Offensive Motion

When millionaire sports team owners get state-sponsored stadiums, the public pays the price.

SEATTLE

It's called "greenmail."

"Either come up with some 'green' to build their new stadium," says Greg Devereux, "or they threaten to 'mail' the team to another city."

Devereux should know. As executive director of the 20,000-member Council 28 in Washington state, he's had not one but two stadium fights on his hands since 1995.

"It was a real mess," he says.

"Taxpayers voted down a referendum in '95 to foot the bill for a new $320 million ballpark for the Mariners baseball team," explains Devereux, "[then the] Republican legislature retooled the measure and passed it anyway."

This year, Seahawks owner Paul Allen, whose Microsoft stock is worth at least $12.4 billion, picked up the $4.2 million tab to hold a referendum for a $417 million stadium for the football team.

It passed by a whisker in July.

"Look," Devereux says, "plenty of AFSCME members are sports fans, and they don't want the baseball and football teams to leave Washington state.

"At the same time, we can't build stadiums at the expense of our members' livelihoods. They still need to feed their families."

Like it or not, however, Washington state taxpayers are financial participants in construction of new baseball and football stadiums costing almost $1 billion. Next year, the city tears down the 20-year-old Kingdome — whose leaky roof was repaired at a cost of 100 million taxpayer dollars only two years ago — then work begins on the new football park.

"Why do they help a billionaire," Devereux asks of the legislature, "when our highways are full of potholes, schools are overcrowded, and public employees are struggling to make ends meet without a cost-of-living raise?"

TOUGH CALL. "This was a tough call for everyone," says Chris Dugovich, who is president and executive director of Washington Council 2 and an International vice president. "The football stadium costs a lot of money and we can all think of other ways we could spend it."

Council 2 took no official position on building the football stadium but many individual members supported it. Dugovich explains that some members are die-hard Seahawks fans who feared losing the team if the stadium was not built. Others were attracted to the proposal by a provision which shifts $5.5 million in debt from their employer, King County, to the state.

Washington state residents are hardly alone in their concerns about public money and professional sports. Today some 49 professional sports teams across the nation are asking for and usually getting taxpayer funding to expand, refurbish or build new sports facilities.

The debate sometimes gets hot. Citizens and AFSCME members alike ask whether it would be more appropriate for millionaire owners to reach into their own pockets to build luxurious sports palaces.

More than $7 billion is expected to be spent on stadiums and arenas in the next decade. Using public money for exclusive professional sports facilities is nothing less than corporate welfare, and a mockery of government's role in promoting the common good, contend the critics.

LITTLE GAIN. At the same time, independent researchers say there is little economic gain from these kinds of projects and that stadium building diverts funds from other critical needs.

"Once you take taxes to pay for a stadium or arena, you can't spend it somewhere else," observes Mark Rosentraub, a professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs and author of Major League Losers, a 513-page look at the stadium mania sweeping America.

"Stadium construction creates no real wealth," Rosentraub insists. "It just transfers it."

Yet politicians say it's sound economic development, asserts Andrew Zimbalist, professor of economics at Smith College, who is writing a book on the subject for the Brookings Institution. "They are either misinformed or lying."

There doesn't seem "to be much of an economic impact created either by bringing a team to a community or by keeping a team in a community," concurs Robert Baade, an economist at Lake Forest College in Illinois.

"And when you take into account that the money spent on a stadium could be invested in roads or bridges or industrial parks or schools, all of which have much greater returns, it may well be that stadium building actually has a negative economic impact," he says.

In fact, Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.) cited these and other studies earlier this year when he introduced legislation in Congress that would bar state and local governments from using tax-exempt bonds to build sports arenas. He says the changes in tax laws would make it harder for professional teams to use "greenmail" to pit cities against one another to attract teams.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Doug Moore, president of Local 1632 (Council 8) in Ohio, believes the debate also needs to focus on "the competition for recreation resources."

Moore's unit represents Columbus city workers, where voters rejected a tax increase this year to pay for a proposed $285 million soccer stadium/arena.

"While Columbus voters didn't go for the arena idea," he says, "there's strong community support for the city's Parks and Recreation Department."

"Most people will never see a professional game, even if they could afford the $35 ticket," he says. "But for a lot of working people here, the neighborhood center is the place they depend on for their recreation, especially the kids.

"We have to remind voters of the vital role AFSCME members play in this area. It's something not to throw away just to help some millionaire sports team owner."

Meanwhile, voters downstate earlier this year narrowly passed a county tax increase to pay for replacing the 20-year-old Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium. Taxes will build luxurious sky-boxed stadiums for both the Reds baseball team and the National Football League Bengals.

San Francisco voters passed by a razor-thin margin last summer a similar referendum to finance $100 million of a new $525 million stadium complex to replace 3Com Park — formerly Candlestick Park — which would be razed.

And in Los Angeles, the city council is considering legislation that would require prior voter approval before tax money could be used to back a downtown $240 million sports complex for the Lakers basketball and Kings hockey teams.

BETTER DEALS. In Seattle, AFSCME and the state labor federation fought hard to get the most beneficial stadium deal possible, according to Devereux.

For starters, work on the two replacement stadiums is all unionized, he says. If Seahawks' owner Allen sells the team in the next 10 years, the state of Washington gets 10 percent of the gross price in exchange for the $417 million of taxpayer money — the first such exchange in the nation's sports history.

With a kind of public ownership established, the Seahawks resemble the Green Bay Packers, the only NFL football team locally owned by ordinary people rather than millionaires.

"That means if the Seahawks are sold or Allen tries to move it," says Devereux, "the people here get a piece of the action."

Not only that, but sitting on the stadium boards are union representatives, including an AFSCME local president, "to make sure our interests are looked out for, too," Devereux explains.

VIEWS VARY. While the International has no policy on public funding of professional stadiums, AFSCME members certainly have strong opinions.

Bob Lattimer, president of Western Region 6 of the Civil Service Employees Association/AFSCME Local 1000, has had Buffalo Bills season tickets for years.

"I've listened to both sides of the thing," says the New Yorker, "and I guess as a football fan, I'd hate to see the Bills move away."

But he was upset earlier this year when the state legislature gave $75 million for installing luxury skyboxes in the Bills' Rich Stadium. "Obviously, I believe it's money we should put into things we need like schools, highways, education, hospitals," he says.

"You can argue that the priorities of the nation are warped," he observes. "Certainly giving big tax breaks to the one percent of the population that has the most money isn't a very sensible public policy."

Yet if the people don't care, and "if AFSCME members aren't informed enough and active enough to fight this kind of thing," says Lattimer, "then it's kind of self-indulgent to cry about it."

"Doing something about it," Lattimer says, "now that's the key."

By Ray Lane