If you build it, they will leave: sports teams fleece the taxpayer, again - Columns

The money quote from baseball's most nauseating bit of self-mythology, the 1989 Kevin Costner vehicle Field of Dreams, was, "If you build it, they will come." Like much of the national pastime's lore, the truth is actually much closer to the opposite: Build a stadium with tax money, and they will eventually leave.

The most recent example of this phenomenon was the October sale of the Triple-A Edmonton Trappers franchise to a Texas group headed by Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan. The team moved even though Canadian taxpayers paid for half the construction costs of the Trappers' Telus Field in 1995--and even though Edmonton held a 15-year lease.

Keating made the obvious but infrequently stated point in a March 2000 article for USA Today magazine: "Another major downside to government-built and-owned ballparks is that clubs are transformed from owners to renters. It is always easier for a renter to move to get a better deal. So, government officials who advocate taxpayer-funded sports facilities to attract or keep a team virtually ensure that teams will continue issuing threats and moving."

Here's a different approach: Tax-funded entities should immediately begin selling off all their sports venues. Why on earth should two-thirds of Major League Baseball parks be fully or partly owned by governments? San Francisco's glorious Pac Bell Park was the first privately financed stadium to be built since 1962; not coincidentally, it generates the most revenue in baseball. Private owners are far more likely to upgrade facilities, seek creative revenue-generating schemes, and stay put in their host cities.

A fire sale of stadiums and arenas would bring some much-needed revenue for cash-strapped cities and counties, even in the long term (in the form of future sales and property taxes, which frequently go uncollected on municipally owned properties). The city of Los Angeles, for example, projects a $180 million deficit in the next fiscal year, yet it continues to co-own and operate the nearly vacant Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena while failing to fill the two-foot potholes in the street in front of my house.

Once cities get in the habit of disconnecting taxpayer monies from professional sports franchises, future subsidies will be all that much harder to justify, and the Bud Seligs of the world will have to go back to making money the old-fashioned way: by earning it.

Matt Welch (mwelch@reason.com) is a reason associate editor.

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