Last week, while the rest of the country dealt with minor matters like economic meltdown, terrorism, war, and global pandemics, the government in Louisiana got to business and settled the most pressing political issue of our day — the future of the New Orleans Saints. After much haggling and back room negotiations, Governor Bobby Jindal showed he was good for something more than disastrous Republican responses to presidential speeches by locking the Saints into New Orleans until 2025.
About a decade ago, former Governor Mike Foster brokered a deal to keep the Saints in New Orleans through 2010. Controversially, the agreement guaranteed the Saints certain revenue targets, which, if not met, would trigger cash payments to the team straight out of the state treasury. In recent years, these “inducement” payments have ballooned to $26 million a year. Bribe money to stay in New Orleans.
The new deal involves bribery on a more sophisticated level. Saints owner Tom Benson will buy the Dominion Towers, an office building near the Superdome, and the state will lease space in the building as long as the Saints stay in New Orleans. This indirect bribe, probably illegal in every context that does not involve professional sports, should keep the Saints satisfied for the time being. However, the real estate deal does not mean the days of the direct bribes are completely over; direct cash payments will continue, albeit reduced to a more modest cap of $6 million.
Sports and political commentators alike heavily criticized the last Saints deal. The Saints franchise must not be secure, they argue, if Louisiana has to pay the team to stay in town. The Saints are what NFL people call a “small market” team, meaning the city of New Orleans is on the low end of the population range for NFL cities. Small market cities are often thought to lack the cash resources to support the bacchanalian appetite of NFL franchises for cash, and as a result are usually offered up as candidates for relocation to larger, more affluent cities that currently lack an NFL team. Examples of other small market cities are Green Bay, Buffalo, Indianapolis, and Jacksonville.
Turns out, though, the state’s policy of simply bribing the Saints to stay may have been a winning strategy. For once, Louisiana’s history of corruption is paying off, as it were.
The last decade or so has seen a rash of stadium building in professional sports. In city after city, professional franchise owners have conned local governments into ponying up billions for shining new stadiums neither the cities nor the fans wanted or asked for. The strategy: The team owner threatens to take the team to another town — often a larger market — if the city does not build a state of the art facility. The cities usually waver, then cave, building the teams fabulous new digs complete with retractable roofs, palatial box seating, and, in the case of the Phoenix Cardinal Stadium, a live grass field on motorized trays that can be relocated to the parking lot between games so the grass can grow in the omnipresent Arizona sunshine.
This increasingly bizarre building spree flies in the face of the supposed simplicity of sports contests. At one time football only required 22 players and a grass field. Now it requires box seating with flat screen high def closed circuit television and personal wet bars. These stadiums cost a billion dollars a piece, unless you are the New York Yankees, in which case the cost is a billion and a half.
One and a half billion dollars. For a stadium. A stadium that has fewer seats than the 80 year old facility it replaced. And we wonder why Wall Street disappeared into a sink hole.
While this ridiculous building boom went on, with nearly every team in the NFL getting new stadiums (and teams like Indianapolis, Seattle, and Detroit blowing up “outdated” but less than 30 year old and replacing them with new models), New Orleans held on to its old Superdome, staving off a new facility with ugly payoffs to the Saints. And suffering catcalls from the so-called “experts” who said the Saints would never stay in New Orleans unless Louisiana sprung for a billion dollar stadium of its own.
But now the economic climate has changed. In the current recession, even the biggest cities are balking at the price tag of an NFL stadium. The NFL seems to understand this, and, in the dark days of this economic downturn, silently concedes that now is not a good time to ask for any more shimmering shrines to greed. Ask the Yankees how the public feels about $1200 tickets now that Wall Street is on the skids.
Somehow New Orleans waited out the building boom, and the Saints are settling for a $100 million refurbishment of the Superdome. The Dome, now 35 years old, was due for a facelift, so this was money the state might have spent anyway. The payoffs to the Saints continue, but the millions Louisiana will spend is a fraction of what, for example, a smaller town like Indianapolis is now on the hook for while its economy trembles.
Some have argued that Louisiana should not be spending money for professional sports at all. Maybe the money could be better spent elsewhere, but the Saints have certainly meant a lot to the city as it still struggles to come back from Hurricane Katrina. NFL football attracts visitors who see both how far the city has come and how far it has to go. The Saints give New Orleans the visibility it needs to compete for national sporting events, including NCAA Final Fours, BCS Championship games, and possibly future Super Bowls.
While it is debatable if the Saints are worth the money lavished upon them, the Superdome itself is definitely beneficial. Without the Saints as its primary tenant, it would be politically difficult to get the state to agree to the constant investment the Dome needs to remain competitvie for premier sporting events.
Overall, not a bad deal.