FIVE BOSTON BUSINESSMEN and the chancellor of Boston College believe they "will have done well by our citizens and our Commonwealth" if they succeed in derailing the New England Patriots' agreement to move from Massachusetts to Connecticut. But they offer no evidence for that belief. That is because there is none.
Indeed, the six prominent Bostonians — Wayne Budd, William Connell, John Connors Jr., Paul Kirk Jr., Thomas May, and the Rev. J. Donald Monan Five Boston businessmen and the chancellor of Boston College believe they "will have done well by our citizens and our Commonwealth" if they succeed in derailing the New England Patriots' agreement to move from Massachusetts to Connecticut. But they offer no evidence for that belief. That is because there is none.
Indeed, the six prominent Bostonians — Wayne Budd, William Connell, John Connors Jr., Paul Kirk Jr., Thomas May, and the Rev. J. Donald Monan — don't even try to make an argument for keeping the Patriots in Massachusetts. They merely assert, "We — not Hartford — should be the home of the Patriots." Why? Who knows? The closest Budd & Co. come to an explanation is their passing reference to "our state's dynamic economic growth."
But the Patriots are irrelevant to the Massachusetts economy. Their presence hasn't been a boon, and their departure wouldn't be a blow. Budd & Co. imply that forcing taxpayers to subsidize a new stadium — that is what they are calling for, even if they never muster the candor to say so — would be good for the Commonwealth and its residents. There is a mountain of economic research that says they are wrong.
* Robert Baade of Lake Forest University compared data from 36 metropolitan regions that have professional sports teams with 12 regions that don't. Finding: Pro sports had no statistically significant impact on economic growth rates.
* Baade and Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago looked at 35 years' worth of data to test the hypothesis that adding a new team or stadium leads to higher employment. Finding: No new net job creation takes place, since leisure spending does not measurably increase and not enough fans are attracted from outside the region to make an economic difference.
* Michael Walden of North Carolina State University studied growth patterns in 46 cities between 1990 and 1994. Finding: Cities with major league sports teams grew more slowly than those without them.
* Denis Coates and Brad Humphreys of the University of Maryland analyzed the effect of professional sports on per capita income. Finding: Cities with new ballparks suffered a $100 decrease in per capita income. In cities with new baseball teams, the drop was $400.
* The Allegheny Institute ranked cities according to their ability to attract new business facilities or expand existing ones in 1990-95. Finding: Five out of the five slowest-growing cities were home to two or more big-league teams. Of the nine fastest-growing local economies, none had a major league baseball or football team.
If Boston's tycoons want the Patriots to have a new stadium, nothing prevents them from privately raising the money to build one. Some of the finest ballparks and arenas in America were built with private funds, including Fenway Park, Chicago's United Center, and Turner Field in Atlanta. But if Budd and friends aren't willing to risk their own capital on a stadium project, what possible excuse can they have for risking everyone else's?
"A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment," conclude Roger Noll of Stanford University and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College in a study for the Brookings Institution. "No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of . . . net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus."
How much clearer can it be? When taxpayers are forced to subsidize sports teams and stadiums, the chief beneficiaries are nearly always the millionaire players and their multimillionaire owners. This is corporate welfare at its most egregious.
There is no "multiplier" effect from pumping public money into ballparks. Maryland taxpayers spent nearly $500 million to subsidize beautiful new stadiums for the Orioles and the Ravens. Yet their city's blight, if anything, grew worse. Residents are fleeing Baltimore at the rate of 1,000 per month. The new facilities provided full-time work for fewer than 2,500 people, which means that the new employment was achieved at a cost to taxpayers of $200,000 per job.
Ballparks rarely attract new money. Families tend to have a fixed amount of income available for entertainment; if they don't spend it on professional sports, they spend it on a concert or video rentals or a boat show. And since the vast majority of fans attending a game live within 20 miles of the stadium, money spent on sports is money that would have been spent locally anyway.
The evidence is beyond dispute: There is no economic case for diverting public funds to woo a major league sports team. Nor is there any pressing need to make Bob Kraft and his football players richer than they already are. If Wayne Budd and his colleagues want the Patriots to have a subsidy, let them pass the hat among their friends. Better yet, let them listen to Chuck Sullivan.
"My dad wouldn't have let the taxpayers of Massachusetts or Connecticut build a stadium for him," says the son of Billy Sullivan, the Patriots' longtime owner. "He felt the taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill for a private business."
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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