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http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html"There will be no plan B," promised Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy, just hours before the November 1997 general election. Residents in the eleven-county Pittsburgh area would soon be voting on plan A, a referendum to increase the region's sales tax to finance new stadiums for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Pirates and expand the existing convention center. The referendum was crushed by an almost two-to-one margin, losing decidedly in every county. The public had spoken. Pittsburgh-area residents did not want to use public dollars for new stadiums. The message could not be clearer.
Clear or not, four years later the Pirates and Steelers were playing in two new stadiums paid for primarily with public tax dollars. Despite his election-day warning, Mayor Murphy organized a plan B working group immediately after the referendum, which quickly and successfully devised a strategy to finance these new stadiums publicly without a popular vote. The total price tag of these stadiums was more than $500 million, with most of the revenues accruing to the teams.
Eight years earlier, in 1989, Maricopa County, Arizona, voters soundly defeated a proposed stadium tax and, in addition, passed a law requiring public approval of any future sports or entertainment project in excess of $3 million. By 1994, however, the Arizona state government and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors had devised a way to institute a $238 million stadium tax without going to the voters. This led to the 1998 completion of Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, home of the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks' major league baseball team, a project that cost more than $400 million.
Meanwhile, in 1998, residents of San Diego County approved by a three-to-two margin a referendum that would publicly finance a large piece of the San Diego Padres' new ballpark. Four years after this strong showing of public and political support, construction had barely started, even though the ballpark was originally supposed to be finished by opening day in 2002. Now even the projected 2004 completion looks far from certain, as does the estimated $410 million cost.
What is going on here? In two cities where residents opposed building new stadiums with public dollars, the stadiums were built anyway. In another city, where voters actually supported using public dollars, building the stadium has become a Sisyphean task. Clearly, there is no direct relationship between public sentiments and public policy. But if popular sovereignty, as reflected in these referendums, doesn't affect social policy, then what does? What are the implications of this inconsistency between democratic processes such as voting, and the actual policy decisions that affect people's lives? In this book, we hope to answer these and other equally disconcerting questions by examining how public dollars were used to build professional sports stadiums in nine U.S. cities.
There has been an explosion in new stadium construction since the 1990s, and several things make this current boom very different from any other period in history. First, the breadth of new construction across the country and the amount of public contribution is unprecedented. In the decade since the opening of Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the early 1990s, fourteen new baseball stadiums have been built and an additional three are under construction. When the three stadiums currently under construction are completed, seventeen of the thirty major league baseball teams will be playing in stadiums built since 1992. As for the National Football League, seventeen of thirty-two teams will be playing in stadiums built since 1992, once those currently under construction are completed. This is an unprecedented wave of stadium building, and one analyst has estimated that approximately $10 billion of public money has gone to all new sports stadiums since the mid-1980s (Keating 1999). Although these stadiums are almost always officially owned by quasi-governmental stadium authorities, the revenue streams from new stadiums increasingly flow toward private pockets. So our use of the term private stadiums refers less to the nominal ownership of these facilities and more to who benefits from their publicly financed construction and operation.
In this book, we focus on the processes behind these new stadium initiatives, not just their outcomes. This emphasis on process seemed imperative to us early on in our research as we quickly noticed how the outcomes in each of the nine cities we studied were in no way uniform and because previous studies on new sports stadiums could not account for these differences. Therefore, we designed a comparative framework to explain the distinctive elements of how each city built (or tried to build) new stadiums with public dollars. What is it about each of these cities that accounts for the variation? Are they com- pletely different, thus making outcomes nothing more than random events? Or do certain recurring patterns almost help us predict what the outcome of a stadium initiative will be in a certain city?
Our comparative framework, which we develop in chapters 1 and 2, is built on two distinct but interrelated pillars. First, we identify the new stadium advocates in each of these cities. Who is leading the charge for publicly financed stadiums and how does that leadership, in and of itself, contribute to the relative success or failure of this charge (from the advocates' point of view)? In trying to identify the leaders of a stadium project, we immediately examine what we call a city's "local growth coalition." At heart, a growth coalition is an institutional alliance between the local corporate community and the local government, although the specific form of government involvement may vary.
The local corporate community generally runs the growth coalition, which might include media, religious, and labor organizations (in supporting roles) but rarely includes a city's sports teams. Local growth coalitions have an inordinate influence over public policy and use that influence to serve their parochial interests, although they may claim they are pursuing the overall community good. Policies advocating public dollars for sports stadiums provide just one example of this bias. As we show, however, not all cities have powerful local growth coalitions; and some may not have any growth coalition at all. Indeed, the existence and strength of these coalitions varies widely in the nine cities we study. We will show that the relative strength and coherence of the growth coalition has a significant effect on shaping the process of securing public money for new stadiums. The sports teams themselves, who usually have the most to gain organizationally from new publicly financed stadiums, often do not lead the battle to build them, particularly in strong growth coalition cities. In fact, these initiatives actually go more smoothly for advocates when the sports teams play only a supporting role because non-sports corporations can more easily obfuscate their vested interests in new stadiums and portray their advocacy as being in the best interest of the entire community. Only when a city has a weak growth coalition are sports teams (and other actors) forced to take a leading role in stadium projects. The very existence and relative strength of a local growth coalition depends on the unique history and characteristics of that city. So while all of the cities covered in this book are responding to national trends, they are experiencing these forces at the local level. In other words, these are both national stories and unique city stories.
The second pillar of our analytical framework concerns the strategic choices made by local growth coalitions (or other advocates) to justify why a community should spend public dollars on new stadiums. These strategies generally fall into two categories. The first claims that new stadiums will provide all sorts of tangible economic benefits to the local community. The second insists that new stadiums will benefi- cially augment the way in which a community views itself, how the community is perceived by others, and how community members get along with each other-what we call "community self-esteem" and "community collective conscience." Stadium advocates rely on both justifications and often use them simultaneously.
Nevertheless, there has lately been a noticeable shift away from economic promises and toward promises of social benefits. We believe this is not just random but reflects conscious strategic decisions by stadium proponents in each city. Proponents have realized that the path to publicly financed stadiums will be less problematic if they downplay the tangible economic benefits and accentuate the intangible social goods that might accompany stadiums. But like the existence and strength of local growth coalitions just discussed, these decisions are largely patterned by the unique structural landscape of each city. Stadium advocates certainly have some discretion about which strategies to employ, but certain cities lend themselves to making certain arguments about why it is in the community's best interest to build new sports stadiums with public dollars.