team president Bill DeWitt III tells the alt-weekly that the family’s 18-year-old stadium, built with the help of about $130 million in state funds, county forgivable loans, and city tax breaks, will need a “significant capital infusion” in two to five years, and guess who’ll get to pay for it?
It’s “too early” to detail what the improvements would look like, he says. “Our goal would be to handle whatever back of the house things need to happen and to fix [them], as well as probably create some cool and interesting new features for fans.”
The owners would likely seek public money for that, he adds.
When asked how much such a project would cost, DeWitt III says it would likely be in a similar range to recent Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles projects. Those are $500 million and $600 million taxpayer investments, respectively.
DeWitt III didn’t go into detail about how the money would be raised, likely because he and his dad haven’t figured that part out yet; and likewise didn’t go into detail about how they expect to pin the tab on taxpayers when their lease runs through 2041 and prohibits them from moving during that time. But this is clearly a trial balloon to anchor expectations of how big a public tithe the DeWitts are expecting, so that if the ultimate ask gets whittled down to, say, $450 million, it looks like a relative bargain for taxpayers.
The Riverfront Times article on this (backed by the River City Journalism Fund, because that’s the only way serious journalism happens these days) runs 4,600 words, and includes in-depth look at the history of Cardinals stadium shenanigans, including tidbits about:
- The DeWitts succeeded in getting public money for their current stadium by threatening to move across the Mississippi River to Illinois.
- Though the DeWitts claim to have paid 90% of the construction costs of that stadium, stadium cost expert Judith Grant Long of the University of Michigan says it’s more like 79% — and that’s before counting city tax breaks, infrastructure costs, or spending on municipal services, or public subsidies for the stadium’s accompanying Ballpark Village.
- That Ballpark Village, which was supposed to “revitalize downtown,” has instead helped lead to the closure of several local restaurants by creating new dining establishments that competed with them for fan spending, including the two-story Cardinals Nation bar/restaurant owned by the DeWitts.
And more! It’s well worth a read, for a reminder of how journalism can still work, at least when you have a crowdfunded nonprofit giving reporters the time to do actual research.
As for why the surge in recent baseball stadium subsidy demands, which will reach one-third of the league when the next owner shows up with their hand out — I’ll take a stab and guess the Pittsburgh Pirates, though there are lots of contenders — there are a bunch of factors: lots of teams with stadiums built in the ’90s and ’00s with soon-to-be-expiring leases, a feeding frenzy to get subsidy deals done before MLB expands and takes two move-threat target cities off the table, and just the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses effect you get when some rich guys get suitcases full of public cash and their frenemies see it and decide they should get the same. And so long as owners’ demands are successful — and most of them have been, though the jury’s still out for the Royals, White Sox, and D-Backs — there’s no reason this trend is going to stop, ever. Get comfortable, you and I still have a lot of quality time to spend together over the coming years/decades/centuries.
St Louis is an independent city, not within a county. Most of the people who would use the “cool and interesting new features” likely reside outside the city limits, so the mayor and city council have every fiscally rational reason to tell the team to pound sand. I wonder if the state government has any levers to force the city to pay money. I could picture the governor signing a bill that turns state money earmarked to public schools and transit over to stadium renovation.
Jeremy: Can you explain how an independent city like St. Louis achieved that status please? I’ve never heard of this! The local county is all around them but they’re not in the county? Wild…..
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/the-great-divorce-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-city-county-split-2594707
Thanks Jake!
Going to be a new governor very soon as well as the current one is about to be term’d out…https://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_gubernatorial_election,_2024
Re: infrastructure costs
I’m happy to be disabused of the notion, but it seems like removing freeway ramps, building roads, and moving utilities are legitimate government functions when someone is building a multimillion-dollar project. I guess it could be argued that if your project includes wrecking the place, you should also be responsible for fixing it?
It’s improvements to the property. If I buy a house, I don’t typically get to demand that the government build a new highway off-ramp to make it easier for me to get there, while still paying the same price that I would have when it was a longer drive.
But 30K-40K people don’t visit your house regularly (or do you live in a transit station?).
Make it a chocolate fondue fountain, then. Or a space elevator. Whatever the “infrastructure,” it’s not something all taxpayers are entitled to by nature of living there, making it a special subsidy.
Improvements to the property or access? I agree improvements that benefit one specific property owner shouldn’t be handed out for free, but infrastructure like off-ramps are used by thousands of people who don’t live or work in the area.
A perfect example here was the highway off-ramp that Massachusetts built for the Patriots’ stadium that is only used by season ticket holders. It’s a public amenity technically, sure, but…
Howard Terminal in Oakland was going to get around $800 million in infrastructure spending that was almost entirely ways for people to more easily get around highways and train lines that block off the planned development. None of that would have done much good to people elsewhere in the city, and would have taken away from the city’s ability to pay for services for them.
One of the costs that is “hidden” to most of us when we buy property (be it residential or commercial) is the cost of providing municipal services to the parcel. It may be tempting to think that a franchise owner buying land for a stadium is entitled to have it serviced by ‘the public purse’ in the same way your or my home is serviced.
However, if you look at the differential in price between raw land (which almost no-one not in a commercial or industrial construction business/project ever buys) and fully serviced lots the contrast is quite striking.
Obviously, it varies by location and municipality, but where I live a standard (0.15 to 0.25 acre) residential lot retails for anywhere between $25k and $100k. The price for municipal land in a raw state (unserviced, no area structure plan or subdivisions/lot boundaries) is typically under $20k per acre – roughly 20 times the raw land price.
Most municipalities sell land on a cost recovery basis (or more commonly sell the land to a development company that does the work and resells fully serviced lots/completed homes at a profit), so the difference in price is what the engineering, procurement, construction and completion costs add to the raw land.
It may seem impossible that it could cost this much to service land. It certainly did to me the first time I did any of it. The last time (more than a decade ago) installing shallow services cost about $12k, the land surveying cost about $3500, and the cost of constructing curb/gutter/sidewalk was a little over $2500 per lineal yard. We were probably a little lucky in that both the survey and concrete crews were already working in the area (an issue for rural and small communities, not so much for cities who have these contractors close at hand).
So for a lot with 60′ frontage (to make the math easy), that’s just under $70k for servicing and surveys (not counting the cost of the road adjacent to your land).
Whether landowners know it or not, they pay these costs as part of their property purchase.
I don’t see why a billionaire sports owner should be treated any differently.
Demand money?
Where are the teams going to move?
I recall players association president Marvin Miller worrying about the impact of free agency if every player were to become a free agent at the same time. That would be a great option for cities receiving financial demands from MLB teams.
A’s owner Charles Finley suggested this, when the MLBPA was gaining traction. (I vaguely recall this from Miller’s autobiography, but…)
I wonder if the owners dismissed this idea, due to it coming from Finley, as he wasn’t the most popular owner.
Can we add end-stage capitalism to the list of reasons why the flurry of recent demands?
Sooner or later the music stops (even if it stops after civilization collapses) for we billionaire sports owners. I mean, when all the poor & middle class people have died, not only can’t you make them work in your factories, buy overpriced tickets and beers at your vanity project sports ventures, or get severe brain injuries as employees in contact sports (not that there is any causality there at all as I’m sure you all know), but you can’t use their tax dollars to build infrastructure and monuments to yourself either.
Being a white billionaire isn’t as easy as some of you might think. It requires vigilance and vision.
If the lease does not expire until 2041, why not respond as Jeremy suggests in the 1st post comment- pound sand.
Or my personal favorite when Michael Corleone tells Senator Pat Geary: “My final offer is this: Nothing.”
For once, the team has absolutely no leverage here.
1. The St. Louis Cardinals are not, under any circumstance, leaving the St. Louis market, which is all most fans care about anyway.
2. They could threaten to move to a different area around St. Louis or the Metro East but that would massively devalue the Ballpark Village businesses that the team also owns. By investing so much in that venture, they kind of anchored themselves downtown.
Tell DeWitt to pound sand. In this case, the owner’s “or else” doesn’t have anything behind it.
All true, but the Yankees were never leaving the Bronx either and look how that turned out.
I knew it was only a matter of time before they demand money after the WSJ published last week how downtown was a nightmare, empty, deserted.
Did I miss the link to the actual Riverfront Times story?
I, uh, thought you would enjoy a scavenger hunt?
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/as-cardinals-seek-more-public-money-for-busch-stadium-experts-balk-42342850
Sorry about that — have now added the link above where it was meant to go.
Neil: Do you have any thoughts on the guys (from the Last Dive bar as I understand it) who are trying to trademark the Las Vegas Athletics name?
I know trademark laws/rights are often based on priority/first come first served, but I wonder if this one has a chance???
Full credit for thinking outside the box, but ????
Didn’t one of the attempted trademarkers themselves say it was a longshot?
I think your final line says it well.
so…. you’re sayin’ there’s a chance….
“St Louis is an independent city, not within a county.”
St. Louis County still contributes to a lot of projects in St. Louis City. This is a moot point. St. Louis County right now is giving money to upgrade the Rams old dome in St. Louis city.
With that being said the Cardinals will probably get whatever they ask for. The Cardinals are the main attraction that brings people to Downtown STL. Most of the major St. Louis corporations are most in St. Louis county. The area already took a big hit with the Rams leaving.
The backstory as reported by the Riverfront Times is very unedifying. Bill DeWitt Jr. has a history of behaving like a pig burrowing its snout in the public trough at every opportunity. Cincinnati, Dallas/Fort Worth, Baltimore, now St. Louis.
This latest government subsidy for sportsball wouldn’t be in the spotlight except the Kansas City subsidy was routed at the polls. The situation in St. Louis is markedly worse: Majority non-white city with racist police, lorded over by MAGA politicians on the state and federal level.
Here’s hoping smart people in both city and county use the revelations about DeWitt to send the Cardinals subsidy down to defeat.