Do cities gain from subsidizing sports teams?
The National Hockey League season doesn't start for another three weeks, but already hockey fans in Glendale, Ariz., are counting an unexpected victory. Four years after the Phoenix Coyotes went bankrupt and were taken over by the league, prompting endless rumors that the struggling franchise would relocate to Quebec, Seattle or parts unknown, new owners were approved this month who have promised to keep the team in Arizona.
It's a victory, though, that will come at a high price. To secure the sale, the Glendale city council agreed to a new lease that requires the city to pay the Coyotes' owners $15 million a year as an "arena management fee." If the deal runs its full 15-year course — not a given, because the new lease allows the team to leave town if it’s losing money after five years — the Coyotes' new owners, a pair of Canadian investment bankers, will end up collecting more from the city of Glendale to run the team than the $170 million they're spending to buy it in the first place.
City officials say they had little choice. Glendale mayor Jerry Weiers, who in his acceptance speech last fall warned the Coyotes, "Glendale is not your cash register," has now resigned himself to paying for pro sports, saying, "The council made its decision, and my job at this point is to do everything in my power to make this thing a success." His predecessor, Elaine Scruggs, insisted that paying the Coyotes was cheaper than letting the team leave: "What shall we do — lock it up, turn off the lights and then pay the debt on the arena?"
The answer, say many economists and sports business experts, is very likely yes. There's no way a city like Glendale will see enough of a boost to its local economy to make lease subsidies pay off. And, they warn, the Coyotes deal is a sign of a new trend in the sports industry: After a 20-year period during which, according to Harvard researcher Judith Grant Long, about $18 billion in public money was spent on a wave of new stadiums and arenas, team owners looking for a leg up on their competition are now demanding additional cash to run the buildings they got for free.
"They always do come up with clever little tricks," says Rick Eckstein, sociology professor at Villanova University and co-author of the book Public Dollars, Private Stadiums. "Just when we think we’ve seen it all, they come up with something else."
This summer's new lease isn't the first time that Glendale has anted up public cash for its hockey team. The suburb of 230,000 people was already on the hook for $9 million a year in debt payments on its new arena, a building for which the team's owners paid only $1 a year in rent. (Glendale also spent $200 million on Camelback Ranch, a spring-training baseball facility for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox.) In 2010, after the Coyotes' bankruptcy, Scruggs poured in an additional $50 million in management fees over two years, raiding its landfill, sanitation, water and sewer funds to raise the cash.
The result of all this sports spending has been a massive hit to the city's budget at a time when Glendale was already furloughing firefighters, closing public pools and shortening public libraries' hours. Last month's Coyotes lease subsidy came shortly after the Glendale council discussed a proposal to sell off its city hall to help pay for the previous round of Coyotes payments.
"Our police and fire departments were the first ones that started seeing their budget cut back," says Ken Jones, a Glendale resident who led several unsuccessful attempts to force a public vote that could have overturned the Coyotes lease deal. "Libraries were hit pretty hard. They raised our water bills 80 percent, our sales tax was raised, and our property tax was raised. They have robbed the things that people really expect to get from their taxes in order to keep supporting sports."
The first sports team owner to cash in on this pay-to-play tactic was the New Orleans Saints' Tom Benson, who in 2001 capitalized on rumors that he was considering moving his NFL team to convince the state of Louisiana to pay him $186.5 million over the next 10 years to keep playing at the Superdome. In 2010, the owners of the Indiana Pacers basketball team followed suit by demanding — and receiving — $30 million in "operating subsidies" over three years to remain at Conseco Fieldhouse, the arena that the city of Indianapolis had spent $183 million to build nine years earlier. (As in Glendale, Pacers owner Herb Simon, a billionaire real estate developer, paid just $1 a year rent.)
To pay off the initial Pacers arena cost — plus the $650 million that it sank into a new stadium for the Colts football team — Indianapolis' Capital Improvement Board had already cut off all of its arts and tourism grants the year before. To help fill the new gap, Mayor Greg Ballard funneled city property-tax revenues to the board, even as he asked city agencies to reduce library hours and close public pools because of budget shortfalls.
"Indianapolis might be a great place to visit, but it should be a better place to live," says Pat Andrews, a longtime Indianapolis community activist and blogger who has closely followed the Pacers deal. In addition to cuts to parks, transit and other services, she notes, the city police force has stopped recruiting new officers because of budget cuts, and murders have risen dramatically this year. "The basic services of the city are suffering at the same time the Simons and [Colts owner Jim] Irsay are making out like bandits."
Simon, meanwhile, agreed only to keep the Pacers in town through 2013 in exchange for his $30 million in cash. The city's Capital Improvement Board has since negotiated a one-year lease extension — along with yet another $10 million in payments to the Pacers — while it works out a long-term deal, one that Andrews worries will cement annual operating subsidies in place for good. (CIB officials declined to comment for this story.)
Even team owners building new stadiums have begun seeking annual operating subsidies.Earlier this year, when Atlanta agreed to provide billionaire Atlanta Falcons owner (and Home Depot founder) Arthur Blank with $200 million in hotel tax money to help pay for a new stadium to replace the 20-year-old Georgia Dome, it tacked on an additional bonus: Any leftover hotel tax money after the first $200 million would spill over into a so-called waterfall fund that Blank could then tap for any future maintenance or operating expenses. Estimated cost: an extra $300 million.
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