The Great Worcester Andy Zimbalist Throwdown was so involved that I ended up writing a whole article about it elsewhere, but it ultimately came down to: Zimbalist, the former stadium subsidy skeptic who had started giving testimony-for-hire on both sides of the issue, insisted that Worcester would recoup its expense on a Red Sox Triple-A stadium via taxes generated by new housing that would spring up around it; and pretty much every other economist said it doesn’t usually work that way. “There’s a list a mile long of cities where it hasn’t worked. And there’s a really short list where it has,” said University of San Francisco economist Nola Agha at the time. “Is this development guaranteed? Is it going to happen regardless of if there’s a stock market crash or interest rates go up?”
So how’s that going, you ask, in the three-plus years since the Worcester stadium opened? Welp:
Following news that tax revenues for the independent Polar Park financing account fell short last fiscal year, with the account owing the city general fund $792,000, city councilors had harsh words Tuesday for a developer who appears to be falling short on his obligations to the ballpark district…
“They’ve gotten away with a lot and they’ve put us as a city in a pretty bad position at this point,” District 2 City Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson said.
The city’s stadium fund is supposed to collect property taxes, sales taxes, and building permit fees from development around the stadium, and use it to repay the city’s $146 million in stadium bonds. (It was supposed to be $106 million at the time Zimbalist endorsed the plan, but overruns happen.) But development has lagged as the result of rising inflation — which was largely thanks to Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia and Bill Clinton’s deregulation of financial derivatives, if you’re keeping score — to the point where developers are now turning down the offer of tax breaks so they can walk away from properties entirely.
The good news, if Worcester city manager Eric Batista is to be believed, is that “we remain confident that the DIF will return significant funds to the municipality’s coffers as new development occurs and certain tax agreements expire.” The bad news is: Even that wouldn’t necessarily help ensure that Worcester taxpayers don’t lose their shirts on this deal. If some of the new housing construction that eventually arrives would have happened with or without the stadium; or if it cannibalizes housing construction that might have gone elsewhere in the city if not for the stadium; or if the cost of building schools for all those new residents adds more to the city expense budget than the new taxes add to receipts, then this could still be a money pit even if all the buildings around the stadium are eventually built, just like other TIF districts elsewhere.
The question now: Will the Worcester Telegram issue a retraction for the anonymous chamber-of-commerce-penned op-ed it ran last year (without fact-checking) claiming that Worcester will be different, because reasons? Your guess is as good as mine, and you can probably guess what my guess is.
“Will the Worcester Telegram issue a retraction for the anonymous chamber-of-commerce-penned op-ed it ran last year (without fact-checking) claiming that Worcester will be different, because reasons?”
It could happen. And it could happen that Lucy Lawless is about to ring my doorbell and ask if she can come in and get out of these wet clothes.
I have noticed that the media who basically rewrite press releases about all the benefits the new and publicly-financed stadium or arena will bring seem curiously uninterested in following up to see if it worked out that way.
Here in Detroit, diligent searching has failed to uncover any investigation into whether the public money for Comerica Facility and Ford Field actually had the promised return. The city did give a boatload of tax credits and other benefits to the Illitches for the arena based on promises that might be fulfilled one of these days.