If Mass. won't help pay to build baseball stadium....
McCoy Stadium, the current home of the Pawtucket Red Sox.
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Those who think that Worcester is about to grab the Pawtucket Red Sox should consider this news from the (Worcester) Telegram & Gazette.
Hit this link: http://www.telegram.com/news/20170813/worcester-city-councilors-love-idea-of-wooing-pawsox-but-obstacles-loom from the (Worcester) Telegram & Gazette:
“Massachusetts legislators told the Telegram & Gazette …{that} the {state} Legislature is unlikely to put public dollars toward a stadium for a private team. And even if a deal in Rhode Island that seeks to do that falls through, and neither city offers public money, staying in Pawtucket would likely be the shrewder move,’’ a stadium expert told the paper.
“All things being equal, Worcester is probably going to have to pay a higher subsidy to get them,” said Victor A. Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross economics professor who specializes in stadiums. After all, the Worcester Metropolitan Statistical Area is only about half the size of the Providence-Warwick Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Pawtucket. (Also, Worcester is not on the Main Street of the East Coast -- Route 95. Pawtucket is.)
“It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” Senate Majority Leader Harriette L. Chandler (D.-Worcester) said of the idea of the PawSox moving to Worcester. ”(But) who’s going to pay for it?”
“The reality,’’ she told the paper, “is that the Legislature has an established precedent of not putting public money into sports stadiums.’’ And Massachusetts is of course a much richer state than Rhode Island on a per-capital basis.
While Massachusetts has spent money for public-infrastructure improvements associated with stadiums (most notably around Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro), that’s not the same as the millions that the PawSox wants from Rhode Island taxpayers to actually build a new PawSox stadium itself in downtown Pawtucket. The Boston Red Sox, by the way, got no public money for its massive improvements at Fenway Park in recent years.
The PawSox want $38 million in public money in Rhode Island to build a new stadium: $23 million from the state and $15 million from Pawtucket. The PawSox assert that the long-term loans from the public for the project would be repaid from the tax revenues that the new stadium generated and so wouldn’t hurt taxpayers. But of course it’s impossible to know how well the team and stadium would do in coming decades, indeed how popular baseball in general will be.
Anyway, I continue to be very skeptical that the PawSox would go to Worcester. And I hope that they’ll stay in Pawtucket. Had a wonderful evening there a couple of weeks ago.