If Massachusetts banks and investment firms and under-water homeowners and lemonade stands run by 10-year-olds want to know how to tap into bailout fever and come away with some easy cash, call the Boston Red Sox and ask for advice.
The Red Sox, which occupy a mediocre stadium in a mediocre neighborhood of Fort Myers, Fla., for spring training, got the government handout itch in a way that would make Wall Street proud.
The Sox told Fort Myers and the surrounding Lee County that the team might move to Sarasota unless Fort Myers and environs coughed up about $47 trillion and the first-born child of major politicians and a new stadium and cool practice fields and shops and restaurants and a cool hotel in a nicer area; and a champagne fountain in the manager’s new oak-trimmed office and a state holiday in honor of the Red Sox.
After considerable cost-benefit analysis and soul-searching that lasted about 16 seconds, the Florida politicians have sort of, kind of, promised to give the Sox everything they want, with a few hookers and fresh Florida orange juice thrown in to seal the deal. It was a hard-nosed negotiation.
At a time when General Motors and Ford and Chrysler have to beg for loans at a time when the economy stinks and tax revenues are plunging and your momma didn’t buy you anything for Christmas, credit is due the Red Sox for strutting into southwest Florida and getting themselves bailed out in a strange kind of way because they really didn’t need to be bailed out, but only prettied up a bit. Sort of.
Oh, sure, the Minnesota Twins also do spring training just outside Fort Myers, in an unincorporated county area that is a bit nicer than the Red Sox neighborhood, in a stadium that would make any fan proud to be blond and a Lutheran and from Minnesota, wherever that is. And Sarasota is sort of cool, with lots of sissy art museums and playhouses and symphony orchestras and stuff.
But put it all together and the Red Sox still had to do some fancy dancing to make up a case for a major bailout. The stadium complex is expected to cost about $60 million, which means it will cost $70 million or $80 million or $120 million, by the time the financing of the really cool new energy-saving urinals and stuff are figured in.
The politicians will probably dip into property taxes collected from the unincorporated areas outside the cities to pay for the stadium, with a major assist from the “tourist tax” — a 5 percent tax on short-term lodgings. Some anti-baseball whiners are suggesting that the tourist tax isn’t supposed to be used for baseball stadiums, but for stuff like beach beautification and shoreline fortifications to protect the area from Sarasota economic development armies. These naysayers are probably Yankee fans or something.
Playing Ball
Whether or not the 10 or 12 or 15 spring training games that would be played each year at the new stadium would even come close to justifying the cost of the new facilities is not the point. As the Red Sox have made clear, if you don’t want us to be sending you postcards from Sarasota, build us our new stuff.
And at the same time that the Fort Myers area is prettying things up for the Red Sox, it is also begging the Baltimore Orioles to take over the old, ugly, tired ballpark and stuff that the Red Sox are abandoning.
This spring training thing is getting vicious, with competition for teams coming not just from Florida cities, but also from Arizona, which is so aggressive in growing its own spring training cluster that it has offered to bulldoze John McCain’s childhood home to make way for a new stadium.
OK, I made that up. Sort of like the way Lee County made up the estimated cost of the new Red Sox stadium and stuff.
But it is very competitive, this team-snaring stuff. And nobody has been more clever and aggressive at taking advantage than the Red Sox. It’s sort of like winning the World Series of economic development foolishness.â–
