Stadium Withdrawal

When voters in Columbus, Ohio, rejected a sales-tax increase to pay for a downtown arena for a prospective NHL team, the leader of the opposition proclaimed that “a message has been sent all across the country.”

“The days of sport subsidies are numbered,” Richard Sheir, head of the appropriately named Voters Against Stadium Taxes, said after the May poll.

It’s a message that increasingly is finding a receptive audience across the country.

Last month, Pittsburgh-area residents actually said no to their beloved Steelers, as well as the Pirates, defeating a referendum for a higher sales tax that would have funded two new stadiums and other regional projects.

“This was a victory for the people,” said Allegheny County Commissioner Larry Dunn, who opposed the initiative. “We were outspent 100-1.”

In the nation’s capital, voters were never even asked to go to the ballot box. Local governments told the Washington Redskins, Wizards and Capitals that taxpayer money would not be spent on their new facilities, except for related infrastructure improvements such as parking lots, sewer pipes or road improvements.

As a result, Jack Kent Cooke had to foot the bill for his $170 million Redskins stadium, and Wizards-Capitals owner Abe Pollin has done the same for his $200 million MCI Center, which opens next week.

“The city was going to finance half of my building,” Pollin said. “When it was clear that the city wasn’t going to do it, I had a choice to make.”

That choice was praised by the nation’s First Fan.

“With all these other cities moving to big stadiums out in the suburbs--for him to come back downtown is a big boost for the city,” President Clinton said while attending the arena’s opening Tuesday night.

In Minnesota, legislators are holding fast in their opposition to fund a new ballpark for the Twins. The owner is threatening to sell the team a North Carolina businessman who wants to move the team to Greensboro--assuming voters there approve a food and ticket tax in a May referendum.

And that’s not a sure thing, if the Charlotte Observer’s editorial page is an example.

“We are appalled at what has become of major league sports everywhere,” the paper said. “Team owners are jerking cities around like puppets, playing off their insecurities by threatening to move the teams. . . . Someone, somewhere has to say, ‘Stop.’ ”

Voters are getting fed up with paying all the bills for new sports palaces that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, although experts in the field say it’s hardly a revolution.

“The trend started in 1990 to go away from 100% public financing to more and more public-private partnership deals,” said Gateway Consultants president Thomas Chema, who helped develop the $461 million Jacobs Field-Gund Arena project in Cleveland. “Now I think you’re just seeing some communities where they’re saying, ‘No, we don’t want to put any public money into the building.”’

While the Pittsburgh vote was especially high profile, voters have been turning down stadium and arena initiatives for years. Steelers fans worrying about their team moving, take heart: San Francisco area voters rejected six different referenda over nine years before finally agreeing to build a new stadium for the Giants.

That’s fairly typical, says Andrew Zimbalist, co-editor of the newly published book, “Sports, Job and Taxes.”

“About 60% of them pass, 40% fail,” Zimbalist said. “They’re almost always relatively close. That’s part of the strategy--pick an amount of subsidy you think will get passed.

“Like San Francisco, the final one that passed only had about a third of the stadium being paid for by the city. They start off 100%, and they keep lowering it until they have a number that’s going to pass.”

Some businessmen in Columbus didn’t want to wait that long. Shortly after the NHL arena vote failed, an insurance firm and a printing company came up with all the money needed for $125 million facility. The city was subsequently awarded an expansion franchise.

Thirteen new stadiums for NFL and major league baseball teams alone teams have sprung up over the last eight years, while as many as three dozen teams in the four major pro leagues either are having something built or are grumbling about where they are. In the NFL, more than a dozen teams are unhappy with their current stadium situations.

The teams say the new digs are needed to raise money to pay escalating player salaries. In the 1970s, huge TV contracts generated enough to meet payroll, so multipurpose facilities such as Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati were OK.

Nowadays, TV money isn’t enough, which means sellout crowds for Steelers’ games aren’t enough. Owners need stadiums and arenas with luxury boxes, club seats, personal seat licenses, fancy restaurants, clothing stores and anything else that can raise a fast $100,000 or two.

And if owners don’t get it the first time around, they usually drop hints about moving out of town. The threat rarely is carried out, Zimbalist says, because there’s usually a compromise that involves the private sector paying more of the bill.

That’s what he predicts will happen in Pittsburgh.

“You’ll see a pullback in what they ask for, and they’ll go back another time,” Zimbalist said. “There’s a wonderful line from a mayor of a town in Arizona that built a stadium. He said, ‘We always give voters a choice, and when they say no, we give them the choice again, and eventually we get it.”’

But it’s not a fail-safe route to take. Some teams--the Houston Oilers and Hartford Whalers are the most recent examples--have moved after demands for better facilities never materialized. By saying no, voters walk a fine line that can lead to the unthinkable.

“Never in my whole life did I think the Browns would leave,” said John “Big Dawg” Thompson, the leader of the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, where a stadium referendum passed only after Art Modell had committed to move the team to Baltimore.

“My suggestion to a lot of these cities--if they want the luxury of having professional football and professional baseball--would be to pass the referendum,” Thompson said. “They’re using Cleveland as an example. If it could happen to them, it could happen to anybody.”