In advance of new lease negotiations with the Pittsburgh Pirates for the use of PNC Park after the current lease expires in 2030, two state legislators are more than intimating that the National League franchise is not worthy of further taxpayer subsidies until it spends sufficient money to field a more competitive team.
Armed with the results of a study by the state’s Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) (requested by one of them) that suggests that the Philadelphia Phillies, proportionally, get a better bang for their taxpayer buck than the Pirates, Rep. Tim Bonner, R-Mercer/Butler, argued:
“If the taxpayers are going to put money into the stadium, the Pirates need to also invest in PNC Park, as well as put a worthy product on the field,” said Bonner in a news release last Wednesday.
“Taxpayers deserve more than the bare minimum, and the report demonstrates how sustained on-field success can increase fan attendance, which is how a stadium drives the local economy,” he contended.
Added Rep. Jim Gregory, R-Blair:
“I’ve waited to see this data for as long as anybody to show what we thought was true is real and now quantified for taxpayers, hospitality businesses, critics of the 1999 stadium funding deal and supporters,” he noted in the same news release. “Philly will be pleased, and Yinzers will point out the Bucs need to do better.”
But, again, Bonner and Gregory totally – totally — miss the point: Taxpayers deserve to be left alone.
Not only is it firmly established in the preponderance of scholarly research that sport stadiums shift economic activity and do not create new spending, stadiums in no way “drive the local economy.”
It’s also firmly established that subsidizing the rich barons of sport is nothing more than underwriting morally wrong and insidious corporate wealthfare.
Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Allegheny Institute, sees two legislators setting up a smoke screen, one that does taxpayers no favors:
“They are using their bully pulpit to shame the Pirates into spending more money,” he says. “They know the team will be asking for more money [for stadium improvements in any new lease]; they want to justify giving it to them.
“They are not acting in the best interests of taxpayers, but as fans,”
the Ph.D. economist says.
Talk about an afront to sound public policy.
The Bonners and Gregorys of the world have done a grave disservice to the perennial Great Stadiums Debate.
The question is not how much a respective sports team — whose playground has been heavily subsidized by taxpayers – should spend on its on-field exploits. The question must remain whether it is economically or morally sound public policy for taxpayers to underwrite such folly.
And the clear answer remains a resounding “NO!”
As Clark Merrefield concluded in April in “The Journalist’s Resource”:
“Despite perennial claims from team owners that building new stadiums or revamping existing ones will result in a fiscal and jobs boom for a city or region, research consistently shows that the hundreds of millions of public dollars that are often outlaid are not typically a sound investment,” he wrote.
And John Charles Bradbury, a Kennesaw State University economist and president of the North American Association of Sports Economists, further told Merrefield that while you “might see a little bit of a resurgence in the area right around the stadium … it comes at a cost to less commerce in the outlying area, which is exactly what we’d expect.”
“This is just a transfer of wealth within the community.”
For shame that the IFO, Bonner and Gregory ignore the real point in this ongoing debate. For it only emboldens pickpockets, private and public, to keep raiding the public purse for nefarious purposes never intended.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
