BUSINESS

How to Win Friends and Influence Voters

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None of this is anything new. It's traditional for team owners to spend and spend some more at referendum time; in 1996, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen memorably paid the Washington state legislature for the $4.2 million cost of a stadium referendum, so he wouldn't have to gather signatures to get it on the ballot. At a stadium-builders' conference a couple years back, I watched a pair of team execs debate the pros and cons of holding a referendum vs. going directly to the state legislature: stadium funding was too important to be left to the populace, argued one, while his counterpart replied that with a referendum, all you had to do was to spend enough, and bingo -- instant public support.

The problem came when even the best-funded stadium campaigns started losing. In early 1998, the Twinsís attempt to move to North Carolina collapsed when community opposition beat back a well-funded stadium pitch; three months later, a football stadium plan in Birmingham met the same fate. Team owners, who had been used to outspending their foes by 20-1 or so and pulling out a victory, promptly kicked out the jams: that November, Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen poured in $2 million of his own money in a last-ditch effort to put the stadium over the top, outspending the opposition by an unprecedented 100-1. The next week, he'd won $270 million in public funding. Now that's return on investment.

A hole where his house used to stand

"It's really easy to feel powerless when so much of it comes down to money," says San Diego photographer Christian Michaels. He should know: co-chair of the campaign to stop that city's new baseball stadium in 1998, he watched as the stadium backers launched a nearly $3 million ad blitz during the run-up to election day. Michaels' motley crew, outspent 100-1, were limited to a last-minute mailing of 30,000 brochures. "It was just too little, too late."

Two years later, the new baseball stadium approved over Michaels's best efforts is an empty hole in the ground where his home used to stand. Construction stopped on October 1, after it was revealed that a member of the city council is under investigation for an alleged insider-trading scheme involving Padres owner John Moores. The construction crews will be idle until the issue is resolved, even as the $225 million in public money, approved by voters two years ago, has grown to near $300 million, with the sky the limit.

Of course, even if Michaels had won his battle, he might still have lost the war. The nation is littered with new sports facilities that were rejected at the ballot box, only to be approved later by a friendly state legislature, or overturned by a second vote. Frank Rashid, the Detroit college professor whose Tiger Stadium Fan Club won a hard-fought 1992 referendum to block city funding for a new stadium, only to see it overturned in a re-vote five years later, likes to point out that only in the stadium-fighting biz can you win nine times out of ten -- and still lose.

"Left alone, or given an objective presentation of the options, voters will be very skeptical of these big projects," says Rashid. "We have to concentrate on the relationship between the people who profit from the stadiums, and the politicians who sell them to the public. We have to make it impossible for them to accept campaign contributions from team owners and players and bond attorneys and developers -- anybody who stands to profit from the deal."

If such a plan had been in place in San Diego two years ago, it might have saved the city a few hundred million dollars. And Christian Michaels his home.

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