Take Me Out to the Suburbs

The Atlanta Braves’ long nightmare is finally over. The baseball team has announced that it will move out of its downtown stadium, Turner Field, after a whopping . . . 16 years . . . and move to the greener pastures of suburban Cobb County. “That’s a shock,” Sports Illustrated writes, “in that the Braves have only been playing in Turner Field—which was built for the 1996 Summer Olympics—since 1997. Such a move will make it the first of the 24 major league ballparks to open since 1989 to be replaced, and buck the trend of teams returning to urban centers.”

Indeed it does. Here, at least, is the rationale given by the team:

Turner Field currently needs $150 million in infrastructure work (including seat replacement, upgrades to the lighting, etc.), none of which would significantly enhance the fan experience. If the Braves were to pay for additional projects focused on improving the fan experience, the additional costs would exceed $200 million.

Even with a significant capital investment in Turner Field, there are several issues that cannot be overcome—lack of consistent mass transit to the facility, lack of adequate parking, lack of access to major roadways and lack of control over the development of the surrounding area.

Turner Field, it should be said, is among the uglier of the new baseball-specific stadiums built since the 1990s that replaced the old, concrete, Soviet-looking multipurpose stadiums of the 1960s and 70s. That’s because it wasn’t even originally a baseball-specific stadium. It was built as an 85,000-seat stadium for the 1996 Olympics, and then retrofitted for the Braves beginning in 1997. One might say it lacks a certain coziness and old jewel-box style charm that stadiums like Camden Yards in Baltimore (opened in 1992) pioneered.

Then again: So what? Is the thing really falling apart that much? It seems more likely that the Braves’ ownership wanted the most top-of-the-line facility — who wouldn’t? — with lots of shopping and restaurants and other dumb entertainment things in the area for people to spend more money on. And since Cobb County offered to put up $450 million (!) in financing of the $672 million proposed facility, hey, why not?

Speaking of Cobb County putting up $450 million in financing: where the hell is it getting that money from? Sure, it’s one of the richer counties in the country, but that’s still $450 million. And it’s not like the county treasuries have been especially flush with cash to pay for everything their little hearts desire. Such as, say, teachers:

Cobb County’s school board approved a 2013-14 budget Thursday night that will result in five furlough days for all employees, the loss of 182 teachers through attrition and a slimmer central administration staff.

[…]

Since March, board members and administrators have been at a crossroads on how to close an $86.4 million budget deficit largely caused by state austerity cuts and reduced local property tax collections.

In order to stave off more severe cuts, the board will pull more than $41 million from its fund balance reserves, a sort of savings account.

But sure, what the hell, how about a new and completely unnecessary stadium where the county (with a $86.4 million school budget shortfall and collapsing property tax revenues) puts up $450 million? The dealmakers here will promise more captured revenue from the stadium and surrounding development, but there’s no avoiding that much of the cost will be passed on to taxpayers in the short term. In Republican suburban Georgia, it should be interesting to see how that flies with the citizenry.

And speaking of the Georgia GOP, leave it to a good ol’ local Republican party official to put in near explicit terms the other, more hush-hush aspect of this move (emphasis ours):

Joe Dendy, chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, says that he has two conditions for supporting the Braves’ proposed move (h/t Jim Galloway):

1.) That Cobb County citizens won’t have to pay higher taxes as a result, and

2.) “It is absolutely necessary the (transportation) solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from our north and east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta.”

Cobb County is not serviced by the local rail system at all, and the local GOP chairman is making it clear that he doesn’t want this stadium deal to change that. Because just who might take the train out to this lovely suburban enclave from, say, inner-city Atlanta? As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jay Bookman headlined his article about it, “Cobb GOP chairman concerned about (those) people coming to Braves’ games.”

At Sports on Earth, Neil deMause wonders if this marks the beginning of a new “stadium spree,” even among the teams that built new parks in the 1990s. In other words, what if team owners all try to extort the cities whose downtown areas they reclaimed in the 1990s by playing them against wealthier, whiter suburban areas where nice families “won’t have to risk seeing any poor black people while walking from the parking lot”? The suburbs, he writes, present the omnipresent threat MLB owners have been looking for as leverage in attaining insane public subsidies:

While the White Sox, Indians, and the like may not be able to find suburban counties quite so eager to throw money at them, the Braves’ move does provide them with a great new storyline for subsidy shakedowns. Baseball, after all, has found itself in a bit of a threat shortage: Ever since the Montreal Expos occupied Washington, D.C., in 2005, MLB teams have lacked a big, empty market to frighten local officials with, as the NFL has successfully done with Los Angeles. (The best vacant market for MLB is almost certainly now — irony alert — Montreal.) Now, though, teams can gesture vaguely in the direction of Atlanta, or just show up to lease talks carrying one of those foam tomahawks, and everyone will get the message: Make us happy or we’ll split for the suburbs.

You can always count on the suburbs to fuck up everything.