Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and the author of a book called Baseball and Billions, comments on local stadium actions. Fifty St. Paul business owners started a campaign against a proposed food, beverage, and lodging tax to fund a Twins stadium, while Minnesota House approved a bill for a $330 million open-air stadium that allows the host city to levy the tax to help repay bonds.
Mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul want to convince the Twins to build the proposed stadium in their respective cities. Residents of both cities would have to approve a referendum before taxes are enacted. Zimbalist says the emerging competition between Minneapolis and St. Paul is just a microcosm of what happens on the national level.
Transcripts
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SPEAKER 1: Baseball's monopoly restricts the number of franchises below the demand for franchises from economically viable cities. And hence what you have is different cities in the United States competing against each other.
And if it's not Minneapolis against Saint Paul, then it's Minneapolis against Washington, DC, or Minneapolis against Portland, Oregon. Now, obviously, it's much more unseemly, and it's much more incestuous to have two adjoining cities competing against each other.
And, I think, that in a sense, this emerging battle between Minneapolis and Saint Paul perhaps will make other cities wake up to how silly it is to have cities competing against each other. The root of the problem here is that there's an artificial scarcity of baseball franchises and public policy really has to address itself to that issue as well.
SPEAKER 2: But does it heighten the competition between Saint Paul and Minneapolis, because it wouldn't be as big of a deal to move the team. When a team is thinking about moving to another state or another city, that's quite a thought process. But this would not be hard to do at all.
SPEAKER 1: Well, it's certainly not. I can't imagine if I was a Minnesota Twins fan living in Minneapolis that this would be a great loss for me if Saint Paul got the team. And conversely, if I were living in St Paul, it wouldn't be a great loss if Minneapolis got the team, because at least the team is in the greater Metropolitan area, and you still have your team, you could still go to the games and still root for it.
So I don't think that the intensity of competition should be as great. But there are some fiscal issues here, and there are issues of political ego on the line. And so this plays itself out in the unseemly way that you're seeing.
SPEAKER 2: What's your sense of what may happen here? Is this becoming a foregone conclusion that something will come together to build a stadium in either of the cities?
SPEAKER 1: It seems like it's moving in that direction. The governor, who is outspoken against any kind of public support, seems to have been tamed. And, one of the issues is, I think, that everybody is attuned to is if the politicians make a commitment to this prior to the sale of the team, then Mr. Pohlad is the beneficiary, which is something that everybody has been trying to avoid all along.
They don't want to give this multi-billionaire a large public subsidy. Well, what's going to happen is you're going to commit to a stadium. The value of the Twins immediately is going to go up $50 or $100 million. And guess who's going to get that money?
So I don't see any way around that, frankly. I think Mr. Pohlad has been delaying the sale of the team for precisely that reason. But at the end of the day, Carl Pohlad is not the issue. The issue is baseball and the Twin Cities.