From the moment the federal government started approving COVID relief money and infrastructure spending bills last year, people have been sniffing around to find ways to slice off part of the cash for their own pet projects that aren’t exactly public health or crumbling roads. Iowa is using COVID funds to help build a new Field of Dreams stadium in a cornfield, Augusta is trying to use federal instructure money for its currently unoccupied hockey arena, Oakland is trying to do so for part of its $1.13 billion in A’s stadium costs, and now here comes Dayton, Ohio, which wants to tap $4 million in COVID relief money to upgrade their stadium for the minor-league Dragons — the same stadium, as I recall, that I argued with a U.S. representative from Dayton about when I got to testify before Congress back in 2007 — with, uh, upgraded stuff:
Here are some of the repairs, upgrades and improvements being considered:
– Improve, replace or add water mains
– Improve, replace or add bikeways
– Improve, replace or add parking lots
– Improve, replace or add public facilities
– Replace HVAC system
– Replace the roofing
– Replace field lighting
– Replace the playing field
– Replace the warning track
– Replace drainage systems
– Repair field access ramps
– Upgrading player facilities
– Upgrading IT infrastructure
Some of those items, let’s just say, sound more infrastructurey than others. New water mains? Sure, that’s a legit public expense. Upgraded “player facilities”? That almost certainly includes things like better hot tubs in the training room. Adding “public facilities”? That could be literally anything. That the whole thing is being done “because some elements of the stadium do not meet Major League Baseball requirements,” according to the Dayton Daily News, is an even bigger tipoff, since the entire “MLB requirements” dodge was started by the league as part of its takeover and downsizing of the minor leagues two years ago in order to get minor-league cities to replace or otherwise snazz up their stadiums on pain of having their teams disappeared otherwise.
Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, which is what Dayton is trying to tap for the Dragons stadium, is broadly targeted at “economic recovery,” and oversight as to where the money been going has been fairly spotty. That doesn’t make ARPA a bad idea, necessarily — some of it has gone to things like helping public school kids regain instructional time lost to the pandemic — but, like Donald Trump’s Paycheck Protection Program, when you offer up gobs of public money without a lot of strings attached, that’s great for getting money into the economy quickly, but not so great for making sure it goes to the genuinely needy and not just business owners who are good at filing paperwork. In the grand scheme of things, $4 million for fancier clubhouses and a new warning track for a minor-league baseball team is a drop in the bucket; but where there’s hot tubs there’s entire new districts of road systems and underpasses and berms to protect against sea level rise to aid sports team owners’ private developments, so it’s a bit of a slippery slope.
Fortunately, we have news sites to expose all this like the Dayton Daily News, which included in its story a slideshow it set to generic sportsy music that included images like these:
They’re definitely not making news sites like they used to.