The worst idea ever in St. Louis refuses to go away.
In an article in today’s Post-Dispatch—which appears to have graciously allowed the Cardinals’ PR staff to contribute to the lead paragraph and illustration—it was reported that the Cardinals’ ownership group is requesting “at least $57 million in public subsidies” for its Ballpark Village project.
The only way this project could bring legitimate attention to St. Louis is if it makes the Guinness Book of World Records on a list of overpromised, overestimated, or misrepresented civic projects. Originally conceived as a fig leaf to rationalize the Cardinals’ unsightly request for a $250 million welfare handout from the state of Missouri, the plan has been downsized so many times that it should sponsor The Biggest Loser.
In this case, of course, the biggest loser figures to be the city of St. Louis, where officials desperate for any new project that sounds good—and politically beholden to the Cardinals’ powerful ownership group—are about to give away $22.5 million in federal New Market Tax Credits that could be used for legitimately beneficial projects. And, by the way, to help developers who actually need help.
This is the most galling part of the story: The St. Louis Cardinals’ owners absolutely, positively, and unequivocally do not need financial assistance from the taxpayers for any reason whatsoever. Nada.
A decade ago, the St. Louis Business Journal reported that the team’s owners had a collective net worth of more than $4 billion. That number hasn’t been updated, but it’s reasonable to assume that William DeWitt Jr. and company will not be directly affected if wingnuts in the state legislature succeed in drug-testing welfare recipients. (That is, unless the new testing applied to corporate-welfare recipients).
People of such means do not need to borrow “at least $35 million and up to $47 million” through public financing for projects that are worth doing. Even in these difficult times, banks would fall all over themselves to make loans to DeWitt and company for any project that made the least bit of sense.
Consider the financial health of the St. Louis Cardinals. It has been widely reported that the ownership group bought the team and two parking garages for $150 million, and then sold the garages for roughly $95 million. Fifteen years later, the owners’ net worth blossomed to an estimated $488 million, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual assessment of baseball franchise values.
How many businesses grow in value nine foldin 15 years? How many businesses grow nearly half a billion dollars in net worth in 15 years?
How many businesses would even consider having hands out for public assistance after achieving such success?
Forbes ranks the Cardinals 8th in net worth and 9th in revenues (at $195 million) among baseball’s 30 franchises. So much for the team’s self-pitying talk of being a “mid-market” team that needs public help to compete with the big bad boys of larger cities.
Forbes pegs its annual profits at a seemingly conservative $12.8 million, but it seems certain that the owners have racked up hundreds of millions in addition to the growth of their asset. But they need public financing to build Ballpark Village.
About the only defense one could muster in the Cardinals’ behalf is that the project is arguably so worthless that banks wouldn’t want to touch it despite all their wealth. The latest incarnation of the project promises “a plaza for concerts,” which St. Louis—overrun with concert venues (even before the old Kiel Opera House is restored)—most certainly does not need.
It also proposes “unique stores and restaurants” for which there is no demand. If there were demand, they would already have existed around the old Busch Stadium, or the new one, since St. Louisans have been going to the same place downtown for the same purpose (to watch baseball) for 45 years.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that the average family spends hundreds of dollars and takes several hours out of the day to attend Cardinal games. Spending still more money and time in “unique” stores seems a uniquely unattractive idea.
So, too, does the notion of constructing a new, 12- or 13-story office building that would use city-government subsidy to compete with a downtown core that it is already plagued with a 25-percent vacancy rate. Adding insult to injury, the new building’s prized tenant—Stifel Nicolaus—would be lured from an existing downtown skyscraper, leaving it with a devastating six-floor hole.
This isn’t a new idea: We discussed its lunacy in April 2009. That the mayor’s office thinks it's good policy to use scarce tax credits to move a company from one side of downtown to another says all you need to know about the state of urban planning in St. Louis today.
In the understatement of the century, Stephen Bronner, managing principal of Parmenter Realty Partners, which owns One Financial Plaza—which stands to be decimated by Stifel’s departure—had this to say to the Post:
“We’re a little challenged by being put in a position where we are competing in some ways with the government, which has pretty deep pockets."
In 2007, Bronner’s Dallas-based company purchased the building, probably not fully understanding what it was getting itself into it.
You see, Mr. Bronner, in St. Louis it’s the government that’s a little challenged.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
