Braves Planning a Move to Suburbs

Well, this is a bit of a surprise. This morning, the Braves have announced that they’re going to move to a new ballpark in 2017 following the expiration of their lease with Turner Field. Citing traffic problems and the fact that Turner Field would require “about $150 million in infrastructure work, including replacement of seats, upgrading lighting and plumbing, etc., to remain viable”, the Braves are instead just going to relocate out of a 20 year old stadium in search of something shinier and newer.

Also, importantly, the location for the new stadium is in Cobb County, which is adjacent to Fulton County, where Turner Field is located. Without the threat of potentially losing the revenues that come from having the Braves stay where they are, Fulton County is very unlikely to kick in public money to make the kinds of upgrades the Braves would like to see. Cobb County is almost certainly going to pay a significant chunk of the cost of this proposed new stadium, so now the Braves have some real leverage to get more public funding, either from Cobb County or Fulton County.

The terms of the project and who pays for what haven’t yet been released — though the Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the stadium includes $450 million in public financing, nearly 2/3 of the cost of the project — so it’s impossible to make specific statements about this particular deal, but in general, publicly funded stadiums are a terrible deal for the taxpayers, and the people of Cobb County and Fulton County are likely to be the real losers of today’s announcement. For some more in depth reading on why these deals are so bad for the public, here’s one of the many papers that have been written and tackle the topic.

The Impact of Stadium and Professional Sports on Metropolitan Area Development

There’s plenty of others, and Neil DeMause has chronicled much of the information at his blog Field of Schemes, even writing a book by the same title about how many cities have been fleeced in pursuit of stadium revenues. I’d highly encourage you to check out his take on this subject and other stadium ventures, especially if you have voting rights in the state of Georgia.

An announcement isn’t the same thing as an inevitable result. My guess is that this stadium is going to face many political and legal challenges, and I don’t think anyone will be too surprised if the Braves end up staying in Turner Field, just with some extra upgrades that they didn’t have to pay for. Wendy Thurm will be on top of this story for us, so expect to read a lot more about this in the days and weeks to follow. Meanwhile, Cobb County officials, re-evaluate your priorities. Helping extort taxpayers isn’t what you got elected to do.