One Guarantee Sparked Larger Baseball Battle

 

$19 Million Penalty Fueled Resentment on D.C. Council

By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, December 19, 2004; Page A01

 

The long, dark spiral into chaos that engulfed the D.C. baseball deal began, ironically, with an act of goodwill.

 

D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp asked Major League Baseball to make concessions on a stadium agreement signed in September. Baseball officials agreed. The list of deal-sweeteners delivered to Cropp on Tuesday ranged from self-serving to substantial, such as allowing the District to seek some private financing for the new stadium.

 

Then the council came to focus on Item 7: If the city failed to build a ballpark for the former Montreal Expos by March 2008, it would have to pay the team as much as $19 million a year to cover lost profits.

 

From Major League Baseball's perspective, that was a big concession to the city. The stadium agreement places no limit on the city's liability if the ballpark isn't ready by 2008.

 

To certain council members, however, Item 7 looked like a hoax -- a big, fat thumb in the eye of an unsuspecting city. If baseball were offering to cap lost profits at $19 million, the members said, then $19 million must be exactly what baseball expected to receive all along. Besides, why should there be a late fee of any kind? The city's paying for the whole stadium.

 

Item 7 wasn't a concession, it was an insult, they contended. Cropp agreed and plunged the deal to bring baseball back to the nation's capital into crisis.

 

With a Dec. 31 deadline looming, Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) plans to broker a meeting tomorrow between Cropp (D) and baseball officials. To right the deal, he must overcome vast stores of anger and distrust accumulated between two cultures alien to one another.

 

Williams was expected to bridge that divide. But Williams is terrible at skid-greasing and backroom politics, some council members have said. He repeatedly has failed to sell his grandest ideas to them or their constituents -- people who want a baseball team, but not if it makes them feel as if they have been fleeced.

 

The stadium package should not have been a tough sell, council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) said. The deal is generous to baseball but places no burden on the average taxpayer, he said. The only taxes in the deal would be paid by fans, including many suburbanites, the federal government and large businesses.

 

"We have a way to build the stadium that costs the District basically nothing. It works out fine. But that's all been lost in the hype and the rhetoric," said Evans, the mayor's chief ally on the council. "People are being swayed by their emotional reaction to the fact that billionaires are making more money."

 

From the start, baseball has inflamed those emotions. Baseball officials never have addressed District residents or lobbied the council directly, and they rarely speak openly to reporters. They declined to comment for this article.

 

Many council members said they believe baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has taken advantage of the District, and they view the so-called list of concessions delivered last week to the city as another sign of contempt.

 

"They clearly take us as fools. That letter didn't say anything new," said council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large), who dominated debate over Item 7 during a marathon council session, at which Cropp dramatically altered the stadium legislation by requiring that private funds cover at least half the cost of a new stadium.

 

"In their eyes," council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) said, "we must be something beneath dogcatchers."

 

Selig has a history of using hardball tactics. He won a publicly funded stadium for his Milwaukee Brewers by hinting that he would pull out of town. For more than a year, he sought to keep baseball out of Washington to appease Baltimore Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos, who has argued that a D.C. team would cut into his profits.

 

When baseball's owners decided to find a new home for the financially struggling Montreal Expos, Selig instructed the relocation committee to look at places other than Washington. The committee, led by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, did as it was told.

 

Last year, when Williams suggested that the city would be willing to build a ballpark by using two-thirds public funding and one-third of the money coming from the team, The Washington Post reported that Reinsdorf responded: "Two-thirds/one-third is fine. But three-thirds/no-thirds is more of what we had in mind."

 

This past spring, Williams decided that the only way to overcome the Angelos problem was to give baseball what it wanted and take away all the reasons for saying no. In May, with Cropp by his side, Williams offered to pay for a 41,000-seat stadium at any of four sites near downtown.

 

The gambit worked. But Reinsdorf continued to press every advantage. Baseball officials kept talking to other locations, including Northern Virginia.

 

Convinced they were fighting to keep alive their bid, D.C. officials gave Major League Baseball "the sweetest of sweetheart deals," in the words of one prominent baseball executive. The team would get a free ballpark, the right to choose its location and nearly all the revenue, including tens of millions of dollars from naming rights.

 

News of the deal "spread through baseball like wildfire," said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It really was too good," he said, laying the foundation for a public backlash.

 

On Sept. 29, baseball officials announced that the Expos would open the 2005 season at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Thousands of people rushed to sign up for season tickets. Seven council members, including Cropp and Schwartz, stood onstage with the mayor at a celebratory rally and sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." They represented a council majority. Approval of the stadium legislation seemed assured.

 

But the mayor underestimated the council's concerns about the deal, and none of the politicians anticipated such strong community opposition.

 

The baseball announcement came just two weeks after Democratic voters threw out three council members, replacing them with former mayor Marion Barry and two other candidates who campaigned against the new ballpark. The city had agreed to approve the legislation by Dec. 31, before Barry and the others take office. Suddenly, baseball began to feel like an end run around the voters.

 

Barry vowed to undo the deal, calling it a giveaway to millionaire baseball owners. Activists held angry protests, demanding to know why Williams was raising business taxes for a ballpark but not for deteriorating schools. A Post survey of District residents found that 69 percent of them said city funds should not be spent on a new baseball stadium.

 

Instead of quelling the uprising, Williams flew to a trade mission in Asia for 11 days. In his absence, the debate became "about something more than baseball," council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) said. He said Williams could have solidified a majority council vote for baseball in September by selling his vision to the public.

 

"Instead, he allowed a different politics to take over -- the politics of unhappiness about all the ways this government is not sensitive to the people," Mendelson said.

 

When Cropp tried to sell the stadium plan, she received a hostile reception at several civic association meetings. Then the city's chief financial officer, Natwar M. Gandhi, announced that in his view, the mayor's office had underestimated the cost. Williams proposed increasing the business tax, and a line of panicked executives formed outside Cropp's door. Cropp begged Williams to help fix the problem, but the mayor waved her off, she said.

 

At a Nov. 5 news conference, Cropp said the stadium proposed for the Southeast waterfront was too expensive. She recommended building the ballpark on government land near RFK, a site she said would make the project cheaper. Baseball already had rejected the RFK site, however, and Cropp's announcement threw the deal into crisis.

 

Baseball officials put Reinsdorf on the phone with Cropp to explain their objections, but he did nothing more to woo her or the council. "We believed the mayor to be the representative of the city council negotiating the deal," said a high-ranking baseball official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

 

The mayor, meanwhile, tried to work around Cropp. Williams tacked cash for community projects onto the stadium package, including $45 million to renovate public libraries. He gained council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) but lost Mendelson, who was more concerned about escalating costs.

 

On Nov. 9, the Williams administration said it had the votes, but Cropp controlled the agenda. She canceled a scheduled vote and demanded more time to work on her latest cost-cutting plan: private financing. She also told the mayor to go back to baseball officials and secure new concessions.

 

Barry said that Cropp told him she was trying to give Williams some "wiggle room to go to Major League Baseball and say, 'I can't get this through this council.' Then he would get a better deal."

 

On Dec. 2, Selig came to the District. He declared at a Greater Washington Board of Trade luncheon that baseball officials would not reopen negotiations. "A deal's been made," he told reporters.

 

Cropp sat next to Selig, but the two barely spoke. Afterward, baseball Executive Vice President John McHale Jr. offered to meet with Cropp, said Evans, who was present. Cropp declined, saying she had to attend a hearing. Williams, meanwhile, was out of town again and in no position to broker a compromise.

 

In the end, Major League Baseball did offer concessions. Cropp acknowledged that it met most of her demands. "There are actual concessions in that letter," Evans said. "She should have held it up and declared victory and gone home."

 

But by then, the council's mood was foul. Schwartz sunk her teeth into Item 7, contending that it did nothing to improve the stadium agreement.

 

Later, Schwartz could provide no information to support that argument. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), who joined the assault, acknowledged he had no facts, either.

 

"Look, nobody has any facts," Fenty said. "We were just connecting the dots."

 

Evans wearily blamed Cropp for crumpling in the face of "out-of-control rhetoric."

 

"She's really stepped into a nightmare," he said. "I have no idea what's going to happen."

 

Staff writers Thomas Heath, David Nakamura and Yolanda Woodlee contributed to this report.

 

:o

 

They all need to go out to a nice dinner with plenty of liquor to get back on good terms.

Now Angelos can be happy and not have to field a competitive team. :banghead