Mar 24, 2009 2:35 pm US/Eastern
DeFede: Marlins New Stadium "Just A Bad Deal"
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
During Monday's marathon Miami Dade county commission meeting, Javier Souto delivered my favorite line of the day.
"We need to shake this baby," the long serving county commissioner said.
He made the comment while explaining why he supported building a new stadium for the Florida Marlins. He said despite his many reservations about the deal, he said he was going to vote for the stadium because he wanted to jumpstart our local economy – shake the baby – by creating thousands of construction jobs over the next three years.
But isn't it generally a bad idea to shake a baby?
Babies have weak neck muscles and large, heavy heads and when you shake them it causes all sorts of trauma to the brain. It's called Shaken Baby Syndrome.
Watching Monday's nine-and-a-half hour commission meeting I had a feeling that quite a few of the commissioners were shaken as infants.
How could they vote for a deal that is so lopsided in favor of the Florida Marlins and leave taxpayers vulnerable? My impression was that most commissioners just wanted the entire affair to end. They were tired of all the talk about building a stadium and would have voted for anything that was put in front of them Monday.
The Marlins simply wore them down by waiting them out.
The Marlins are paying just $120 million of the $634 million it will take to build the stadium, the neighboring parking garage and the surrounding infrastructure.
"They [the Marlins] are getting a great deal," said County Commissioner Katy Sorenson, one of four commissioners to vote against the stadium.
Indeed they are. Just look at naming rights. The Marlins get to sell the naming rights to a building the county will pay to build, a building the county owns, a building being built on public land.
If the Marlins get $10 million a year for the naming rights of the ballpark – a figure that is typical for a stadium – then the Marlins will recoup the money they will chip in to build the stadium in a few years.
The Marlins even get the revenue from the parking garage the public is building for them.
Why couldn't the Marlins contribute more to the deal? We'll never know how much they might have been able to invest in their future because the team refused to allow county officials to inspect their financial records. In essence, we are now business partners with a company we know little about. We don't even know if they can cover any cost overruns on building the stadium.
Now that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has his stadium deal, the value of the team just increased substantially and there is nothing to prevent Loria from cashing in on it.
And although there is a clause in the deal that says if Loria flips the team in the first year he has to pay the county and the city 70 percent of his profit on the deal, the reality is there are plenty of ways to get around that. As County Commissioner Carlos Gimenez, another one of the commissioners who voted against the deal, pointed out, there is nothing to keep Loria from selling 49 percent of the team tomorrow and pocketing all of that money.
"It's all smoke and mirrors," Gimenez said.
Most commissioners paid little more than lip service to protecting the public's stake in the stadium and the team. Instead, they simply wanted to grandstand and line up to get credit for keeping major league baseball in South Florida.
The most infuriating part of Monday's discussion for me was when Bob Dupay, the president of Major League Baseball, stood up and said if Miami wanted to be considered a major American city then it needed to build the stadium.
Major League Baseball should be ashamed of themselves. They have created and fostered a system whereby communities are extorted for money. If Major League Baseball cared about the communities they serve they should have set up a fund a long time ago to help teams build their own stadiums. And the only reason Major League Baseball doesn't take responsibility for their own construction projects are because elected officials keep doing it for them.
One of the stranger debates during Monday's commission meeting was whether the public supports building a stadium. The Marlins refuse to let the stadium question go to a public vote because they knew it would lose.
And yet there was team president David Samson saying the public wants the stadium and as proof he pointed to the fact that Mayor Carlos Alvarez ran on for office, in part, on a platform that included building the stadium.
Alvarez reiterated this claim, saying of his previous challengers who opposed the stadium: "I'm here, they're not."
But Sorenson made the most persuasive argument: "The public has voted with their feet." She said Marlins attendance is one of the worst in baseball – despite their winning two world series in recent years.
And the notion that if a new stadium is built, then more people will go – the "if you build it they will come argument" – is nothing more than a "huge gamble."
"This field of dreams is going to be a nightmare for our taxpayers," she said.
One of the statement I agree with that was made by a supporters of the stadium, was repeated by several commissioners, including Jose "Pepe" Diaz who said this deal "is about the future of our children."
Indeed, it is. Long after these commissioners are out of office, this deal will come back to haunt our children.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid the commission has just shaken the baby.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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