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Don't let
government build an obsolete stadium
by Kurt St. Angelo
Libertarian Writers' Bureau
About 21 years ago I was
one of the several thousand who publicly greeted then-owner Robert Irsay at the
Hoosier Dome when he brought his Colts franchise to town.
It's hard now to believe that the city of Indianapolis, with help of a
county-wide hospitality tax granted by the state General Assembly and a generous
$25 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, built an $82 million, 63,000-seat
professional football stadium on pure speculation, without
having a team to play in it.
Less than 13 years later, by the time it was politically acceptable to mention
it, Colts' owner Jim Irsay appeared on national television to call for a new
publicly funded stadium. As then-chairman of the Libertarian Party of Marion
County, I publicly denounced this idea. I asked how an $82
million public works project could become obsolete shortly more than a decade
after it was built.
The straight and fundamental answer is that the RCA Dome was built by three
entities that had no experience in the business of professional football: a
local government, a state government and a tax-exempt foundation. Why should we
have expected anything but a no-frills building, one that had
too few luxury suites and too few fancy club seats to turn an NFL team
moderately profitable in the modern age? Relying on the usual experts lacking
imagination and foresight, government built a facility that was too small and
was neither expandable nor convertible.
Worse, it tied the project to special interest groups, such as downtown
parking-lot owners. But the main problem with government-built stadiums like the
RCA Dome is that no one is really accountable for the decisions once the
stadiums turn out to be inappropriate. The William Hudnut administration, which
built the Dome and brought the Colts to town, was long gone before the
inadequacies of the facility become apparent.
For example, the RCA Dome has always been small by NFL standards. However, since
adding extra luxury suites and club seats in 1998, the Dome is the NFL 's
smallest -- with 57,500 seats.
Major League Baseball once considered Indianapolis in an expansion. However, due
to lack of planning, it would have cost over $40 million to convert the RCA Dome
to baseball. Later, MLB abandoned offering franchises to cities with indoor
stadiums.
Game parking is inadequate and expensive around the RCA Dome. Event parking more
than a mile from the Dome starts at $5. The Dome has no underground parking and
very little parking revenue to share with an NFL team owner. (To the credit of
the Hudnut administration, the RCA Dome is modest. In real terms, it cost about
as much as Conseco Fieldhouse, which holds over 17,000. Other than lacking
adequate profit-enhancing amenities to keep NFL franchises happy, the Dome is a
very functional stadium that is used 200-plus times per year, only 10 of which
are for regularly-scheduled professional football games.)
Now Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson wants to relive the glory days of the
Hudnut administration, but without that past administration's modesty. If
Peterson gets his way, taxpayers will spend over $500 million to build the NFL's
newest stadium, premiering in 2008. In inflation-adjusted terms, that's about
three times the real expense of the ill-planned RCA Dome. The Colts have agreed
to contribute only $100 million to the project, a third of which is in the form
of a favorable NFL loan.
Indianapolis would be smarter to follow the recent lead of Washington. Last
week, by a 7-to-6 vote, Washington's city council voted against the deal struck
between Major League Baseball and Mayor Anthony Williams, which required the
city to build a new $579 million stadium for the former
Montreal Expos. Mayor Williams now has until June to find private financing for
the other half of the stadium's costs.
That's the kind of deal the voters of Indianapolis should demand. Less
government involvement in the city's next stadium means less risk for taxpayers,
better planning and less pressure to raise taxes. We should resist the
temptation to let government build another obsolete stadium.
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Kurt St.Angelo is an
attorney, screen writer and former chair of the Libertarian Party of Marion
County.
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