Gwinnett stadium backers follow Texas' lead

The folks in Frisco, Texas, have been awfully busy the past few years.

After hearing a new mall that transformed the community into a commercial powerhouse might not survive without more shoppers, city leaders set out on a plan to transform the city into a center of sports tourism.

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Vino Wong/vwong@ajc.com

Construction goes on at the Gwinnett Braves’ new ballpark off I-85. The stadium is to open next spring in time for the team’s season opener April 17 against Norfolk.

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They built a bicycle racing venue. Then a baseball stadium. A hockey arena. A convention center. A soccer stadium. Hotel occupancy has exploded, along with taxes on room rentals, said James Gandy, president of the Frisco Economic Development Corp. Sales tax collections also have increased.

It’s a model Gwinnett County leaders frequently point to when they argue their new 10,000-seat baseball stadium will catalyze development around the Buford Drive site near Lawrencville, more than making up for the $64 million cost, including the cost of the land. The county is covering $31 million of the cost in cash.

Whether it truly will is a matter of debate, and not just from county residents angry over how the deal to build the stadium sprang fully formed into public view one day in January.

Bad for taxpayers

Supporters point to a major mixed-use project proposed by developer Brand Morgan for the area around the stadium, as well as a newer application filed by landowners across the street who want to build a new hotel, restaurant and retail complex.

But economists almost unanimously agree such stadium deals are bad for taxpayers. A 2005 survey found 90 percent of economists agreeing that governments should not subsidize sports teams.

“The only ones who think they’re going to create development and jobs aren’t economists,” said Dennis Coates, a University of Maryland-Baltimore County economics professor who has been studying stadium financing deals for 13 years.

Coates said economists find that spending on hotels, meals and similar side fare to a baseball game represents leisure money that probably would have been spent on another recreational activity anyway. Development around stadiums would have been built elsewhere, they argue. And to top it all off, studies show that per-person income in communities with professional sports teams is sometimes lower than in those without because of all the money that gets siphoned off to the places where players live and the team’s corporate ownership is located.

Such arguments are nonsense to Gwinnett County Commissioner Bert Nasuti, who came up with the idea of bringing pro ball to the county and has been an unwavering defender of the deal to build the stadium for the top minor-league affiliate of the Atlanta Braves.

Nasuti said he doesn’t understand how the county won’t gain with an estimated 400,000 people spending money at the stadium each baseball season, not to mention all the people who will live, work or shop year-round at developments now under review around the stadium site.

“I really don’t believe that without the anchor amenity of a baseball stadium there that Brand Morgan or any other developer would do the level of development that’s going to be there,” he said.

There’s no way to prove such an opinion, of course, and the area has been up for active development consideration for years. Morgan, who previously owned the stadium site, was floating the land as the site of a major mixed-use development anchored by an amphitheater before county officials snapped it up. And land-use attorney Michael Sullivan, who is representing the land owners across from the stadium in their rezoning request, said he believed the land his clients own would have been developed commercially regardless of the stadium.

But he said the stadium helped focus the land’s use and will help provide store owners with traffic that has been slow to emerge on the south side of the Buford Drive/I-85 interchange. That’s because most retailers have gravitated toward the Mall of Georgia, which is north of the interchange.

As for Frisco, that city’s experience appears to be mixed as a model for Gwinnett.

The city’s population has more than tripled to 101,000 and hotel occupancy is up, indicating increased tourism to the community about 30 miles north of Dallas, but with all the public building, there’s more at work there than just the baseball stadium.

And while sales tax revenues have exploded since 2000, they actually increased the fastest before the city’s stadium was built in 2003. During that time, more than 2.6 million square feet of retail space went live in the city, according to Gandy.

There’s also the matter of a major mixed-use development that was to have been built around the Frisco stadium. That project still has not materialized, leaving it up to the government to spearhead most of the development.

“That’s one of our disappointments with this particular development,” Gandy said. “Unfortunately it hasn’t developed in concert with our expectations.”

Gwinnett County officials haven’t studied the broad question of how much economic development sparked by the stadium might mean to the county’s economy. So far, studies have only looked at the impact of the stadium itself.

Undisputable benefits

The consulting company hired to study the feasibility of bringing baseball to Gwinnett believes the ballpark will generate $6.3 million to $8 million in net new spending each year, create 130 to 170 jobs and generate between $267,000 and $342,000 a year in taxes.

Those are numbers many academic economists would dispute. But that’s not to say there still aren’t benefits, say some.

Rodney Fort, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, said the intangible value of having a new recreational opportunity, team to root for and all that goes along with it can produce quality-of-life benefits that can help justify public spending on a project.

The dollar figures are often fairly small spread out across a community’s population, Fort argues.

Seattle officials used a similar argument in seeking to publicly finance a new stadium years ago, Fort said. Backers produced ads comparing the cost to that of a Big Mac sandwich every month.

“A lot of people are going to say, ‘No, it’s not worth a Big Mac a month,’ ” Fort said. “But a lot of people are going to say, ‘Yeah, that’s worth it.’ “