Illustration by Ann White
Once upon a time, in a century long ago, a grand and magnificent structure arose in St. Louis. We called it the Trans World Dome, and it was promised to help us live happily ever after.
It was greeted as a gift from God, literally. On the eve before its doors would majestically swing open for all of the villagers, Archbishop Justin Rigali, Bishop Dotcy I. Isom Jr., and Rabbi Mordecai Miller appeared before the gladiators—who were garbed in hooded sweatshirts for the ancient ritual known as the “walkthrough”—and blessed them as “St. Louis Rams.” The rabbi fittingly ended the ceremony by blowing the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn of Jewish tradition and biblical lore.
“Now God is here, in our home,” gladiator D’Marco Farr said. “I’d hate to be the opposing team.”
I make this up not.
The scribe Bernie Miklasz chronicled the unveiling of this “$280 million crib” for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on November 12, 1995. He performed his duties well, aptly capturing what so many of the inhabitants in St. Louis were feeling:
“There was joy...there was pride...there were teardrops...there was laughter. The Trans World Dome is beautiful.”
And it was something else, as one of the elders called vice chairman would relate to Miklasz. This man was known as Stan Kroenke, and this is how he spoke:
“I’m excited that we have a place to play,” said Kroenke. “The fans can come in and call it their own. The players can come in and call it their own. This franchise, the players, were uprooted. This has been quite a journey. But now they’ve seen their home.”
And everyone did live happily ever after, or for two decades, whichever came first. And so ended this chapter of the fairy tale.
I recall this to remind you just how fleeting a stadium issue can be and, more important, how little can be trusted of what you think you know for certain. Today, it’s just 20 years later, not 200, yet it seems as distant as a TWA jet. The Trans World Dome, now known as the Ancient Ruins Of Edward Jones, seems not so beautiful. Kroenke—now the full owner of the team—seems not so fan friendly, seeing as how he’s decided that the franchise and players should be embarking on another journey, back to Los Angeles, of all places. And St. Louis seems not so full of joy, pride, teardrops, and laughter.
This is awkward. In one sense, St. Louis doesn’t deserve this. It’s a fine city, a great and loyal sports town, and it has been an utterly gracious home for a franchise that delivered only a brief run of glory amidst a whole lot of losing. On the other hand, we did indeed lure this team away from its previous home in L.A., with the help of many millions of taxpayer dollars, just as Phoenix had done to us several years earlier when the Big Red bolted from town. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and for now, we’re wearing Milk-Bone underwear. So it’s a bit disingenuous to act indignant—as many have done—that the NFL would permit this highly profitable circle of life to continue. We were cool with it when God blessed our dome as the new home of some other betrayed city’s departed heroes.
That said, it’s a circle that ought to be broken. According to one study, no less than $12 billion in public dollars was lavished on 48 sports facilities in the U.S. during the first decade of this century alone. And that didn’t count another $10 billion in forgone revenues from donated land, abated property taxes, and the like.
It’s a national scandal that billions in public dollars are heaped upon filthy-rich sports franchise owners for the purpose of making them filthier rich through the leveraging of monopoly privilege and exploitation of fan loyalty. And in many cases (although not necessarily this one), threats to move if stadiums aren’t built amount to nothing less than extortion.
So what to do if you’re St. Louis and don’t want to lose another team? Do you continue to throw good money after bad? From the Brookings Institution on the left to the Cato Institute on the right, one economic study after another concludes that stadiums are a terrible public investment, with no financial return. And if you roll your eyes at studies, look at St. Louis’ real-life experience: The day before opening our stadium as an interfaith event, ours was a city without an NFL team. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are we better off now than we were 20 years ago economically? Not so much.
But even considering all of that, it’s upsetting to lose a professional sports team. The St. Louis Rams are a good corporate citizen and, to many of us sports fans, an important part of our community. A team like the Rams may not move the needle economically, but it does matter to a lot of people.
And there’s this: A businessman named Dave Peacock and a lawyer named Bob Blitz—heretofore little known to the public—have shepherded a proposal for a new NFL stadium to the point that it at least has the appearance of a doable $1 billion project, of which slightly less than half would come from city and state revenues. They are reasonably viewed as heroic by sports fans, even though there’s a bit of smoke-and-mirrors feel about it all (e.g. calling two guys a “task force”). Some of their numbers remain dubious.
If you’re Mayor Francis Slay, this looms as a giant, tempting WPA-style jobs program—for which organized labor, your largest political supporter, is over the moon. It would energize a hopelessly blighted area. The lion’s share of the funding would come from outside the city, and all you would contribute is a relatively small amount of tourism money. And it’s not a choice of spending $1 billion for football and a billionaire, or spending $1 billion for something more worthwhile, because there is no “something more worthwhile” available to you. It’s take part in this miserable stadium game, or do nothing. And did I mention you’re broke?
But harking back to how little you can trust in a stadium issue: The broader your perspective, the worse this thing looks. It doesn’t matter to sports fans, but everything about the process represents bad government at its worst. Lame duck Gov. Jay Nixon has made this his signature project—partly owing to his passion for sports, partly out of desperation for a legacy—and it arguably represents the largest attempt at executive overreach in state history.
Nixon is trying to bypass all legislative processes to use what should be an expired authority for funding the original Trans World Dome to issue $201 million in bonds for the new stadium. He proposes to slide another $187 million or more in state funds through a variety of financial mechanisms available to him, all without any serious oversight or review by anyone. At the end of the day, if he’s successful, Nixon will have legally siphoned nearly $400 million in public money (assuming no overruns)—at a significant cost to Missourians for decades—with literally no public process at all. But give Nixon this much: He’s thus far played the legal system like a fiddle.
The stadium backers’ success so far has been aided by a laserlike, unwavering commitment to avoid citizen participation of any kind, especially at the ballot box. A decade or so ago, in response to the St. Louis Cardinals’ mostly failed attempt to get hundreds of millions in corporate welfare for their new stadium, both the city and county passed measures demanding that no tax revenues go for a stadium without a public vote. It’s an example of the arrogance of the current process that Nixon simply ejected St. Louis County from participation when informed by St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger that he wouldn’t try to bypass the vote requirement. Meanwhile, the stadium backers essentially staged a lawsuit in which both the plaintiff (the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority) and the defendant (the city) wanted to invalidate the city-vote ordinance. It worked.
One truly has to hold one’s nose to think this is OK.
In their defense, stadium backers will privately argue that they had no other choice than to use their end-justifies-the-means strategy, at least in part because of the NFL’s tight deadlines to consider the L.A. franchise situation.
Oh yes, that. There’s the small detail that for all of the machinations to get a new stadium here, there’s a good chance that Kroenke will succeed in moving the Rams back to L.A. next year. If that happens, St. Louis only has a slim chance of getting another team, even if the stadium backers survive other legal challenges. And if Kroenke stays, he has nine one-year options to play at the Ancient Ed, as opposed to investing $250 million in the stadium. And that might blow up the dream in any event. Whether the “task force” has more tricks up its sleeve remains to be seen.
It doesn’t seem like such a happy fairy tale now. And I’m not sure we can look to God this time to fix it.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
