EDITORIAL: Team owners should pay for their stadiums. They can afford it.

America’s professional sports teams, with the exception of the publicly owned Green Bay Packers, are owned by members of the super-rich class. A number of the owners of baseball, basketball and football franchises are billionaires. 

Their teams are gold mines. For example, the owner of the Washington Commanders sold the football team he bought for $800 million in 1999 for $6 billion in 2023. In February, Marc Lasry sold his 25% share of the Milwaukee Bucks for $3.5 billion. He bought it from Herb Kohl in 2014 for $550 million. Mark Attanasio paid Bud Selig $223 million for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2005. Today the estimated value of the team is $1.6 billion.

It is good to see that the sports business that entertains so many Americans is thriving, but the monetary extravagance that surrounds it begs the question: Why should taxpayers pay for the stadiums and arenas that generate mind-boggling financial rewards for owners?

Facilities for professional sports teams have been paid for entirely or in part with tax money in a number of states. That includes Wisconsin.

Wisconsin taxpayers paid for the construction of the Brewers’ home field, now named American Family Field, in a 1995 deal crafted by Gov. Tommy Thompson. The deal left Milwaukee County and the four counties surrounding it, including Ozaukee, with a 0.1% stadium sales tax added to the state sales tax.

Thompson later bragged to a cheering northern Wisconsin audience that he had “stuck it to Milwaukee.”

Indeed he did, and to Ozaukee County as well. The stadium tax was collected from 1996 to 2020, six years longer than it was supposed to be in effect. The stadium cost  $392 million to build. The tax raised $605 million.

Now it seems Wisconsin taxpayers will have to make another nine-figure contribution to the Brewers’ stadium.

American Family Field is primarily owned by the state through the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District and leased to the Brewers. The terms of the lease make the district responsible for renovations. A study paid for by the Brewers found that the stadium needs $448 million worth of upgrades.

Gov. Tony Evers wanted to contribute $290 million of the state’s surplus for the renovations. Republicans in the Legislature blocked the move, but are working on their own stadium financing plan, which could include a larger share of state funds.

Why? Why keep the citizens of Wisconsin on the hook for a sports facility that enriches a private owner?

The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Robert Manfred, came to Milwaukee in May and answered the question with a veiled threat. If the state failed to come up with a plan to pay for the renovations with public money, he said, it would risk having the Brewers leave Wisconsin.

Risks like that are powerful incentives that have motivated a number of states to require their taxpayers to pony up to build or improve sports team owners’ places of business.

The Milwaukee Brewers are an asset, of course. The team makes a significant positive economic impact on southeast Wisconsin and also provides value in the enjoyment its fans find attending games and the prestige garnered by Milwaukee and the state as the home of a Major League Baseball team.

But is this worth the hundreds of millions of tax dollars invested in the team’s stadium? Economists don’t think so.

In a University of Chicago Booth School of Business survey of leading economists, a group that included seven Nobel Prize winners in economics, 83% said public stadium subsidies are not worth their cost.

Dr. Michael Farren, a research fellow at George Mason University who has studied and written about the cost/benefit trade-off for public-funded stadiums, wrote, “Peer-reviewed academic research consistently finds that subsidies, especially stadium subsidies, don’t work very well to create economic development, and may even reduce it in the long run.”

The Brewers’ Attanasio has said he wants  the team to stay in Milwaukee. He should demonstrate the sincerity of that statement by working with political and business leaders to find an alternative to billing the taxpayers for improving his playing field.

That alternative should be weighted heavily in favor of private funding, especially funding by team ownership.