Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
Local elected officials are for it. Now the governor is on board.
It seems the only folks who won't have a say in whether Augusta builds a baseball stadium on the river downtown will be the voters of Augusta.
That's just one of the handful of problems we see with the city's plans to break ground on the new stadium as early as this fall.
We also question the long-term financial feasibility of the project. Stadiums are infamous for being money pits all across the country. Take Aberdeen, Md., for instance: According to the Baltimore Sun , the baseball stadium there was filled to capacity for every game for years following its 2002 opening -- and yet the city was still losing money every night.
"(Aberdeen) owes $6.7 million in stadium-related debt, and millions in interest, on a payment schedule stretching to 2022," The Sun reported a couple years ago. "The city's stadium fund has posted operating losses that total more than $1 million since 2001, forcing Aberdeen to dip into its treasury."
When the stadium was built, the city's entire budget was $7 million.
"Municipalities, especially this one, shouldn't be in this type of business," Aberdeen Mayor S. Fred Simmons said in a 2005 e-mail.
"Independent studies of sports facilities," Brookings Institution visiting fellow Roger G. Noll wrote in 1996, "invariably conclude that they provide no significant economic benefits. A sports team does increase overall income in a community slightly, but the increase never offsets the stadium's financing and operating costs.
"Stadiums are bad investments, which is why the teams themselves are never willing to pay for them."
We also strongly believe that the geography is all wrong -- that the stadium is the wrong project for valuable downtown riverfront land. We seriously doubt that a comprehensive, objective and open-ended study of the highest and best use of that land would come back and suggest a ballpark.
Moreover, the city's current baseball stadium just up the road at Lake Olmstead, which houses the Class A minor league Augusta Greenjackets, is significantly more than adequate -- having been built in 1995 and updated just a couple years ago.
"This is the way more new parks should be built," says a glowing review of Lake Olmstead Stadium at www.ballparkreviews.com, which gives the stadium a grade of A-. "Augusta has made the outside look nice without spending a lot of money on it.
"It truly is a unique ballpark. There has been talk of building a new ballpark in Augusta, but here's hoping that Lake Olmstead lives on for many more years."
We agree. This doesn't sound to us like a facility that needs to be traded in -- especially in such a tight economy.
As troubling as anything, though, is the fact that voters won't be asked to weigh in.
The financing scheme may not require a public vote, but good sense does. If nothing else, hold a nonbinding referendum -- why not at the special June 16 election? -- through which citizens can at least say what they think. This is a huge project on prime public land on one of the most desirable and rare plots of undeveloped riverfront east of the Mississippi. How can our leaders not want to take the public's temperature on this -- to protect themselves as much as to protect the public?
No one has been a bigger supporter of Mayor Deke Copenhaver since he took office in 2005. A level-headed, prayerful, respectful leader, and a unifier in a formerly divided city, he's been one of the best things to happen to this town in years.
But for the reasons listed above and more, we think he's off base on the downtown stadium proposal.
We implore him to call time, get out of the batter's box and check the signals.
