Two very good arguments against the PawSox caper
Here are two tightly written pieces that tear apart
the arguments for public funding for the proposed move of the PawSox from
Pawtucket (where they belong) to Providence (where they don’t).
The first, by Beth Comery of our sister blog, the
Providence Daily Dose, looks at how the proposal will totally screw up more
well thought out plans for the land where the PawSox owners want the taxpayers
to fund a new stadium.
The second by Dan Lawlor, first published in RhodeIsland’s Future, reviews the critiques by an array of economists on the lousy
job sports stadiums do on the economies of their host cities.
Here’s Beth’s piece:
NO! To Riverfront Stadium Site
By BETH COMERY
This should be an absolute deal-breaker. Opposition
to the stadium scheme has been largely focused on the taxpayer money grab — and
rightly so — but the owners’ choice of the riverfront location has been hugely
problematic as well.
Now comes Kate Bramson’s piece in the Sunday ProJo —“Proposed PawSox stadium in Providence threatens master plan for
stormwater mitigation” — which illuminates how two years of
work by multiple state agencies will have to be thrown out the window for a
handful of seasonal, minimum wage jobs.
We are being asked to abandon not only this huge
investment in time and resources but the original vision of a biotech Knowledge
District because these self-promoting boosters have rushed in with a shiny
bauble.
The I-195 Redevelopment District Commission owns 26 acres of former highway land and is charged with redeveloping the land in a way that stimulates the state’s ailing economy and also creates 7 acres of public parkland. The Pawtucket Red Sox owners want 4.8 acres now set aside to become a public park.
In 2012 and 2013, the 195 commission worked with the DEM, the Coastal Resources Management Council and the Narragansett Bay Commission to develop the master environmental permit. Those agencies approved the 195 commission’s request to treat the former highway land comprehensively and granted final approval for the master permit in November 2013.
And now we need to spend $300,000 to study the
issue? Good news — the studies have already been done! The verdict is in.
Taxpayer-funded sports stadium are losers!
All the information needed has been made available
to all in the Providence Journal. Kate Bramson and Paul Grimaldi have been on
top of this project every step of the way. Meanwhile business writer John Kostrzewa sought the opinion of Victor Matheson, an
economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross and co-author of
“Financing Professional Sports Facilities.”
“It’s an absolutely silly economic idea,” Matheson said. “It makes no sense from the state’s standpoint to move the team five miles from Pawtucket to Providence.”
Reports in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and
Forbes have all come to the same conclusion. (Happily, a more suitable location has turned up — assuming the
owners can go forward without taxpayer support of course.)
The first public meeting on the stadium issue was
held last month (ProJo 4.28.15)
during which I-195 Redevelopment District Commission member Dr. Barrett Bready
told the owners “the commission’s goal is broader than merely finding uses for
the 26 acres of former highway land now available after the state’s realignment
of Route 195. The state has long said the land is one of the best places to
create jobs in the medical and education sectors that will draw upon the nearby
hospitals and universities.”
“If the state is willing to spend $4 million to $5 million a year, there are more direct ways of attracting life-sciences companies” than building a ballpark, said Bready.
Bready knows what he’s talking about; he is the founder of
Nabsys, a biotech firm (semiconductor tools for DNA analysis) in the
Jewelry District funded with the help of (then citizen) Gina Raimondo of Point
Judith Capital. Raimondo sure seemed to know what she was doing when she was
handling private equity, and I’ll bet she didn’t spend $300,000 of the firm’s
money looking into the matter.
By Dan Lawlor
Rhode Island will not attract millennials, build a
new economy, end homelessness or improve public schools by helping the
Pawtucket Red Sox to move to Providence. Even according to Republican economist
Greg Mankiw, 85% of economists oppose public subsidies of sports stadiums. Ideological
journals from left to right, from National Review to Dissent, decry the
giveaways and waste spent on stadiums for well connected owners.
Here’s a few words from the critics…
1. James Hamilton, UC San Diego: “I am not aware of a recent example of a major sports facility investment that
earned anything approaching a reasonable return on capital or
turned out to be self-financing in terms of tax revenues.”
2.Grace Lee Boggs, Providence-born Detroit Civil Rights activist: “I
am saddened by the short-sightedness,” Boggs said, referring to the recent
building of more casinos and sports stadiums.”
3.Steve Lopez, LA Times: “It
would be fun to have a pro football team to cheer and to boo… But as I’ve
said before, the terms have to be right for citizens, not for AEG’s $7-billion
man — Philip Anschutz — or for the band of barons who make up the National
Football League.”
3. Joel Kotkin, an Urban Studies Fellow at Chapman
University and author of The New Class Conflict:”… a fanciful approach towards economic development instead of
building really good jobs. And except for the construction, the jobs created by
stadia are generally low wage occasional work.”
4.Matt Connolly, writer with Mother Jones: “While
there may be legitimate reasons for franchises to relocate—bankruptcy, low
ticket sales, Jay-Z buying a stake—many recent
threats to move have one common factor: stadium funding. If
your local government decided against spending $400 million of public money to
add a few more luxury boxes to Xtreme Cola Guzzle The Flavor® Memorial Arena,
get ready to hear your team’s owner talking…”
5.Doug Bandow, National
Review: “The primary justification for looting taxpayers to
construct sports cathedrals is always “economic development.” …But that’s not
the uniform experience. In D.C. itself you will have a hard time finding the
renaissance that was supposed to be sparked by RFK stadium, which hosted the
Redskins for years.”
6. Joan Didion, author, commentator: “What
we had in the tarmac arrival with ball tossing then, was an understanding: a
repeated moment witnessed by many people, all of whom believed it to be a setup
and yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, someone too “naive” to
know the rules of the game, would so describe it.”
Forget subsidizing sports stadiums. Funding a good
old boy’s development scheme is not the answer to empower the working women and
men of Rhode Island.