ROLDO: Gullible’s Travels & Rope-A-Dope

By Roldo Bartimole

You are going to hear a lot of lies. There will be mucho money poured into telling these lies. The Greater Cleveland Partnership – Cleveland’s corporate voice – will try to Rope-a-Dope us again.

Some truth is therefore necessary.

So I’m going to reach back into the past to give some context to what will be the Cleveland Establishment’s biggest campaign. It’s already started months ahead of a ballot issue due in May. Be sure also to read the postscript.

They want to sell you an extension of the sales taxes for another 20 years. After you have been paying for 25 years already. The cost – hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition to sin taxes tens of millions still due bondholders. From both the city and county.

Before I get started I have the answer to the problem of financing our sports teams. It’s very simple. The City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County should do one thing: Sell each of the sport facilities to the respective team owners for $1 each. A great bargain. The facilities cost hundreds of millions to build. So, give ’em away. Then, as every other business, they pay their bills and get off welfare.

Why are we allowing Major League Baseball, National League Football and the National Basketball League, their billionaire owners and millionaire ballplayers to continue at the tax teat? We’re paying for A-Rod, LeBron and all the rest of the prima donnas.

True now as then:

Here is a transcript of my remarks of a 1997 City Club debate with Gateway’s then chairman Tom Chema. It was labeled “What Price Professional Sports.” Too high a price. Here it is:

In 1990, before the sin tax vote, Tom Chema and I had a little debate. I was wearing a button that said, ‘Let Jacobs Pay.’ Tom made a note of the button and said, “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Last year, Dick Jacobs got $45.6 million in ticket receipts before the season even started. In November, he sent his rent check to Gateway for $120,000. (The Gunds have yet to pay any rent.)

Does anyone believe that Tom made Dick pay?

They said that there would be 28,000 jobs, 16,000 good-paying, full-time jobs.

They said that the stadium would cost $128 million. It came in at more than $180 million.

Does anyone believe them now?

They said that the arena would cost some $75 million. It came in at $157 million.

They said there would be $36 to $51 million left over for economic development. When Tom left Gateway, there were $30 million in unpaid contractor bills.

Does anyone believe them now?

Mike White, days before the vote, wrote in the Pee Dee “It was critical that I could truthfully assure our citizens that this project would afford real jobs opportunities for Greater Clevelanders, particularly those most in need – the unemployed.”

Does anyone believe him or them now?

Mayor White also wrote, “It is the policy of our administration not to offer tax abatement for this development.” And proponents advertised “No abatement” in full-page ads days before the election.

Together they later went to Columbus to free Gateway of new property taxes – forever. It’s already cost more than $12 million in county lost revenue.

Could anyone possible believe what they said now?

“The Cleveland schools alone would realize $15.6 million per year in new real estate taxes from the project…” said Mike White – and the ad from proponents who echoed that promise.

Things that they didn’t tell the public:

That they would allow the Gunds to build an apartment for themselves in the arena, a public facility.

That they would build a $5.2 million restaurant for Jacobs that ordinary fans can’t even use on game days.

That they’d build a $7-million office building for Dick Jacobs.

That they’d put Italian marble coffee tables, now cracking, in loges – despite being told the tables might not work – at a cost of $330,000 and a fix-up cost of possibly $260,000.

They left the County and city holding the bag for millions of dollars a year in payments for the arena and parking facilities. And they left Gateway in a state of beggary, unable to financially hire a single employee.

Does anyone believe anything that they said now?

Only if your name is Jacobs, Gund or Chema, or you are the most gullible of the gullible.

In contrast, Mark Rosentraub, associate dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University and a friend of Tom Chema’s (or so he says), writes in his new book, “The Real Cost of Sports and Who’s Paying For It”: “In no county do professional sports teams account for as much as 1 percent of the county’s private sector payroll or 1 percent of all the private sector’s jobs.” (Rosentraub later served as dean of the CSU urban affairs department and on the board of Gateway.)

Can anyone believe that this is the engine of economic development, rather than a drain on the economy? The tax revenue that has been poured into this venture makes its way into the pockets of millionaires and people worth a hell of a lot more.

Rosentraub said, and we know that this is true, the spinoff spending at hotels and restaurants “is quite small,” and that the spending around the sports facilities “”is merely a transfer of economic activity within your community.”

He made a point of examining the Cleveland baseball team and the multiplier effect that everyone talks about and says, “… my gross estimate (is) that the gain for Cleveland was in the $11 million range each year, substantially below what many consulting reports will predict.”

Since the County is paying some $7 to $8 million a year on bonds and the city’s paying $3 million on the parking garages and since Gateway hasn’t been able to keep up with property taxes on the land; and since taxpayers have been shelling out $1 million a month on sin taxes just about $110 million since August, 1990, not counting sales tax on the sin tax at close to $8 million since 1990, doesn’t it cost the community more than it benefits?

Rosentraub sums it up: “It is probably safe to conclude that Cleveland has spent more for and on professional sports teams and their playing facilities than any other community in the United States.”

Now, among the public only a complete sucker could think that Gateway has been a plus.

But wait. What about the community spirit? What about all the good feelings? Aren’t they a plus?

Maybe. But unfortunately, if you really think about it, the good feelings may be an omen of the biggest letdown.

Prompted by almost hysteric sports coverage by the Pee Dee and TV, the community has been on a high. I’ve never seen such pandering as that which takes place on the front page of the morning newspaper, and the obnoxious coverage by TV anchors adorned by Cleveland Indian sportswear as they lead the cheers and call it news.

Unfortunately, what goes up must someday come down.

We are building for a depression in this town when reality intrudes on this falsely created atmosphere.

We’ve created a state of celebrity-hood for the teams.

They serve a purpose, as John Ralston says in Voltaire’s Bastards, “these celebrities serve an important public purpose. They distract in the way monarchs once used their courts to distract.”

This distraction – this false sense of well-being – has been created in this community, and it has gotten out of hand. The distraction allows us to avoid looking at problems, to live in denial.

The world of sports has become another element of the corruption of human emotions for commercial purposes.

It has become so much a symbolic part of the corporate commercialization of today’s life; they are wrenching honest human emotions from almost every experience.

It’s clearly symbolized – just as one example – by the sale of Nike sneakers at $180, advertised by our most talented sports stars, who know that the producers of those sneakers are paid two or three dollars a day, not enough to feed and clothe themselves.

Those injustices are tearing at our society. The more we cater to the privileges of those who have, it appears that the meaner and more hardened we get about the needs of those less fortunate.

That’s what you are buying into when you go along with the system that subverts real human instincts and corrupts human emotions – that is, to enjoy sports for the all-encompassing commercialism.

We can already see signs of public discontent with our teams.

I guess I welcome it. I want to end with a quote by Edmund Wilson and his reaction to the 1929 crash. He welcomed it.

He said: “To writer and artists of my generation who had grown up in the big business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding out of everything they cared about, these (Depression) years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud.”

I await that collapse. Maybe then we can get on to attending the real human needs and welcome honest human experiences.

POSTSCRIPT: In subsequent years Cleveland suffered the serious economic recession and a loss of jobs and population that saw the city dip below 400,000 people. Inequality has skyrocketed. Though we have glowing reports of downtown and some neighborhood revival, the city’s poverty rates continue up and the city’s infant mortality rate has been compared poorly in parts of our city to even some Third World countries.

Meanwhile, all three sports teams have been sold at exploded prices to new owners. George Gund bought the Cavs for $20 million and sold to Dan Gilbert for $375 million; Al Lerner got the Browns for $530 million and sold to Jimmy Haslam for $1.05 billion; Dick Jacobs bought Indians from $35 to $45 million (reports differ) and sold it to Larry Dolan for $320 million, after previously cashing in on some $60 million by taking the franchise public, then back private. Do they really need more welfare?

[Photo: FitchDnld (Flickr)]

 

 

In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]

 

 

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