Batting .000 on New Ballparks

This is a fanatical baseball town. But when the much-loved Cardinals asked taxpayers here and across Missouri to pitch in for a pricey new stadium, the response was stony.

Proposals for a $346-million ballpark to replace the team’s aging downtown home collapsed this month when state lawmakers refused to commit public funds.

“People and the Legislature had this preconceived idea that it was corporate welfare for billionaire owners and millionaire players,” said Jeff Rainford, the mayor’s chief of staff.

It’s a sound bite that’s likely to echo in city after city these days.

The frenzied ballpark boom of the 1990s, which saw taxpayers contribute big bucks to build major league baseball stadiums in a dozen cities from Seattle to Baltimore, appears to have come to a crashing halt. Sports facilities proposed for New Jersey, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Diego and now St. Louis have stalled in recent years due to concerns about public financing.

As Mark Ganis, a consultant on several stadium deals, put it: “Government officials are getting tougher.”

To be sure, deals for new sports arenas are still being negotiated around the country. And there are still examples of lavish giveaways, most notably in Illinois, where state and local officials agreed last year to put up $400 million toward a Chicago Bears football stadium.

Such subsidies, however, “are now the exception, not the rule,” a dramatic change from just three or four years ago, said Ganis, president of SportsCorp Ltd., a Chicago consulting firm.

The new model looks more like what’s happening in Los Angeles, where Mayor James K. Hahn has vowed not to put public funds at risk for a proposed pro football stadium downtown. (The developers have asked the city to issue $100 million in bonds to help them buy land; they promise to pay it all back with ticket and property taxes once an NFL team is in town.)

“I’d be the last one to say that we won’t have any more new stadiums built, because people like new things and people like sports,” said Mark Rosentraub, an economist who has spent a decade studying, and often criticizing, public financing of stadiums.

“But I think we’re going to see a much more prudent, much more jaundiced view of the numbers, of how much the team can contribute and what percentage the public should bear. And if those numbers don’t add up, then legislatures and city councils are not going to approve the deals,” said Rosentraub, a dean at Cleveland State University in Ohio.

The caution comes, in part, because government budgets are tighter now than they’ve been in a decade.

In Missouri, new luxury boxes for the Cardinals were a tough sell when the state was so short of money that it had to stop sending out income tax refunds for several weeks this spring.

The stadium bill came up for consideration just as Gov. Bob Holden announced he would have to slash funding for state universities, cut payments to nursing homes, defer maintenance on prisons, eliminate dental insurance for poor adults and furlough 6,000 state workers to plug budget gaps.

Holden and other stadium backers argued that the budget crisis was irrelevant because the Cardinals deal would not begin to draw down state resources until 2005. But that nuance was lost on a furious public. Polls showed that two-thirds of area residents did not want their tax dollars building a ballpark. An anti-stadium petition drive netted nearly 19,000 signatures.

“Our basic message was: Fund the needy, not the greedy,” said activist Eric Vickers.

Potent as such slogans are, analysts say they’re not the only reason that stadium deals have lost their allure.

City after city has found that new ballparks do not always bring a sustained increase in attendance. Ticket sales sometimes spike for a year, only to slump again.

In Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, for instance, new baseball stadiums drew record crowds last year. This season, sales are way off. Similar patterns have beset teams in Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore. (The San Francisco Giants, the only team to finance a stadium without major public funds, are a rare exception.)

Promises that the stadiums will revitalize sagging cities have often proved overblown as well. “In downtowns across America,” Rosentraub said, “people are beginning to realize that ... stadiums by themselves are too small to generate any [economic activity] that’s worth much.”

On the other hand, people in St. Louis are well aware that losing the Cardinals would be an enormous economic blow. “Comparable to demolishing the [Gateway] Arch,” said one prominent downtown businessman.

The team pays about $8 million in city taxes each year, plus $12 million in state taxes. Just as important, it draws people from across the Midwest to St. Louis, filling downtown hotels and restaurants as well as Busch Stadium, the 36-year-old ballpark.

“The Cardinals bring 3 million people into our city each year,” Rainford said. “They bring money. They bring excitement. When they’re at home, downtown is vibrant and fun. The place is hopping.”

Since the financing deal collapsed, Cardinals owners have said they are looking at other sites for a park, including suburbs north of St. Louis and land across the Mississippi River in Illinois.

St. Louis officials are scrambling to draft a proposal to keep the team where it is by offering limited public financing for a stadium.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), for one, hopes the city will succeed. “I’ve been rooting for the Cardinals ever since I was tall enough to turn on the radio. St. Louis wouldn’t be St. Louis without the Cardinals.”