Business

Stadium mania socks taxpayers

Taxpayers in the US spent about $10 billion more on stadiums and arenas for professional sports teams than they forecast, according to a new book by Harvard University urban-planning professor Judith Grant Long.

The costs of land, infrastructure, operations and lost property taxes added 25 percent to the taxpayer bill for the 121 sports facilities in use during 2010, increasing the average public cost by $89 million to $259 million, up from $170 million commonly reported by the sports industry and media, she writes in the book “Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.”

The book, released last month by Routledge, aims to help governments and taxpayers reduce hidden subsidies to team owners by allowing them to compare stadium deals for their cities against those elsewhere.

The average public-private partnership worked out to cost cities 78 percent and the teams 22 percent, she wrote.

“Given that popular reports set expectations of more or less equal partnerships between host cities and teams, these estimates of public cost indicate that the public/private partnerships underlying these deals are in fact highly uneven,” wrote Long, who is an associate professor at Harvard’s graduate school of design.

Long’s analysis added costs such as those for land, infrastructure and lost tax revenue, while subtracting money that flows back to states or cities from revenue or rent payments.

“Professional sports stadiums are as close as you can get to a controlled experiment in urban design,” she said in a telephone interview.

The highest-cost deals include Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium, where the National Football League’s Colts play; Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati, home of the Bengals; and the Milwaukee Brewers’ Miller Park in baseball. In those cases, the public share of costs, once ongoing expenses are included, exceeds 100 percent of the building’s original price tag.