Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 939: Death to Dumb Stadium Deals

Episode Date: August 12, 2016

Ben and Sam talk to Georgia State University Assistant Professor Tim Kellison about his initiative to combat misinformation about public stadium funding for sports teams.

Information travels faster in the modern age, in the modern age, as our days are calling us so slowly. The nation travels faster In the modern age, in the modern age As the days are crawling by so slowly Hello and welcome to episode 939 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Sam. Sam Miller A couple times already this year,

we have had occasion to talk about stadium funding deals and the ways in which the public seems to be wronged by owners who make lots of money off of local officials' willingness to rubber stamp anything that franchises want. And we talked about this briefly in episode 9-11. That was about the Rangers' new ballpark and the discussion of that in Arlington. Then back in episode 873, we did a whole episode on the Braves, who are the masters, the evil masters of this practice and are doing the best they can to get stadiums for free at every level of their system, most notably in AAA and Cobb County and also in Atlanta with their new stadium, SunTrust Park, that's opening next year. So it's been a bleak landscape of teams getting away with this and very few local communities seeming to stand up in opposition. But there is one lone hero who has arisen to take on the teams. And his name is Tim Kellison. He is an assistant professor in sports administration at Georgia State University. State University, and he is also the director of a new initiative called the Sports and Urban Policy Initiative, which is based in Atlanta and run by Georgia State University's Department of

Kinesiology and Health. Tim, hello, welcome. Kyle, you guys are getting me in so much trouble already, but thanks for having me on anyway. You didn't say any of that. It was all me. That's right. That your blinks. So I assume it's not a complete coincidence that you are near the Atlanta epicenter of the stadium funding battles these days. No, it's not a coincidence. And you know, Atlanta has been, as you said, kind of a focal point for this kind of stuff. And it didn't start here. It didn't start with the Olympics. You know, there's just Atlanta and its stadiums have a long, illustrious past.

And I don't see that changing anytime in the future, depending on what side you're on, you know, unfortunately or fortunately. So how did you get the idea to do something about this? Because everyone laments it or lots of people in the media lament it, but it keeps happening over and over. And so how did you decide to be the one to try to at least offer some information that could counter the misinformation that gets bandied about? Yeah, well, Georgia State, the university as a whole has as part of its strategic initiative, as a whole has as part of its strategic initiative, this idea of as an urban university in downtown Atlanta, you can't really separate the academic world from what's happening out in the city. So

as one of its goals, it's to kind of address the issues that challenge modern cities. And certainly there's some huge overlap, we think, with the stadium financing and just professional and collegiate big time sports in general, with kind of the urban landscape and the way that it impacts sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, you know, local citizens and those folks living in and around kind of the stadium footprint. So that's kind of the impetus for the initiative, at least for our focus on stadiums and development. We also, as part of our goals of trying to solve some of those problems, I shouldn't say solve, at least bringing to light some of those problems. We also have a focus on environmental sustainability,

which again, overlaps with stadium design and kind of the strategic initiatives that teams have, and also community engagement. But yeah, the big one seems to be stadiums and development. That's certainly the big money one. And that attracts a lot of attention in the press and among citizens as it rightfully should, I think. So Ben used the word misinformation. And among the, you know, roughly 26 people in the world that I actually know, pretty much all of them probably are aware that stadiums are a bad deal for municipalities. But I'm curious if you have a sense of how widespread the misinformation is, if there's any way to put it in perspective. And particularly, I'm like, the Braves got their stadium, not by

public referendum, but because a city council approved it, if I'm not mistaken, right? You're right. I'm curious, when municipalities actually put this up to a vote, how gullible are the voters actually? I won't speak to their gullibleness, but I will speak to how often it passes or fails. it passes or fails. It seems like since 2000, there's been, let's see, probably 12 to 13 public stadium votes that have affected big league teams. And they've got a pretty decent track record. About half of them have passed. Another half have failed. So the Islanders were unsuccessful a few years back. And now they're at the Barclays Center, at least for, I don't know, another season maybe. And they're already looking Barclays Center, at least for, I don't know, another season maybe.

And they're already looking for other places to go. Sacramento Kings have had problems. But for the most part, teams can be successful. And a lot of the research that I've looked at that has been done talks about the different ways in which the stadium votes can be successful. But I think the bigger picture is that these votes are pretty rare, that the upcoming one in Arlington is not all that common. So often we think, well, voters, you know, have a say one way or the other. But for the vast majority of stadium issues in

North America, it's almost entirely done the way the Cobb County one was done, which is by elected officials, usually county commissioners or city council members or both. And do you have a sense of, well, I don't, there's probably no way of really putting a number on this, but how much of the sales pitch to the public is generally based on a financial improvement and not the sort of things that while perhaps intangible and perhaps more, you know, sort of quality of life based might still be, you know, they are at least real. Like you cannot deny that, you know, a baseball team is

playing there. You can deny whether it's actually a good investment or not. Right. I think that traditionally, historically, that's the message that teams have been promoting, or at least those post-subsidy groups, they're not always the teams themselves, but they also local officials or business leaders, or a combination of all those. Almost, you know, over the history of these issues, the economic impact has always been a very significant aspect of a campaign to get a publicly financed stadium. I will say that in the last couple of years, though, it seems that teams have kind of moved away from this.

I think that in some ways, citizens in different parts of the United States, at least, are becoming more aware of the research that's been out there, which is almost entirely 100% universally sponsored or impartial researchers, especially economists have found that the public investment never is realized through economic impact. So the economic impact is never going to equal the amount of money that's invested by the public on these issues, on these plans. Who does the research that does purport to show an economic impact? Those are typically just consultants who are hired, private consultants for the most part, typically from firms, some that are well known, that are hired to whether impartial or not, for the most part, if they're finding a huge economic impact, we would argue that it's it can't be impartial,

because the independent research that's been conducted for years, get consistent. It's one of the few things I think economists really have agreed about is that these economic impacts are much, much lower than what a team usually purports them to be. You mentioned a couple of cases where this didn't work for teams and those were non-baseball examples. Do you have any sense of whether baseball teams have a better record of getting these things through than owners in other sports? of getting these things through than owners in other sports. I'm thinking maybe because baseball's audience skews older, maybe those baseball fans are more likely to be voting in these referenda or to be on the local city council, or maybe because of baseball's long history, there are more deep roots in the local community, that kind of thing. But I don't know whether that holds up to the data. Yeah. The fact is the sample size is just too small to kind of pull any of that analysis out.

If we look back again, it's going back to 2000. Looks like major league centered stadium votes, there's been two, the Rangers will be the third one. And so the first one was the Rangers, or sorry, the Royals and the Chiefs back in 2006, one of which passed and the other so they were kind of bundled together. One was for the rolling roof that we talked about a while ago. So one of those passed and then the Indians most recently got a vote passed, but it was bundled with the Cavaliers and Browns. So it was kind of it was an extension of a syntax to for all the stadiums in Cleveland. So the sample size is just too small to kind of pull any of that stuff out. And it goes again to speak to the fact that these stadium votes are pretty rare, at least in terms of citizens and local voters having a direct say.

And of the ongoing flare-ups in this ongoing war, I guess there's what the Braves at multiple levels, the Rangers and the Diamondbacks have one going on too about repairs and whether the city is liable for those. Is there one that has the best chance of not working out in the team's favor? Yeah, well, you named the three ones for this week, but it's tough to say what will be next week. The Braves, well, obviously, that stadium's very far along now. It gets further along every week. I will say that a recent, I guess the last bit of public say in this was during the runoff election at the county level of Cobb County, where Tim Lee was kind of the architect for this deal.

He was ousted by a challenger who was new to politics and basically made it a one-issue re-election case, which was about the Cobb Stadium. And Mike Boyce, he's the opponent who subsequently won in a runoff. He didn't say anything necessarily bad about the stadium. He said he didn't oppose it, but he was against the way in which the decision was made, which is kind of quickly and without Cobb voters really getting much insight and transparency on the issue. The Arlington ones, I'm obviously interested in because it's going to be one of those public votes that we don't see very often. So as polls, maybe if they start coming out, I don't know if there will be any polling done. Certainly, that's something we'd be interested in looking at,

is what are voters saying? How does that break down by race and gender and all the other demographics that we often look at? And then, yeah, this Diamondbacks one's new. And I've just been following it. It's almost like a tabloid about the political infighting that takes place. And it does speak to kind of the politics that does kind of underlie all these issues that we aren't often privy to, but certainly makes for interesting reading. It seems like the Braves scheme or whatever word of having their minor league affiliates also get stadium funding is sort of a very different class because, I mean, in the one, you know, for a major league team, for a major league city, having a team in your city is, you know, it's kind of a prestige thing. It puts you on, on the map and, and establishes that you're,

you know, a real city. Uh, whereas the minor league stuff, it's really like, I would imagine that the benefit is really does boil down almost exclusively to, you know, how many vending jobs you have and, and how many, um, how much money goes into development of the park and that sort of stuff. So is one of those, I guess I would ask if the research on those two different kind of categories is fairly consistent, or if there is any better or worse case to be made for the minor league parks compared to the major league parks. Yeah, I think that it's worth noting there hasn't been a lot of research done outside of kind of the big pro levels. Certainly, there's been some stuff on spring training stadiums, on some minor league stuff. I usually approach it just by a case-by-case, on a case-by-case basis. So certainly some of those smaller market teams that are AAA, even AA, they do see some benefit.

But they're also not investing a whole lot of money. In some cases, they are. And when they are investing a lot of money, they just have to, I think it's important that local citizens realize that this is not going to drive your economy. Certainly, it's going to be something fun for your family to go see, maybe. But yeah, I always just take it on a case-by-case basis. I think that for those smaller market teams, even at the pro level, there aren't that many, but there's something that can be pulled out of that or something that can be said about what those stadiums do for their local economy. But still, it's very minimal. I would never say, go ahead, public support this 100%. percent. In my view, there's always got to be some sort of partnership and a partnership isn't just a 90% public, 10% private kind of breakdown. It's got to be much more equitable. To your knowledge, is there any example from the past of a city where in fact, it did make a big difference on the economy that it bumped them into some extra new tier of

economic development or something and provided an example that all these other parks, all these other cities hold up? Yeah. Okay. So I'll try to answer this in a non-economist way because I don't want to offend real economists. I'm certainly not one. I study what they've written. So most of the places today that are popular, that are often cited as a

real opportunity to turn around an economy or to revitalize an area are these places that are basically districts, entertainment districts. So Cobb, the SunTrust Park development is not just going to be a stadium, but it's also going to be a part of the Battery Atlanta, which is going to have shops and all this private investment that will help support or complement the stadium itself. Historically, Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio was one that was thought to be a good marker of success. And it has dramatically changed the downtown area of Columbus. But part of the appeal of that stadium was, of that arena for the Blue Jackets, the NHL team, was that it was originally developed privately, that the public voted on the issue and they opposed it. So they lost the referendum. And as a result, the stadium still

was built, but it was just built privately, which is how we tend to think these things should work that if voters say no, we don't want to spend any money. If private owners or developers still want to build it, they'll build it with their own money. And so historically, that was a good case. And so historically, that was a good case. Nationwide has since changed a little bit. The ownership is now at the county level that the city and county now own Nationwide Arena. So that's changed a bit. But that's usually one that I think in Edmonton, they're trying to build a new hockey arena.

They're working to build one. And that was they're trying to base it off of the nationwide arena impact. But again, a lot of it has to deal with, okay, well, how much money is being invested in these public versus private? So to bring it back to the sports and urban policy initiative, what are you working on? And what are you hoping to accomplish? Yeah. Well, one of our goals, one of the initiatives that we have in the initiative, that was clever, is our StadiaTrack data source, which is basically a breakdown of some of the data I've already cited. At StadiaTrack.com, you can look at the history of the public stadium referendum since 2000. Again, it's a short list, but we try to put it there so people have at least a sense of how often these things happen. And then that can be compared with another data set we have

that focuses on all the professional sports stadiums receiving public funding since 2005, which when you total it up, it's $22 billion of stadiums have been constructed since 2005, almost $11 billion of which has been from the public. And if you break that down even further, $9.5 billion have been spent without a public vote on these issues. So that's, you know, depending on how you're measuring that, it's either a very large amount or maybe not so much. Depends on which side you're on probably so that's one aspect of the of the initiative that we're focusing on i'm currently in south africa

and part of what we're doing here is we're working with some colleagues at and cape town and pretoria where we're measuring the impact or hoping to measure the impact of some of the stadiums first that were built for the World Cup and then looking to expand on that. How that's impacted, if any, local citizens here. It just goes to show that this isn't limited to local politics or state or national, that these things exist all over the world. And certainly with these big mega events, if you read about what's going on in Rio or what's happening in Qatar, what happened in South Africa, certainly these things kind of follow us around wherever we go. Can you give us any sense of how you try to assess that impact? I mean, what measures do you look at kind during the fact finding mission that we have. We're just trying to understand some of the narratives and some of the stories of those folks who have been impacted. That's been a big part of the literature,

particularly in Atlanta, focusing on the impact on the neighborhoods surrounding Turner Field and Summer Hill and People's Town and Mechanicsville and all these other local neighborhoods. So we focus more or we're focusing more right now on those individual stories and then try to grow that and focusing on more quantitative measures, which economists have looked at, which is local spending and so on. And do you think that a lack of information is high up on the reasons for why these things have gotten approved in the past? Or do you think that, you know, there are just all of these incentives that these local officials have that either they're reading the research and disregarding it, or they just aren't interested in looking and, you know, might not even be

interested if someone told them it was there? Yeah, it really, it depends on how I'm feeling on a given day. Some days I feel optimistic. And I think, you know, this information is just missing. And as the public becomes more and more aware of spending, or at least has a better idea of where their money is going, at least they can give that a fair evaluation. And so if they go to a referendum or a ballot box, they'll have all the information they need to make a well-reasoned decision. And then it's up to them. If they want to invest and they realize that the economic impact will not be as high, but maybe they're a public image impact or a source of pride, or you just don't want to see your team leave, I think that's part of democracy.

However, other days I think, well, given this information, I don't know how you could vote in any other way. And so I don't know. Today, I feel okay about it. Tomorrow, I might feel, you know, less optimistic about information. Certainly, the research has shown some folks like Rod Ford have found that, you know, even if you can get this information out, to me, a referendum is a good, it's something that we look for, a goal that we strive toward. But research shows that even in

those cases, they get all messed up too. The voters don't always know what they want, or don't always know what they're voting for, that the median voter doesn't always get what she or he wants in an outcome, that those anti-subsidy groups are significantly outspent. It's much harder for them to get together and collaborate and to kind of create some sort of momentum against all the economic engine that's helping promote a pro-subsidy thing. So, yeah, I don't know. That was a terrible answer because I just end up not knowing at all. Every time we talk about this on this show, it seems like we always end up with this

depressing resignation to the fact that people just like to have, I mean, like city council people, I think, just really like to say they built that stadium, like they like to build. I would bet that if you had a referendum, or if you had a city council consider a say $600 million, you know, public subsidy of a stadium, and you told them there would be zero economic economic benefit that it would just be $600 million going from the city to the team. Like I bet you'd still get 30% in November in favor of it because people just like stadiums. It's kind of crazy. Or maybe it's not. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. I mean, I like stadiums too. And I don't know that I would vote, you know, against every single stadium subsidy referendum that was out there. I certainly think that there's value in keeping teams in your cities. I just think that, again, citizens should have a full understanding of what it means. And, you know, I grew up as a sports fan. That's why I decided to,

you know, make it a career to study sports issues. But I think that I've grown, maybe not wiser, but at least I know more. I don't know that I always use that information well. But I think that I sometimes it's easier for me now to say, well, the city would be okay with that team moving somewhere else. And teams, people sometimes just need to let things go. But certainly that's easy for me to say, because I don't really care about the Braves. I'll probably go to the games no matter what. But, you know, I just won't have to spend my tax dollars on it anymore. That's co-voters now, and I'm in DeKalb County.

All right. So you mentioned the information you're trying to gather in South Africa. Is there anything else that you are trying to add to the site or trying to add to your database that people might expect would be available sometime soon? Yeah. So one of our challenges, I'm speaking on behalf of all academics in the world now that our research is boring and doesn't always, it's hard to find. And when you do find it, it doesn't seem like it's saying anything. So part of what we're trying to do is take some of the research we're doing at Georgia State and with our colleagues across around the world now and trying to make it more palatable to the public to just create some more understanding. So as we develop more relationships, and as we publish more research, we're going to not only put it in these hard to find peer reviewed journals, but we're also going to speak or put in a plainer language, language that I, you can tell by the way I talk that I speak a little more down to a level of, well, see, I came in, I came and formulated a sentence right now. So,

to make it more publicly palatable, I suppose. And so, I would say check the website for more development. Hopefully, you know, the press plays an important role. Certainly, we think the public understanding is critical to these things. And we researchers, we don't do a very good job of that. But we do rely on, you know, resources like the one I'm talking on now to kind of help further this conversation. I think that's where the important work lies. So we're trying to, you know, create some more understanding of these issues, you know, through people like you. Yeah, well, so tell everyone where they can find you where they can find information about the program, where they can see the data, whatever you want to plug. Go ahead.

Thanks. Okay. So the Sport and Urban Policy Initiative, you can find us easily at www.stadiatrack.com. That'll get you to our data set. And then you can find more stuff out about the initiative there. Certainly, if you're interested in these issues more, you can always email me at tkellison at gsu.edu. I'm happy to talk to anyone really. But yeah, usually it's just my mom calling me. So I'm happy to talk to anyone who seems to have more interest in these issues than she does. All right. And everyone can also find Tim on Twitter at tbkellison. Tim, thank you very much for starting this and for filling us in. Thanks, fellas. Thank you very much for having me on and, like I said, keeping this narrative going.

Okay, so that is it for today. You can support the podcast by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already supported the podcast on Patreon are Andy Karl, Brett O'Neill, Andrew Patrick, Edward Colliden, and Eric Sorensen. Thank you. our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the play index by going to baseball reference.com and using the coupon code BP. When you sign up, that's it for this week.

If you're at saber seminar this weekend or in Boston or Red Sox game on Saturday, I hope you'll say hello to me and Sam. Those of you who aren't there, hopefully you'll hear our recorded live show sometime soon. So have a nice weekend, and we will talk to you next week. Thanks for the information

Oh, I'll never give a sucker and leave it great When you're onto something Gets a dime and it does it People start coming out of the woodwork Thanks for the invitation I know I must be on to something big Every time I take two steps forward

I end up having to take three back