Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit Hardcover - 2002

From the publisher

Are you a sports fan distraught over seeing your home team move to another city? Or a happy sports fan whose city has just lured that team to your home turf with a brand new stadium? Or maybe you don't follow sports, but as a taxpayer are decrying cutbacks in school funding and other services. Whoever you are, state and local officials have thrown you a financial curve ball.

While President Reagan made famous the false and chiding comment about "welfare queens" who ride around in Cadillacs, Field of Schemes introduces you to some real welfare kings -- who not only prefer BMWs, thank you, but also know the meaning of fun:
-- A millionaire pizza baron wants more corporate luxury seating than his historic old ballpark provides, so he demands a new stadium at taxpayer expense, saying the old one is falling down. A group of grass-roots activists reveal that his engineering reports are faked, and that it would be far cheaper to renovate the old ballpark -- but the city and state go ahead with the project anyway.-- A used-car salesman turned baseba11 team owner promises to pay for a new stadium out of his own pocket, if the state government just agrees to move a highway to clear the land. Several backroom deals later, the state is paying to move the highway and raising a quarter-billion dollars towards the stadium costs, -- and the team owner is getting his stadium scott-free.
-- The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft wants to buy a football team, but only if the state will build him a new stadium first. So he pays the state $4 million to hold an emergency referendum -- then spends millions more in advertising to make sure he wins. In exchange, he gets over $400 million in statetax money to build his team's new home.-- When an economically depressed city is faced with losing its football team, it scrambles to allocate $220 million for a new, state-of-the-art stadium. The next day, the city school system announces that it plans to lay off up to 160 teachers and eliminate interscholastic athletics.
-- A Sunbelt town builds a new arena at public expense in order to lure expansion basketball and hockey franchises to the region. Just nine years later, the city is forced to build two new arenas, one for each sport, to keep the teams from bolting town. Total cost: almost $400 million, including $50 million for the soon-to-be-abandoned first arena.

From Seattle Sea Hawks owner Paul Allen of Microsoft to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, from Tom Monaghan of Domino's Pizza who destroyed Tiger Stadium to the building of Camden Yards, the stories are all here in a uniquely accessible journalistic style that brings you up close and personal to the moguls -- to the activists protecting your wallet.

You'll be gripped by the behind-the scenes threats and political machinations in this play-by-play draining of billions of dollars from the public treasury. Between 1980 and 1990, U.S. cities spent some $1.5 billion on building or renovating sports arenas and stadiums; the bill for the '90s is expected to be more than $11 billion.

If you can't be a defense contractor, the next best way to get public funds for your private gain, it seems, is to own a professional sports team.

Sports teams have become an incredibly valuable investment in the '80s and '90s -- in part due to the corporate welfare that owning a team gives you access to. Some teams havedoubled in value after receiving a public subsidy for a new stadium, either by moving to a new city or by threatening their existing city into ponying up for a new facility.

Taxpayers, urban residents and sports fans, meanwhile, all come out the losers. Study after study has shown that there is no economic benefit to building a new stadium in your city's downtown -- while there is a tremendous "opportunity cost" in the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money that could have been spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, fans are left with new stadiums and arenas where the only affordable seats are miles from the action, thanks to the layers of high-priced luxury suites that make the new stadiums so profitable.

Field of Schemes details many of these stories, from Baltimore and Cleveland to Minneapolis and Seattle, and dozens of places in between. It tells of how sports team owners increasingly also the heads of powerful corporations like Disney and Microsoft -- use their money and their political muscle to get their way even against stuff public opposition. And it also tells the stories of the community groups, both sports fans and community activists, who have fought an uphill battle to stop wealthy owners from looting the public treasury for private profit.