In metro Atlanta, we have a hard time driving home from work in less than hour, trusting our public schools to remain accredited, and keeping sewers in good repair, public pensions funded, and elected officials away from a grand jury.
But we can sure as heck tear down a perfectly good sports stadium and bill the taxpayer for a new one.
This week’s news the Braves will relocate to a new home in Cobb County come 2017, with Turner Field razed in their wake, opens a new chapter in our disposable-stadium history. And what a sorry history it is.
Between 1964 and 1999, the city and state built a total of five stadiums and arenas for five professional sports franchises, even though three of those buildings housed multiple teams. By 2017, just one of those five facilities will remain standing.
And yes, at the rate we’ve been going, I’m making an awfully big assumption about what the future holds for what will then be a nearly 20-year-old Philips Arena.
It appears there’s a 25-year itch in these parts. Construction of the Georgia Dome began 25 years after workers broke ground on what became Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The Omni was demolished after 25 years to make way for Philips. The Falcons’ new stadium will open 25 years after the Dome did.
The phoenix may be Atlanta’s symbol, but I don’t think Sherman’s approach to the city was meant to be a model.
The Braves will spend only 20 years at The Ted, and that’s not the only ominous sign here. If stadium fatigue hits sports franchises faster these days, the cost of the remedies they seek is only going up.
Together, the cost of those first five facilities came to about $1.2 billion in today’s dollars. As it happens, that’s the latest estimate for the new Falcons stadium alone.
The preliminary figure of $672 million for the Braves’ new home in Cobb, meanwhile, would surpass the inflation-adjusted price of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, the Omni and the Dome combined.
While private money will pay for a large chunk of the construction costs of the new Braves and Falcons stadiums, taxpayers in Atlanta and Cobb still stand to be on the hook for perhaps $1 billion (pending the full details of Cobb’s public-financing plans).
All told, taxpayers will have spent or committed roughly $2 billion to build sports facilities during a 30-year span.
That’s a 30-year span, remember, when the state has shortchanged transportation needs and Atlanta has accumulated an infrastructure backlog Mayor Kasim Reed puts at almost $1 billion.
Sports facilities are notoriously bad public investments: They mostly shift consumer spending away from other uses. And it’s not as if our teams have been winning enough to make up the difference.
The Braves, Falcons, Hawks and two former hockey franchises, the Flames and Thrashers, have played a combined 162 seasons in Atlanta since 1966. We have seen even one of them win just a single playoff series (or game, in the Falcons’ case) only every 18 months on average.
If you weren’t here in 1995, when the Braves won the World Series, you missed the only championship in those 162 seasons.
Reed, who said Tuesday he has as much recent polling on sports stadiums as any American politician, puts the general public attitude at 70 percent against public financing of these facilities. There aren’t that many team owners, pro athletes, stadium employees, and elected officials whose names will go on a plaque somewhere in the building (as well, one expects, as the guest list for a lot of luxury boxes). So, it’s somewhat surprising support hits even 30 percent.
Yet, we keep tearing down and building, tearing down and building. That’s in part because those who want a new stadium will always find creative ways to disguise the fact every public dollar, no matter which bucket it comes from, is a dollar that could have gone to another use or stayed in someone’s pocket.
And apparently we will keep falling for it.
