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10/8/2010
Ponschock: 2-Minute Warning and Moving the Goal Posts all part of the Field of Schemes
The current Packer Palooza tour by Mark Murphy detailing the team's ambition toward expansion falls nicely into place with what I've read about public private partnerships with sports teams in other markets. In Field of Schemes**, Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan have documented extensively the ways in which new stadiums are forced upon communities through the use of veiled threats of moving or loss of the franchise.
Field of Schemes, written in 1999 and updated and revised in 2008, uses the language of sports to show how owners of teams coerce the public to help them build new stadiums - and other benefits in tax relief and a myriad of other techniques. Below are a couple of examples.
The Two Minute Warning
This is the ultimate technique – threatening that the team will move if a new stadium is not built. Stadiums as relatively new as three years old (!) have been torn down for new facilities in the same host city at taxpayer expense. See this interesting study – the average age of the professional sports stadium replaced was 30 years, with replacement age varying from the aforementioned 3 years (Atlanta, basketball) to 88 years (Detroit, baseball). After replacement, the inevitable rise in ticket prices, sales of luxury box seats and elaborate amenities within the new structure will follow. The scare of course, is that our team will not be competitive with other major markets-- those which already have or are also negotiating for new stadiums. And the taxpayers who have financed the new stadium are ultimately kept out of the facility for which they have paid due to those rising prices of tickets and concessions.
Moving The Goal Posts
This is closer to what's going on in Green Bay right now. In 2000, Brown County residents approved a .5% sales tax for the NFL’s only publicly owned team to help finance the most recent Lambeau stadium upgrade. Now the organization is beating the drum for an expansion on lands the team owns adjacent to the stadium.
The referendum authorized a sales and use tax for purposes related to football stadium facilities in the professional football stadium district. According to the Brown County Taxpayers Association, “there was no specific amount specified, time limit established, or explanation of upkeep and maintenance obligations.” The concern is that this tax will be extended for additional improvements with negligible job creation - and that job creation will be nothing more than retail clerks and concession vendors. In addition, as retail and concessions are added, the new businesses inevitably hurt nearby local restaurants.
If, as the recent report on the Packers says, the team is a very healthy franchise, then petitioning the city for extensions of sales taxes should not be necessary or approved.
**Stacy Mitchell, via her 2007 book the Big-Box Swindle recommends Field of Schemes. Big-Box Swindle is unbeatable for those interested in how outsized shopping places like Walmart move into a community.
Lon Ponschock is a FoxPolitics reader and a resident of Appleton.
COMMENTS
I remember living in Tempe AZ (Pheonix area) for 8 yrs before there were any pro sports teams there. The argument of the movers and shakers was that a big league city has big league sports teams. Tempe even sponsored a poorly researched "economic impact" study that did not recognize that the dollars spent on pro sports come from the same pool of recreational dollars as exists with or without sports teams, did not recognize ANY costs associated with having sports teams. AND this study done by a Big 5 accounting firm, Touceh Ross.
I tried then to present the argument that sports teams and economic success do not necessarily go hand in hand. Now Phoenix has I believe 3 pro sports teams, and it has gone from the fastest growing big city in the country, to one that is broke and laying off police, firemen, and other government workers.
Too bad they did not look at my example of Milwaukee, that despite 2 1/2 pro teams, went from #7 in size, to the 4th poorest city in the US, and somewhere around #30 in size, despite (or in part, because of?) the pro sports teams there.
Government and REAL economic development are almost mutually exclusive. More jobs are destroyed than created by goverNMEnt efforts.
Ken Van Doren (Wed Oct 13 11:56:50 2010)
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