Bruce Murphy
Murphy’s Law

Brewers Floundering on Stadium Deal

Baseball Commissioner’s threat looks desperate, team’s lobbying looks inept.

By - May 29th, 2023 05:03 pm
American Family Field. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

American Family Field. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Last week Major League Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred came to town to play the civic blackmail card, warning that the Milwaukee Brewers could move to another city if the taxpayers didn’t pony up and provide yet another massive subsidy for the team. This kind of threat has often been used by pro sports commissioners, but more strategically. Manfred’s visit was badly mistimed: It is unlikely to have much impact and now it will be hard for the Brewers to bring him back for an anticlimactic encore warning. It is part of a series of mistakes by the team that go all the way back to prior owner Bud Selig and will make this a very hard package for politicians to pass

Stadium and arena subsidies are a nightmare for elected officials. If you don’t provide a subsidy and the team moves you get blamed. If you vote for the subsidy, you can also be blamed. Republican state Sen. George Petak was, famously, recalled from office by Racine voters in 1996 for backing the five-county sales tax that paid for the Brewers stadium. So a sports team has to maneuver very adroitly.

And the Brewers are asking for a lot. The original stadium deal and 25 years of repairs and maintenance have cost taxpayers $1.56 billion to date, as Urban Milwaukee has reported, and now the owners want another $290 million subsidy to be put aside (or $378 million with interest it is expected to earn), simply to guarantee they stay in Milwaukee for another 13 years. That would be the highest per-year subsidy in major league history as sports funding analyst Neil deMause has written.

Back in 1996, when the first Brewers deal was passed, it was clear what it would pay for: a new, state-of-the-art stadium. When the subsidy for the Milwaukee Bucks was passed in 2015 it was equally clear, for a state-of-the-art arena. But what are we taxpayers getting this time?

The Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District that oversees Brewers’ stadium already commissioned a 2018 study by the Mortenson company of all the likely maintenance and repair costs for the stadium through 2040 and put aside $71.8 million in sales tax revenue to pay for a long list of stadium features. Those included “a full replacement of all 35,244 seats,” replacing two 800-ton chillers and air-handling equipment, the flat roof portion of the ballpark, the LED ribbon board and LED out-of-town scoreboards, and doing “one more replacement of these boards” 10-15 years later, along with new LED lights and theatrical controls, a “drastically improved” sound system, maintenance and upgrades of 9 elevators and 10 escalators and parking lot and roadway improvements.

The Brewers have insisted the study was incomplete and have come up with their own study showing the true cost was $448 million, but the team has never clarified or costed out which features were missing from the Mortenson study and what taxpayers will actually be paying for.

Worse, they have done a poor job of lobbying the state Legislature. The team spent $435,000 on lobbyists in the 2021-2022 session and surely are aware that Republican legislative leaders are typically at odds with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Yet the team crafted a subsidy package with the governor and left out legislators in this discussion, as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos complained. And so the proposal was among hundreds that legislators removed from the budget.

At this point it’s far from clear what a revised subsidy proposal might look like. Vos has suggested Milwaukee taxpayers must pay for some of it, but that can’t happen until legislators figure out what the increased shared revenue and sales tax hike for the city and county of Milwaukee will look like. And even then will likely be no local money available.

The one pot of money that might have been used, an increase in the hotel and car rental tax which helps support the Wisconsin Center District, was already grabbed by the Milwaukee Bucks for Fiserv Forum. And the Bucks also got lucky in having Chris Abele as Milwaukee County Executive at the time. Abele, a Bucks fan, was a key factor in providing county support and helping craft the deal.

But the Bucks leaders were also far more adroit in how they handled state, county and city politicians. Bucks President Peter Feigin was more positive and engaging than Brewers President Rick Schlesinger. And once the arena was built the Bucks owners began building the Deer District around it, with restaurants, bars, a hotel, the Five Fifty Ultra Lofts apartment complex and (partnering with the Medical College of Wisconsin) a sports science center. The Brewers, by contrast, have never built much around the stadium on the 265 acres for parking that the team controls — even though any development it did would be tax exempt.  (The fact that the proposal by Evers included such a tax exemption was seen by some as a clue that the team planned to do such development. In fact, it simply included the provision as written in the prior legislation for the stadium.)

Meanwhile as the Brewers did nothing to make its stadium more of an attraction, baseball has seen a huge decline in its fan base: attendance for MLB games has steadily declined since the 2011-2012 season, with an overall 14% decline, while TV viewership for games has plummeted, from 22 million in 1992 down to 7.5 million in 2022  The average age of pro baseball fans is 57 vs 42 for the NBA. In short, there are fewer voters today who will care if Wisconsin “loses” the Brewers.

And probably fewer baseball fans in the state Legislature today than a generation ago, when it passed the last Brewers bailout. And the increase in partisanship along with the drastic gerrymandering of legislative seats since then has all but eliminated moderate Republicans or Democrats — politicians like George Petak — who might be able to find common ground on the tough issue of a sports subsidy.

Back in 1996, one issue that nearly derailed the stadium deal was a belated push to build the stadium in Downtown, which Selig adamantly opposed. Had he relented, there would be bars and restaurants in the area that got business from the games and the team would now be talking about preserving a chunk of downtown development as well as a major league venue. By contrast, an empty baseball stadium in the Menomonee Valley, while not ideal, would have nowhere near the economic and psychological impact of a white elephant in Downtown.

One thing the Brewers have been strategic about is realizing that the huge, $6.9 billion state budget surplus offers a now-or-never opportunity to gain another subsidy. But until it’s clear what taxpayers would be paying for, until the city’s and county’s financial issues are solved, until there’s an actual legislative bill crafted, a grim reaper warning by the commissioner is unlikely to have much impact. Instead, it suggested the Brewers have lost their way and are feeling very desperate.

If you think stories like this are important, become a member of Urban Milwaukee and help support real, independent journalism. Plus you get some cool added benefits.

Categories: Murphy's Law, Politics

9 thoughts on “Murphy’s Law: Brewers Floundering on Stadium Deal”

  1. ZeeManMke says:

    This is Milwaukee, not LA, New York or Chicago. You can only push the people here so far. Many did not want to pay for this new stadium in the first place. But they did and paid and paid. Now we are told a 22-year-old building is falling apart. I would guess that many people wonder where the heck Attanasio is. He’s worth almost $1 billion but he hasn’t offered to pay anything. He treats the people like Backwoods hicks. He has never spent any real money to bring a Championship to Milwaukee. And now he thinks we should cough up a few hundred million, while the city government is on the brink, and he sits back laughing at us. We are not stupid. He has no interest in sharing the pain. The people see that and they have had enough.

  2. rubiomon@gmail.com says:

    No more subsidies for billionaire-owned private businesses! Let cheapskate Attanasio pay for improvements at the stadium- and rent us someone who can actually hit?

  3. AttyDanAdams says:

    Great article, Bruce! I does seem there is tepid support for the project. Wouldn’t it be great if Tammy and RonJon co-sponsored federal legislation to forbid the hostage-taking/public fund-grabbing practices of the major sports leagues?

  4. Keith Prochnow says:

    Thanks, Bruce, for the great, informative story. It looks to me like the baseball sector of the sports industry is in rough shape, and the company serving Milwaukee is in even worse condition.

    A widget manufacturer in a similar condition would: Forecast the necessary cost of re-tooling their plant over these next thirteen years, add borrowing cost, and divide that total by the likely number of unit sales over that period and– ta-da!– raise prices.

    You already know many of the figures necessary and you certainly know where to get the rest. You’re really great at this sort of thing.

    The question: How much would future tickets have to sell for– increasing each year– to keep the local company paying breath-taking salaries to their workers and executives and giant dividends to their owners, while making the required updates to their production facility?

    Not that it would come to this, but maybe, if Urban Milwaukee could provide the bottom line number– the true cost for them of going to see their local nine get shut out, yet again– the local customer base would realize just what an awful proposition it would be to support a badly run company in a failing sector of the entertainment industry.

    A second, related question: Does Austin, TX, the capital of that dusty state, which has quietly become the tenth most populous city in the country (60% greater than Milwaukee), and one with gobs of tech money, have even one professional sports company? Maybe they would take ours off our hands.

  5. mr_cox says:

    Between tickets/concession prices and the need for pay-TV subscriptions to watch games, Major League Baseball priced itself out of reach of actual fans long ago. Squeezing fans a second time, especially during the Republican state legislature-created budget crisis, is too much. If they just cut out pricy coffee drinks and avocado toast, the Brewers should be able to make ends meet. No more corporate bailouts.

  6. gerrybroderick says:

    Thanks Bruce. Your piece, as well as the above commentary, are both informative and insightful. And as a long time baseball fan I’m hoping the Brewers are listening.

    Our tax paying public, especially those of us old enough to remember how the industry treated us during the Braves era, are fed up their ongoing extortion. They’re breaching all reasonable limits and if they continue they’ll be leaving town to a chorus of Bronx cheers at their backs.

  7. CraigR says:

    I’d be willing to pay extra for our county parks which all people can enjoy for free. I don’t want to subsidize something that has a limited audience, especially when people like Robin Vos think it’s my responsibility to subsidize it. I guess he didn’t get the memo that the city and county are on the cusp of financial ruin. Maybe the Brewers should move to Burlington and those folks can ante up.

  8. JohnDJohnson says:

    Good article, Bruce. Thanks for writing it.

  9. ZeeManMke says:

    There are about 600 comments on this article UM posted on Facebook. They all focus on the same things. 1. No tax money for billionaires. 2. The Brewers are not competitive and have not been. 3. Milwaukee has greater problems than a baseball team.

Leave a Reply

You must be an Urban Milwaukee member to leave a comment. Membership, which includes a host of perks, including an ad-free website, tickets to marquee events like Summerfest, the Wisconsin State Fair and the Florentine Opera, a better photo browser and access to members-only, behind-the-scenes tours, starts at $9/month. Learn more.

Join now and cancel anytime.

If you are an existing member, sign-in to leave a comment.

Have questions? Need to report an error? Contact Us