Can-Am League and a study in public policy failure
TUESDAY, 01 FEBRUARY 2011 12:50
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/can-am-league-and-a-study-in-public-policy-failure
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Just in case you haven't notice, and many in New Jersey probably have not, New Jersey lost a professional baseball team in January. Floyd Hall decided to disband his Sussex Skyhawks of the independent Canadian American Association of Professional Baseball, or Can-Am League for short on January 11. The reason for the team's demise is pretty simple. Hall's lease at the August baseball park had expired and he was unable to sell the customer-challenged franchise to an investor so he cut his losses and folded the team.
Only Skyhawks diehards, and there were not many of them, will miss the team.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may want a replacement team in Newark after National Basketball Association's New Jersey Nets depart for Brooklyn sometime in the future, but he is not clamouring for a Sussex Skyhawks replacement in the Can-Am League.
The Can-Am League is just not that important.
Skyhawks fans can watch Can-Am League baseball elsewhere in New Jersey, either in Montclair or Newark or can make a short drive into Rockland County, New York and watch the Ramapo-based Rockland Boulders. That is if there is a Boulders franchise as all of a sudden, the future of that franchise may be deciding by a New York State Supreme Court Judge.
People in northwest New Jersey apparently had a lot of other things to do in June, July and August each summer and neglected to show up at the Augusta yard. Hall's team drew just 71,826 "paid" customers or 1,670 per game in 43 openings. That was not the worst attendance in the league in 2010. That honor belonged to Pittsfield, a team that averaged 702 paying customers a game and drew 29,485 people in 42 openings in the western Massachusetts city in the Berkshires.
Hall will still operate a New Jersey team in the league as his New Jersey Jackals will once again play at Yogi Berra Stadium on the Montclair State University campus. Hall's other team, the Jackals, didn't excite too many people either, the Jackals attendance figure was 86,014 "paying" customers in 44 dates or an average of 1,954 per game in an affluent market with demographics that would be the envy of most affiliated minor league baseball team owners.
The Can-Am League is in many ways the last stop for players who still have the dream of making it to the Major Leagues. The league has some older players who are looking at one more shot at Major League Baseball and younger players who have been overlooked and may have fallen through scouting cracks that are hoping to impress someone who works in player personnel major league team. The league lacks fans in large numbers and is publicity starved as well as media-challenged since there are no TV and radio contracts with stations that have limited signals although those broadcasts are available on the Internet.
It is also a league that has seen franchises come and go at alarming rates. The independent circuit has lost Sussex but gained Newark after Tom Cetnar purchased the Bears franchise and decided to move the team from the Atlantic League to the Can-Am League last October. That gave the league six teams but there is a seventh and an eight team scheduled to compete in 2011 and the eighth franchise (which is located about eight miles north of the New Jersey-New York border in Montvale up New York's Route 45 in Ramapo, New York) is going to be a problem for the league.
The seventh franchise seems to be a travelling squad made up of New York State League players looking for a chance. The eighth team is the Rockland Boulders and the franchise already has a sordid history. That "history" is going to be played out in court very shortly. Some Ramapo, New York residents are a tad upset with Ramapo Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence who decided to go ahead and build a 3,500-seat stadium off of Route 45 despite the fact that local residents overwhelming voted against funding of the ballpark last August.
St. Lawrence probably thought the vote was a mirage as construction of the stadium continued despite the fact that local voters said there were not giving permission to use town funds to pay off $16.5 million worth of debt. Last Friday, St. Lawrence was hit with a lawsuit, which cannot make the Can-Am League too happy.
The suit filed on Friday in the State Supreme Court of New York State in Rockland County has 390 points of discussion (including item 233, a column by this reporter on the economics of the Can-Am League). The lawsuit is asking for a judgment to stop the project.
Meanwhile the Rockland Boulders along with the rest of the Can-Am League are scheduled to start playing in late May.
Spending on sports facilities in the United States is a major issue and when a municipality decides to get into the sports business, it becomes a money pit of which there seems to be no escape. Ramapo Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence is hell bent on building a baseball park for a sports league which has at best a mediocre financial history.
The Can-Am League had six (two from New Jersey) teams playing in 2010. St. Lawrence wanted to see Ramapo included as the league's seventh team in 2011 and authorized the town to build a $25 million ($16.7 million for the stadium the rest for land acquisition), 3,500-seat park for an owner who wants to cast his lot in a league that doesn't seem to have too many fans.
The Canadian American Association of Professional Baseball.
Because of the number of teams that have folded, offers little more than a grim financial picture but St. Lawrence wanted his taxpayers to invest in by building a stadium for prospective owners. As St. Lawrence continued to make his push to get a stadium funded and a prospective owner, the East Ramapo School District (which is part of the Town of Ramapo) made plans to lay off workers and close a school, the Hillcrest School, which is not far from where the stadium with a promise of a few minimum wage per diem jobs will be built.
Can-Am League players don't get paid much money either. Independent baseball differs from minor league baseball in a significant way. Major League Baseball teams pick up the salaries for managers, coaches, players and trainers in the farm system which eliminates a significant payroll item for owners; in the independent leagues, owners pay for everything. There is a tight salary cap in the independent leagues.
The Can-Am League has a long list of defunct teams: Atlantic City, N.J., Elmira, N.Y., New Hampshire (Nashua), New Haven, North Shore (Lynn, Ma.), Ottawa, Ontario and Sussex.
A 2005 team was supposed to play in Bangor, Maine. That franchise became a road team known as the Grays and folded with Elmira after the 2005 inaugural Can-Am season. The league had 10 teams in 2007 and by 2010 lost 40 percent of the league members.
The league could not find an investor for Sussex and has a travelling team of guys who are basically auditioning for the Can-Am League in the New York State League players. That history should not give anyone any real confidence in the league's financial wherewithal.
But in 2010, St. Lawrence moved ahead and signed a memorandum of understanding through the not-for-profit Ramapo Local Development Corporation and Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC and landed a team. The document was not a binding legal paper but it laid out a road map for Ramapo taxpayers and the baseball team owners. RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball had 18 months to finish a deal after the clock started on June 4, 2010. It is not as though Ramapo had many suitors at the town's doorstep for the new stadium. It is going to be a tough go for anyone to sellout a 3,500-seat baseball stadium in Ramapo and in the "secondary" markets of Rockland and Orange Counties in New York and Bergen County in New Jersey.
The contract between the town and the team is for 20-years, which is quite a stretch considering the Can-Am League is just playing a seventh season after reorganizing following the failure of the Northeast League. The Northeast League began in 1995 and merged with the Northern League in 1998. The two groups split after the 2002 season.
The league has never enjoyed financial stability in 16-years of various incarnations.
The Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball deal could have fallen apart on August 15, 2010 if a number of conditions were not been met. Ramapo and RLDC had to find money to support the construction (with or without Ramapo taxpayers' approval) and have to get all the necessary land approvals. Bottom 9 Baseball had to be in a league by October 8, 2010.
St. Lawrence lost the financial referendum in late August by a 2 to 1 margin, but no matter he forged ahead. Bottom 9 Baseball also missed the October 8 deadline. On January 11, 2011, three months later, Bottom 9 Baseball officials joined the Can-Am League.
The baseball facility is supposed to be ready to open on June 6, 2011. Bottom 9 Baseball will be throwing a million dollars or four percent of the estimated costs into the venue. The team will pay $175,000 a year in rent. It would take more than a century for Ramapo to get back the construction costs at that rate. The team threw a couple of bones to Ramapo. The municipality will get a dollar for each ticket sold (not including those seats in the stadium's 20 luxury boxes — the town will get some money from those seats and some money from the sale of the stadium's naming rights.
What are the odds that a Ramapo Stadium can get any money for naming rights when the New York Giants/Jets Meadowlands Stadium and the Dallas Cowboys Stadium (where Sunday's Super Bowl is taking place) are still unnamed? What also has to be disturbing to St. Lawrence is that the city of Jacksonville waived the 25 percent of an estimated $16 million naming rights deal at the city's stadium to help the Jacksonville Jaguars bottom line. The city is forfeiting $800,000 in revenues annually for the next five years.)
The team will give Ramapo two dollars from each car parked in the stadium's lot for a game. The town will also get 10 percent of the concessions whether it is food, beverage or merchandise sold at the stadium. The team will keep signage rights in the building.
Based on Can-Am League attendance figures, the Town of Ramapo will get somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 a game if the town and team is lucky.
The Ramapo paid financial consultant on the project thinks the stadium will bring in $1.4 million a year which would cover the $1.3 million annual debt service that St. Lawrence projects for the stadium.
Politicians when it comes to stadium costs are so easily fooled.
There is a treasure chest of consultant figures that can fill up rooms at municipal buildings around the country with rosy projections. In Cincinnati, the city and Hamilton County need to find money somewhere to cover the debt of the city's football stadium.
Revenues will come in at $500,000 for the Town of Ramapo and that is a big maybe from games in real world projections not Town of Ramapo-hired economist projections.
Ramapo taxpayers better understand that this stadium will be a loss leader no matter what both sides say. Ramapo officials think the team will bring in $900,000 in stadium related revenues. The bad news, the revenues figure is grossly overstated, the good news for Ramapo is that at this point they are not being asked to pay the team's expenses like New Orleans and Indianapolis and Glendale, Arizona residents are doing for pro sports teams. The bad news is that Ramapo will have to find money somewhere to pay from the annual $1.3 million stadium debt. That money won't be coming from local college baseball teams (Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas College and Dominican College) or high school baseball or stadium concerts, as the seating capacity is too small for anything but small acts.
There is also a question of infrastructure (road repairs, sewer installation and other improvements) and other costs including police. Can the area also handle game day traffic, although that would seem to be a moot point considering the lack of attendance in the Can-Am league?
Another question that should be answered: Who is paying RLDC's legal fees? St. Lawrence or the town?
There is a laughable clause about radio and TV and how Ramapo and the RLDC will get some advertising money from broadcasts and telecasts of the team. Many Major League Baseball teams, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and National Football League teams have revenue sharing deals with local radio stations and a radio network.
Ramapo has two radio stations.
There is a major radio problem, the stronger signal of the two Rockland radio stations (a 1,000 watt daytime) broadcasts in Polish and the other is a 500 watt station daytime that doesn't cover the entire county. Most games will be played at night when the station's signals are diminished under rules established by the Federal Communications Commission. The money that can be charged for a commercial on a small radio station for an independent baseball league team might amount to tip money at a local diner.
There is always Internet radio.
Unless some local access cable TV company wants to put some games on TV, there will be no TV. The affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones franchise in the Short Season A Ball, New York-Penn League is owned by the New York Mets and there are a couple games on TV on SNY and maybe a game here or there on WFAN. The Yankees' Staten Island affiliate in the New York Penn League is on the YES Network once in a while or a blue moon, whatever frequency is less.
The terms of the Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball agreement heavily favors the baseball team which is not surprising.
If the stadium is not done by June 6, 2011, Ramapo will pay Bottom 9 Baseball a penalty of $2,500 a day for every day the stadium is unusable or up to $175,000. If construction of the stadium starts and Bottom 9 Baseball cannot get into a league, Bottom 9 Baseball has to give Ramapo $675,000.
If the stadium isn't built and the RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have an agreement and the agreement is canceled out because there is no stadium by September 30, 2011, Ramapo taxpayers are on the hook for $500,000 as a penalty for Ramapo not living up to the contract.
Bottom 9 Baseball gets exclusive use of the stadium 85 days a year, which is the summer when an outdoor stadium in the northeastern part of the United States should be most utilized. Ramapo gets the stadium 280 days a year, mostly in the winter. It is hard to hold an outdoor concert on January 17 and putting a temporary ice rink in the middle of a 3,500-seat outdoor facility in winter borders on financial lunacy if the town thinks that an outdoor rink in a baseball stadium will make some money.
There is a high baseball team mortality rate in the Can-Am league. Chris St. Lawrence probably doesn't want to know all of this but Ramapo residents should. Publicly funded stadium and arena construction is a failed urban and public policy
Stadium and arena building became an integral part of public policy in the 1940s when Oakland decided to build a football stadium however that was shot down in a referendum. But other cities such as Baltimore and Milwaukee jumped onto the stadium building bandwagon and by the 1950s, cities began putting money aside for simple stadiums that could be used for baseball and football. By the 1990s, (after the 1986 Tax Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan which somehow changed the way stadium debt was paid down---only eight cents of every dollar generated in a stadium or arena built with public funds could go to pay off debt) sports executives convinced politicians that building a sports arena or stadium would be an economic engine. That was the mantra in Cleveland and people said yes to a baseball stadium for the Indians and a project called The Gateway was built which came complete with a baseball stadium, a multipurpose arena, a football stadium and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The project has been bleeding money and the latest plan to help Cleveland's downtown is opening a casino next to the arena.
Sports owners got great leases though at the stadiums and arenas built on the public dime.
Now the Can-Am League is encountering a major problem, a lawsuit that could result in Ramapo having the stadium construction halted. Actually, it is not really much of a problem for the Can-Am League as the baseball grouping has lost franchises before. It is a problem for Christopher St. Lawrence and the residents of Ramapo, New York.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Showing posts with label CanAm League. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CanAm League. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Monday, November 22, 2010
No Never Means No in the Politics of Sports Facility Construction
By Evan Weiner
November 22, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/no-never-means-no-the-politics-of-sports-facility-construction
(New York, N. Y.) -- In the suburban New York City at the Town Hall of Ramapo in Suffern, New York, which is about 35 miles north of the George Washington Bridge, Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence will once again on Tuesday night explain why he feels there is the need to spend millions of dollars for a project that has failure written all over it.
St. Lawrence is continuing his quest to bring an independent baseball league franchise to what once was a wooded area in his town.
St. Lawrence is so gung ho about getting a 3,500-seat facility built on the taxpayers’ dime that he has decided that to ignore the results of an August referendum election which saw local voters turn down the stadium spending request by a 2 to 1 margin. The referendum result apparently was a mirage. Yes the voters said no, but they were clearly mistaken. It wasn't the ballpark or the fact that St. Lawrence has an agreement with the financially-troubled Can-Am League to play at the facility that caused a landslide vote.
Despite the loss, St. Lawrence is plowing ahead with his initiative. The Ramapo Town Board has since the defeat approved a payment of $8,700 for a traffic study of the roads around the site. Then $336,296 was quietly allocated for the site this despite the vote when Ramapo residents said they did not want to put up $16.5 million for the stadium.
Ramapo residents welcome to the "Business and Politics of Sports." Ramapo now has a chance to join a select group of municipalities who voted down stadium or arena packages only to see elected officials overturn the result. No never means no in the political sports arena.
St. Lawrence wants his town board to transfer 61 acres of Ramapo land to the Ramapo Local Development Corporation and use 27 acres to build a small baseball park that will seat 3,500. St. Lawrence plans to proceed with plans for the stadium that could cost taxpayers even more money. Ramapo could pay a higher interest rate on the 20-year bonds, which have been guaranteed by the Ramapo Local Development Corp., or vote to finance the stadium with town funds. Either way, Ramapo taxpayers stand to lose more than they will gain and the possibility of cutting needed town services becomes greater as stadiums and arenas are endless money pits for their owners, town boards like Ramapo.
The stadium idea seems to be a misguided adventure that might have made sense in 1959 after the Tappan Zee Bridge opened north of New York City and when city residents flocked to Ramapo and Rockland County. A stadium with business going up around the facility might have be a gateway to the town but just building a stadium off of parkway and a state road, Route 45 makes no sense in 2011 as there the ballpark is being built in a mature suburb and will not generate any business development or spur housing.
St. Lawrence wants to build a baseball park for an independent league team in an area that has never supported any kind of big time sports or entertainment. At one time, the Nanuet Theater-Go-Round in the late 1970s brought the biggest names in show business to the area but the concept failed and there is now a church in the facility which is about 10-15 minutes away from St. Lawrence's ballpark.
Big time tennis in Mahwah, New Jersey, also within 15 minutes of St. Lawrence's ballpark folded after nearly two decades of mediocre support about 10 years ago.
St. Lawrence is going after a team in a grouping, the CanAm League, that has hardly impressed anyone. The league gets no media attention, has no TV contract and has problems attracting fans.
The 2010 CanAm champions Quebec City franchise led the league in attendance with 147,978 people in 45 games or an average of 3,288 per opening. A team in the backyard of the Boston Red Sox, the Brockton Rox did as much business over 46 games as the nearby Boston Red Sox get in three openings. A slightly more than 100,000 people saw Rox games, 100,092 to be exact or 2,175 a game. Another franchise near Boston did even worse. The Worcester Tornadoes franchise had 88,499 customers in 45 games or 1,966 per opening. The New Jersey Jackals franchise playing on the campus of Montclair State in New Jersey next to the Yogi Berra Museum and within the shadow of the Meadowlands Sports Complex and with Manhattan in the distance had 86,014 people in the stands in44 dates with an average attendance of 1,956 a game. Another New Jersey team, the Augusta-based Sussex franchise ended up with 71,826 patrons in 43 dates or 1,670 a game. Pittsfield could not even break four figures for a per game average. Only 29,485 people came through the turnstiles in 42 games for an average of 702 customers a guy.
The Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball started business in October 2004 with franchise in Bangor, Maine, Brockton, Massachusetts, Elmira, New York, New Haven, Connecticut, Lynn, Massachusetts, Little Falls, New Jersey, Quebec City, Quebec, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Bangor never opened the doors and the league replaced the franchise with a road franchise called the Grays. That franchise and Elmira folded after 2005 and the franchises were replaced by Augusta and Nashua, New Hampshire in 2006. Two more teams joined the league in 2007, Atlantic City, New Jersey and the road franchise known as the Grays.
Lynn and New Haven folded after the 2007 season. Ottawa joined the league for 2008 and replaced the Grays. Atlantic City and Ottawa did not return in 2009. The Nashua franchise was locked out of the local stadium because of the failure to pay rent and became a road team. That franchise moved to Pittsfield after the 2009 season. The league will add Newark, New Jersey as a seventh team in 2011. Newark was a financial failure in the Atlantic league of Professional Baseball. The Ramapo team would be the eighth team and is needed to balance out the league so everybody can play every day.
That is the league that St. Lawrence desperately wants to have Ramapo join.
In sports, saying no to a stadium or an arena proposal doesn't mean no. In the mid-1990s, voters in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee voted against funding for new baseball parks and in Pittsburgh's case a new football stadium as well. Yet the Seattle Mariners ended up with a new, taxpayers funded ball park as did the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Milwaukee Brewers. Pittsburgh also built a new facility for the NFL Steelers.
In Charlotte, voters said no to spending $342 million for a new arena in June 2001 with a 15,000 vote majority. George Shinn took his National Basketball Association franchise to New Orleans in 2002. Charlotte spent $52 million to build an arena in the late 1980s. The structure opened in 1988 and by 1999, Shinn was pushing for a new Charlotte arena for his Hornets because the 11-year-old facility was outdated.
Once Shinn was gone, Charlotte decided that the city needed an NBA team and that the 2001 vote was a referendum on Shinn not the need for a new arena. The city was promised an expansion team by NBA Commissioner David Stern if elected officials came through on a promise to build a new arena. Charlotte Mayor Pat McCoury said one of the reasons that he wanted a new arena built in the city to replace the one that opened in 1988 was that the city would get free publicity every time Charlotte’s basketball team’s highlights were shown on ESPN.
The city spent $265 million to get back into the good graces of the NBA and in exchange, Bob Johnson bought the 2004 expansion team which moved into the new arena in 2005. Arena revenue streams from club seats, luxury boxes (two items that Shinn really did not have) were supposed to make a Charlotte team financially competitive. The franchise has had money problems since day one and the Charlotte Coliseum was demolished in June 2007 at the age of 19.
But in sports, saying no to a stadium or an arena proposal doesn't mean no. State politicians in Washington, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin decided that the voters really didn't intend to kill the ballparks and overturned the vote by taking it out of the voters' hands and passing state legislation raising taxes to build ballparks in Seattle and Milwaukee.
Weeks after the Seattle ballpark referendum was defeated, Washington Governor Mike Lowry on October 24, 1995 signed a bill which allowed King County to create a .017% sales tax, which was offset against the sales tax now collected by the state in King County. Other funding mechanisms included the sale of baseball stadium commemorative license plates as well as using money from sports theme lottery scratch games. Non baseball fans were hit as well as baseball fans for dining as a special stadium sales tax of .5% on restaurants, bars and taverns was levied for patrons in King County and as a special stadium sales tax of 2% on rental cars was implemented. The Mariners contributed $75 million.
The Kingdome was blown up in 2000 but the debt service lingers on until 2016.
In Pittsburgh, Plan B was enacted by city and Allegheny County politicians and money was found to build a new baseball park and a football stadium. Pittsburgh and Allegheny County residents were still paying off the debt on Three Rivers Stadium when the two new parks opened. Three Rivers Stadium was blown up in 2001 but the debt service wasn't.
In Milwaukee after voters said no in January 1995, the state houses (the assembly 52-47) and the state senate 16-15) said yes and sent a bill to Governor Tommy Thompson to sign that made taxpayers in Milwaukee, Racine, Waukesha, Washington, and Ozaukee Counties pay additional sales taxes 0.1% sales tax to cover 77.5% of the costs of the baseball stadium they didn't want. The tax is scheduled to end in 2014. The most interesting part of the Brewers/Wisconsin stadium deal came nine months after the October 6, 1995 vote by the state senate to approve the taxation. State Senator George Petak, a Republican from Racine, originally voted no because Racine had nothing to do with Milwaukee economically and Petak felt that Racine should not be included in the taxation method. Petak voted no but switched his vote which allowed the stadium package to pass by a vote.
Petak was recalled by Racine voters nine months later and ousted from office because of his support for the stadium financing scheme. But the stadium was built.
Politicians just cannot say no to sports. Yonkers, New York has been pushing to build a 6,500-seat baseball park for another independent baseball circuit, the Atlantic League for 10 years now but the project has not taken off. The former mayor, John Spencer, brought out the old and worn out axiom that the ballpark would be an economic engine---a notion that has been put to pasture by virtually everyone over the past two decades with stadium economic impact knowledge----but so far the stadium project remains on the drawing board.
Ramapo Supervisor St. Lawrence hasn't given up yet and probably doesn't know much about George Petak.
Last spring, St. Lawrence signed a memorandum of understanding through the not-for-profit Ramapo Local Development Corporation and Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC to pave the way for a team with Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC running the franchise. The document was not a binding legal paper but it laid out what was ahead for Ramapo taxpayers and the baseball team owners. RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball had 18 months to finish a deal after the clock started on June 4, 2010. It is not as though Ramapo had many suitors at the town's doorstep for the new stadium. It is going to be a tough go for anyone to sellout a 3,500-seat baseball stadium in Ramapo and in the "secondary" markets of Rockland and Orange Counties in New York and Bergen County in New Jersey.
The contract between the town and the team will be for 20-years, which is quite a stretch considering the Can-Am League is just playing a sixth season after reorganizing following the failure of the Northeast League. The Northeast League began in 1995 and merged with the Northern League in 1998. The two groups split after the 2002 season.
The league has never enjoyed financial stability in 16-years of various incarnations.
The Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball deal could have fallen apart on August 15, 2010 if a number of conditions were not been met. Apparently the referendum failure was not a deal breaker. Ramapo and RLDC have to find money to support the construction (with or without Ramapo taxpayers' approval) and have to get all the necessary land approvals. Lawsuits could delay or scuttle the project entirely. Bottom 9 Baseball also has to be in a league by October 8, 2010. As of today, November 22, 2010, the CanAm League officially has seven members and no team in Ramapo. Apparently that is not a deal breaker either.
Assuming Bottom 9 Baseball gets into the Can-Am League (and pays a million dollars or so for that right) and is set to go and Ramapo or the RLDC gets the stadium funding together, the new facility will be built over the winter and will be ready to open on June 6, 2011. Bottom 9 Baseball will be throwing a million dollars or four percent of the estimated costs into the venue. The team will pay $175,000 a year in rent. It would take more than a century for Ramapo to get back the construction costs at that rate. The team threw a couple of bones to Ramapo. The municipality will get a dollar for each ticket sold (not including those seats in the stadium's 20 luxury boxes – the town will get some money from those seats and some money from the sale of the stadium's naming rights. What are the odds that a Ramapo Stadium can get any money for naming rights when the New York Giants/Jets Meadowlands Stadium, the Dallas Cowboys Stadium and the Golden State Warriors facility are still unnamed? What also has to be disturbing to St. Lawrence is that the city of Jacksonville waived the 25 percent of an estimated $16 million naming rights deal at the city's stadium to help the Jacksonville Jaguars bottom line. The city is forfeiting $800,000 in revenues annually for the next five years.)
The team will give Ramapo two dollars from each car parked in the stadium's lot for a game. The town will also get 10 percent of the concessions whether it is food, beverage or merchandise sold at the stadium. The team will keep signage rights in the building. Based on Can-Am League attendance figures, the Town of Ramapo will get somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 a game if the town and team is lucky.
St. Lawrence is absolutely convinced that spending what will become tens of millions of dollars will be a good investment even though there is so much documented proof that municipalities going into the sports business end up having to constantly scramble for funds to cover unanticipated expenditures starting with stadium cost overruns. But St. Lawrence knows better than stadium opponents and the real life experiences in places like Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Jacksonville, after all his hired firm of financial consultants Fishkind and Associates has told him that the ballpark will be a winner.
Fishkind thinks the stadium will bring in $1.4 million a year which would cover the $1.3 million annual debt service that St. Lawrence projects for the stadium. Politicians when it comes to stadium costs are so easily fooled. There is a paper trail of consultant figures that can fill up rooms at municipal buildings around the country of rosy projections. In Cincinnati, the city and Hamilton County need to find money somewhere to cover the debt of the city's football stadium.
Revenues will come in at $500,000 for the Town of Ramapo and that is a big maybe from games in real world projections not Town of Ramapo-hired economist projections.
Ramapo taxpayers better understand that this stadium will be a loss leader no matter what both sides say. Ramapo officials think the team will bring in $900,000 in stadium related revenues. The bad news, the revenues figure is grossly overstated, the good news for Ramapo is that at this point they are not being asked to pay the team's expenses like New Orleans and Indianapolis and Glendale, Arizona residents are doing for pro sports teams. The bad news is that Ramapo will have to find money somewhere to pay from the annual $1.3 million stadium debt. That money won't be coming from local college baseball teams (Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas College and Dominican College) or high school baseball or stadium concerts, as the seating capacity is too small for anything but small acts.
There is also a question of infrastructure (road repairs, sewer installation and other improvements) and other costs including police. Can the area also handle game day traffic, although that would seem to be a moot point considering the lack of attendance in the Can-Am league?
Another question that should be answered: Who is paying RLDC's legal fees? St. Lawrence or the town?
There is also a clause about radio and TV and how Ramapo and the RLDC will get some advertising money from broadcasts and telecasts of the team. Many Major League Baseball teams, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and National Football League teams have revenue sharing deals with local radio stations and a radio network. Ramapo has two radio stations.
There is a major radio problem, the stronger signal of the two Rockland radio stations (a 1,000 watt daytime) broadcasts in Polish and the other is a 500 watt station daytime that doesn't cover the entire county. Most games will be played at night when the station's signals are diminished under rules established by the Federal Communications Commission. The money that can be charged for a commercial on a small radio station for an independent baseball league team might amount to tip money at a local diner.
There is always Internet radio.
Unless some local access cable TV company wants to put some games on TV, there will be no TV. The affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones franchise in the Short Season A Ball, New York-Penn League is owned by the New York Mets and there are a couple games on TV on SNY and maybe a game here or there on WFAN. The Yankees' Staten Island affiliate in the New York Penn League is on the YES Network once in a while or a blue moon, whatever frequency is less.
The terms of the Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball agreement heavily favors the baseball team which is not surprising.
If the stadium is not done by June 6, 2011, Ramapo will pay Bottom 9 Baseball a penalty of $2,500 a day for every day the stadium is unusable or up to $175,000. If construction of the stadium starts and Bottom 9 Baseball cannot get into a league, Bottom 9 Baseball has to give Ramapo $675,000.
If the stadium isn't built and the RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have an agreement and the agreement is canceled out because there is no stadium by September 30, 2011, Ramapo taxpayers are on the hook for $500,000 as a penalty for Ramapo not living up to the contract.
Bottom 9 Baseball gets exclusive use of the stadium 85 days a year, which is the summer when an outdoor stadium in the northeastern part of the United States should be most utilized. Ramapo gets the stadium 280 days a year, mostly in the winter. It is hard to hold an outdoor concert on January 17 and putting a temporary ice rink in the middle of a 3,500-seat outdoor facility in winter borders on financial lunacy if the town thinks that an outdoor rink in a baseball stadium will make some money.
There is a high baseball team mortality rate in the Can-Am league. Chris St. Lawrence probably doesn't want to know all of this but Ramapo residents should. There really is no media in Ramapo other than the local Gannett newspaper which has shrunk the paper's newsroom staff and the physical size of the paper that has gone into any real detail about what is a failed urban and public policy----stadium and arena subsidies.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
November 22, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/no-never-means-no-the-politics-of-sports-facility-construction
(New York, N. Y.) -- In the suburban New York City at the Town Hall of Ramapo in Suffern, New York, which is about 35 miles north of the George Washington Bridge, Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence will once again on Tuesday night explain why he feels there is the need to spend millions of dollars for a project that has failure written all over it.
St. Lawrence is continuing his quest to bring an independent baseball league franchise to what once was a wooded area in his town.
St. Lawrence is so gung ho about getting a 3,500-seat facility built on the taxpayers’ dime that he has decided that to ignore the results of an August referendum election which saw local voters turn down the stadium spending request by a 2 to 1 margin. The referendum result apparently was a mirage. Yes the voters said no, but they were clearly mistaken. It wasn't the ballpark or the fact that St. Lawrence has an agreement with the financially-troubled Can-Am League to play at the facility that caused a landslide vote.
Despite the loss, St. Lawrence is plowing ahead with his initiative. The Ramapo Town Board has since the defeat approved a payment of $8,700 for a traffic study of the roads around the site. Then $336,296 was quietly allocated for the site this despite the vote when Ramapo residents said they did not want to put up $16.5 million for the stadium.
Ramapo residents welcome to the "Business and Politics of Sports." Ramapo now has a chance to join a select group of municipalities who voted down stadium or arena packages only to see elected officials overturn the result. No never means no in the political sports arena.
St. Lawrence wants his town board to transfer 61 acres of Ramapo land to the Ramapo Local Development Corporation and use 27 acres to build a small baseball park that will seat 3,500. St. Lawrence plans to proceed with plans for the stadium that could cost taxpayers even more money. Ramapo could pay a higher interest rate on the 20-year bonds, which have been guaranteed by the Ramapo Local Development Corp., or vote to finance the stadium with town funds. Either way, Ramapo taxpayers stand to lose more than they will gain and the possibility of cutting needed town services becomes greater as stadiums and arenas are endless money pits for their owners, town boards like Ramapo.
The stadium idea seems to be a misguided adventure that might have made sense in 1959 after the Tappan Zee Bridge opened north of New York City and when city residents flocked to Ramapo and Rockland County. A stadium with business going up around the facility might have be a gateway to the town but just building a stadium off of parkway and a state road, Route 45 makes no sense in 2011 as there the ballpark is being built in a mature suburb and will not generate any business development or spur housing.
St. Lawrence wants to build a baseball park for an independent league team in an area that has never supported any kind of big time sports or entertainment. At one time, the Nanuet Theater-Go-Round in the late 1970s brought the biggest names in show business to the area but the concept failed and there is now a church in the facility which is about 10-15 minutes away from St. Lawrence's ballpark.
Big time tennis in Mahwah, New Jersey, also within 15 minutes of St. Lawrence's ballpark folded after nearly two decades of mediocre support about 10 years ago.
St. Lawrence is going after a team in a grouping, the CanAm League, that has hardly impressed anyone. The league gets no media attention, has no TV contract and has problems attracting fans.
The 2010 CanAm champions Quebec City franchise led the league in attendance with 147,978 people in 45 games or an average of 3,288 per opening. A team in the backyard of the Boston Red Sox, the Brockton Rox did as much business over 46 games as the nearby Boston Red Sox get in three openings. A slightly more than 100,000 people saw Rox games, 100,092 to be exact or 2,175 a game. Another franchise near Boston did even worse. The Worcester Tornadoes franchise had 88,499 customers in 45 games or 1,966 per opening. The New Jersey Jackals franchise playing on the campus of Montclair State in New Jersey next to the Yogi Berra Museum and within the shadow of the Meadowlands Sports Complex and with Manhattan in the distance had 86,014 people in the stands in44 dates with an average attendance of 1,956 a game. Another New Jersey team, the Augusta-based Sussex franchise ended up with 71,826 patrons in 43 dates or 1,670 a game. Pittsfield could not even break four figures for a per game average. Only 29,485 people came through the turnstiles in 42 games for an average of 702 customers a guy.
The Canadian-American Association of Professional Baseball started business in October 2004 with franchise in Bangor, Maine, Brockton, Massachusetts, Elmira, New York, New Haven, Connecticut, Lynn, Massachusetts, Little Falls, New Jersey, Quebec City, Quebec, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Bangor never opened the doors and the league replaced the franchise with a road franchise called the Grays. That franchise and Elmira folded after 2005 and the franchises were replaced by Augusta and Nashua, New Hampshire in 2006. Two more teams joined the league in 2007, Atlantic City, New Jersey and the road franchise known as the Grays.
Lynn and New Haven folded after the 2007 season. Ottawa joined the league for 2008 and replaced the Grays. Atlantic City and Ottawa did not return in 2009. The Nashua franchise was locked out of the local stadium because of the failure to pay rent and became a road team. That franchise moved to Pittsfield after the 2009 season. The league will add Newark, New Jersey as a seventh team in 2011. Newark was a financial failure in the Atlantic league of Professional Baseball. The Ramapo team would be the eighth team and is needed to balance out the league so everybody can play every day.
That is the league that St. Lawrence desperately wants to have Ramapo join.
In sports, saying no to a stadium or an arena proposal doesn't mean no. In the mid-1990s, voters in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee voted against funding for new baseball parks and in Pittsburgh's case a new football stadium as well. Yet the Seattle Mariners ended up with a new, taxpayers funded ball park as did the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Milwaukee Brewers. Pittsburgh also built a new facility for the NFL Steelers.
In Charlotte, voters said no to spending $342 million for a new arena in June 2001 with a 15,000 vote majority. George Shinn took his National Basketball Association franchise to New Orleans in 2002. Charlotte spent $52 million to build an arena in the late 1980s. The structure opened in 1988 and by 1999, Shinn was pushing for a new Charlotte arena for his Hornets because the 11-year-old facility was outdated.
Once Shinn was gone, Charlotte decided that the city needed an NBA team and that the 2001 vote was a referendum on Shinn not the need for a new arena. The city was promised an expansion team by NBA Commissioner David Stern if elected officials came through on a promise to build a new arena. Charlotte Mayor Pat McCoury said one of the reasons that he wanted a new arena built in the city to replace the one that opened in 1988 was that the city would get free publicity every time Charlotte’s basketball team’s highlights were shown on ESPN.
The city spent $265 million to get back into the good graces of the NBA and in exchange, Bob Johnson bought the 2004 expansion team which moved into the new arena in 2005. Arena revenue streams from club seats, luxury boxes (two items that Shinn really did not have) were supposed to make a Charlotte team financially competitive. The franchise has had money problems since day one and the Charlotte Coliseum was demolished in June 2007 at the age of 19.
But in sports, saying no to a stadium or an arena proposal doesn't mean no. State politicians in Washington, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin decided that the voters really didn't intend to kill the ballparks and overturned the vote by taking it out of the voters' hands and passing state legislation raising taxes to build ballparks in Seattle and Milwaukee.
Weeks after the Seattle ballpark referendum was defeated, Washington Governor Mike Lowry on October 24, 1995 signed a bill which allowed King County to create a .017% sales tax, which was offset against the sales tax now collected by the state in King County. Other funding mechanisms included the sale of baseball stadium commemorative license plates as well as using money from sports theme lottery scratch games. Non baseball fans were hit as well as baseball fans for dining as a special stadium sales tax of .5% on restaurants, bars and taverns was levied for patrons in King County and as a special stadium sales tax of 2% on rental cars was implemented. The Mariners contributed $75 million.
The Kingdome was blown up in 2000 but the debt service lingers on until 2016.
In Pittsburgh, Plan B was enacted by city and Allegheny County politicians and money was found to build a new baseball park and a football stadium. Pittsburgh and Allegheny County residents were still paying off the debt on Three Rivers Stadium when the two new parks opened. Three Rivers Stadium was blown up in 2001 but the debt service wasn't.
In Milwaukee after voters said no in January 1995, the state houses (the assembly 52-47) and the state senate 16-15) said yes and sent a bill to Governor Tommy Thompson to sign that made taxpayers in Milwaukee, Racine, Waukesha, Washington, and Ozaukee Counties pay additional sales taxes 0.1% sales tax to cover 77.5% of the costs of the baseball stadium they didn't want. The tax is scheduled to end in 2014. The most interesting part of the Brewers/Wisconsin stadium deal came nine months after the October 6, 1995 vote by the state senate to approve the taxation. State Senator George Petak, a Republican from Racine, originally voted no because Racine had nothing to do with Milwaukee economically and Petak felt that Racine should not be included in the taxation method. Petak voted no but switched his vote which allowed the stadium package to pass by a vote.
Petak was recalled by Racine voters nine months later and ousted from office because of his support for the stadium financing scheme. But the stadium was built.
Politicians just cannot say no to sports. Yonkers, New York has been pushing to build a 6,500-seat baseball park for another independent baseball circuit, the Atlantic League for 10 years now but the project has not taken off. The former mayor, John Spencer, brought out the old and worn out axiom that the ballpark would be an economic engine---a notion that has been put to pasture by virtually everyone over the past two decades with stadium economic impact knowledge----but so far the stadium project remains on the drawing board.
Ramapo Supervisor St. Lawrence hasn't given up yet and probably doesn't know much about George Petak.
Last spring, St. Lawrence signed a memorandum of understanding through the not-for-profit Ramapo Local Development Corporation and Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC to pave the way for a team with Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC running the franchise. The document was not a binding legal paper but it laid out what was ahead for Ramapo taxpayers and the baseball team owners. RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball had 18 months to finish a deal after the clock started on June 4, 2010. It is not as though Ramapo had many suitors at the town's doorstep for the new stadium. It is going to be a tough go for anyone to sellout a 3,500-seat baseball stadium in Ramapo and in the "secondary" markets of Rockland and Orange Counties in New York and Bergen County in New Jersey.
The contract between the town and the team will be for 20-years, which is quite a stretch considering the Can-Am League is just playing a sixth season after reorganizing following the failure of the Northeast League. The Northeast League began in 1995 and merged with the Northern League in 1998. The two groups split after the 2002 season.
The league has never enjoyed financial stability in 16-years of various incarnations.
The Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball deal could have fallen apart on August 15, 2010 if a number of conditions were not been met. Apparently the referendum failure was not a deal breaker. Ramapo and RLDC have to find money to support the construction (with or without Ramapo taxpayers' approval) and have to get all the necessary land approvals. Lawsuits could delay or scuttle the project entirely. Bottom 9 Baseball also has to be in a league by October 8, 2010. As of today, November 22, 2010, the CanAm League officially has seven members and no team in Ramapo. Apparently that is not a deal breaker either.
Assuming Bottom 9 Baseball gets into the Can-Am League (and pays a million dollars or so for that right) and is set to go and Ramapo or the RLDC gets the stadium funding together, the new facility will be built over the winter and will be ready to open on June 6, 2011. Bottom 9 Baseball will be throwing a million dollars or four percent of the estimated costs into the venue. The team will pay $175,000 a year in rent. It would take more than a century for Ramapo to get back the construction costs at that rate. The team threw a couple of bones to Ramapo. The municipality will get a dollar for each ticket sold (not including those seats in the stadium's 20 luxury boxes – the town will get some money from those seats and some money from the sale of the stadium's naming rights. What are the odds that a Ramapo Stadium can get any money for naming rights when the New York Giants/Jets Meadowlands Stadium, the Dallas Cowboys Stadium and the Golden State Warriors facility are still unnamed? What also has to be disturbing to St. Lawrence is that the city of Jacksonville waived the 25 percent of an estimated $16 million naming rights deal at the city's stadium to help the Jacksonville Jaguars bottom line. The city is forfeiting $800,000 in revenues annually for the next five years.)
The team will give Ramapo two dollars from each car parked in the stadium's lot for a game. The town will also get 10 percent of the concessions whether it is food, beverage or merchandise sold at the stadium. The team will keep signage rights in the building. Based on Can-Am League attendance figures, the Town of Ramapo will get somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 a game if the town and team is lucky.
St. Lawrence is absolutely convinced that spending what will become tens of millions of dollars will be a good investment even though there is so much documented proof that municipalities going into the sports business end up having to constantly scramble for funds to cover unanticipated expenditures starting with stadium cost overruns. But St. Lawrence knows better than stadium opponents and the real life experiences in places like Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Jacksonville, after all his hired firm of financial consultants Fishkind and Associates has told him that the ballpark will be a winner.
Fishkind thinks the stadium will bring in $1.4 million a year which would cover the $1.3 million annual debt service that St. Lawrence projects for the stadium. Politicians when it comes to stadium costs are so easily fooled. There is a paper trail of consultant figures that can fill up rooms at municipal buildings around the country of rosy projections. In Cincinnati, the city and Hamilton County need to find money somewhere to cover the debt of the city's football stadium.
Revenues will come in at $500,000 for the Town of Ramapo and that is a big maybe from games in real world projections not Town of Ramapo-hired economist projections.
Ramapo taxpayers better understand that this stadium will be a loss leader no matter what both sides say. Ramapo officials think the team will bring in $900,000 in stadium related revenues. The bad news, the revenues figure is grossly overstated, the good news for Ramapo is that at this point they are not being asked to pay the team's expenses like New Orleans and Indianapolis and Glendale, Arizona residents are doing for pro sports teams. The bad news is that Ramapo will have to find money somewhere to pay from the annual $1.3 million stadium debt. That money won't be coming from local college baseball teams (Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas College and Dominican College) or high school baseball or stadium concerts, as the seating capacity is too small for anything but small acts.
There is also a question of infrastructure (road repairs, sewer installation and other improvements) and other costs including police. Can the area also handle game day traffic, although that would seem to be a moot point considering the lack of attendance in the Can-Am league?
Another question that should be answered: Who is paying RLDC's legal fees? St. Lawrence or the town?
There is also a clause about radio and TV and how Ramapo and the RLDC will get some advertising money from broadcasts and telecasts of the team. Many Major League Baseball teams, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and National Football League teams have revenue sharing deals with local radio stations and a radio network. Ramapo has two radio stations.
There is a major radio problem, the stronger signal of the two Rockland radio stations (a 1,000 watt daytime) broadcasts in Polish and the other is a 500 watt station daytime that doesn't cover the entire county. Most games will be played at night when the station's signals are diminished under rules established by the Federal Communications Commission. The money that can be charged for a commercial on a small radio station for an independent baseball league team might amount to tip money at a local diner.
There is always Internet radio.
Unless some local access cable TV company wants to put some games on TV, there will be no TV. The affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones franchise in the Short Season A Ball, New York-Penn League is owned by the New York Mets and there are a couple games on TV on SNY and maybe a game here or there on WFAN. The Yankees' Staten Island affiliate in the New York Penn League is on the YES Network once in a while or a blue moon, whatever frequency is less.
The terms of the Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball agreement heavily favors the baseball team which is not surprising.
If the stadium is not done by June 6, 2011, Ramapo will pay Bottom 9 Baseball a penalty of $2,500 a day for every day the stadium is unusable or up to $175,000. If construction of the stadium starts and Bottom 9 Baseball cannot get into a league, Bottom 9 Baseball has to give Ramapo $675,000.
If the stadium isn't built and the RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have an agreement and the agreement is canceled out because there is no stadium by September 30, 2011, Ramapo taxpayers are on the hook for $500,000 as a penalty for Ramapo not living up to the contract.
Bottom 9 Baseball gets exclusive use of the stadium 85 days a year, which is the summer when an outdoor stadium in the northeastern part of the United States should be most utilized. Ramapo gets the stadium 280 days a year, mostly in the winter. It is hard to hold an outdoor concert on January 17 and putting a temporary ice rink in the middle of a 3,500-seat outdoor facility in winter borders on financial lunacy if the town thinks that an outdoor rink in a baseball stadium will make some money.
There is a high baseball team mortality rate in the Can-Am league. Chris St. Lawrence probably doesn't want to know all of this but Ramapo residents should. There really is no media in Ramapo other than the local Gannett newspaper which has shrunk the paper's newsroom staff and the physical size of the paper that has gone into any real detail about what is a failed urban and public policy----stadium and arena subsidies.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Monday, July 19, 2010
A potential sports financial fiasco in the making just north of the New Jersey-New York border
A potential sports financial fiasco in the making just north of the New Jersey-New York border
MONDAY, 19 JULY 2010 08:27
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-potential-sports-financial-fiasco-in-the-making-just-north-of-the-new-jersey-new-york-borderhttp://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-potential-sports-financial-fiasco-in-the-making-just-north-of-the-new-jersey-new-york-border
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE POLITICS OF SPORTS BUSINESS
About eight miles north of the New Jersey-New York border after Chestnut Ridge Road in Montvale turns into Route 45 in New York State (near Exit 12 of the Palisades Parkway), there is supposed to be a baseball park built by June 6, 2011. The Town of Ramapo, (New York) Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence has decided that his town needs an independent baseball league team in the financially challenged Can-Am League.
Ramapo needs something to distinguish itself from other New York City suburban communities in St. Lawrence's thinking and a money-losing stadium hosting a team in a shaky independent baseball league with baseball players who were stars in high school or college or older players who have been in the Major Leagues but have been injured or past their prime with virtually no chance to make it to "The Show" is just the thing.
The Cam-Am League has six (two from New Jersey) teams playing in 2010. St. Lawrence wants to see Ramapo included as the league's seventh team in 2011 and he has authorized the town to build a $25 million ($16.7 million for the stadium the rest for land acquisition), 3,500-seat park for an owner who wants to cast his lot in a league that doesn't seem to have too many fans. According to the Can-Am website, the league's attendance through July 17 should cause Town of Ramapo residents real concerns as they are the ones who will pay for St. Lawrence's dream.
The Quebec City-based Capitales have had the most customers so far this year with 69,735 tickets sold in 23 dates or about 3,031 a game. The Jersey Jackals, a team that plays games at Yogi Berra Stadium on the grounds of Montclair State University, have sold 46,779 people in 22 openings or an average of 2,126 a date. In Brockton, Massachusetts, near Boston, the Rox franchise is nearly on par with the Jackals in getting fannies in the seats. Brockton has attracted 49,162 people in 24 games or an average of 2,048. In Worcester, Massachusetts, the Tornadoes team has played 23 home games and has sold 43,111 tickets or 1,874 a game.
The Augusta, New Jersey-based Sussex Skyhawks have had a difficult time selling tickets since the team began in 2006. This year the team has played 22 home games and has drawn just 40,513 or an average of 1,841 an outing. The team's attendance has dropped every year since 2,006.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts's Colonials franchise has played 19 home games and is averaging 870 tickets sold per game. Colonials baseball has drawn 16,532 fans this year.
This is the grim financial picture of the league that St. Lawrence wants his taxpayers to invest in by building a stadium for prospective owners. As St. Lawrence was making his push to get a stadium funded and a prospective owner, the East Ramapo School District (which is part of the Town of Ramapo) was making plans to lay off workers and was closing a school, the Hillcrest School which is not far from where the stadium with a promise of a few minimum wage per diem jobs will be built.
St. Lawrence has not yet used the old bromide that the stadium will be an economic engine and a job creator. Can-Am League players don't get paid much money either. Independent baseball differs from minor league baseball in a significant way. Major League Baseball teams pick up the salaries for managers, coaches, players and trainers in the farm system which eliminates a significant payroll item for owners, in the independent leagues, owners pay for everything. There is a tight salary cap in the independent leagues.
The Can-Am League has a long list of defunct teams: Atlantic City, N.J., Elmira, N.Y. (Elmira lost an affiliated baseball team after Major League Baseball in 1990 took a look at minor league baseball parks and established new guidelines for affiliated teams that demanded minor league team owners or local municipalities spend hundreds of millions of dollars across the United States and Canada to upgrade existing minor league facilities or build new ones. Elmira's local officials said no and Elmira lost a New York Penn League team – Elmira was a Baltimore Orioles affiliate for years and one of the team's managers was Baseball Hall of Famer Earl Weaver – Elmira has been on the outside since the 1990 Major League-Minor League Baseball agreement.), New Hampshire (Nashua), New Haven, North Shore (Lynn, Ma.) and Ottawa, Ontario.
A 2005 team was support to play in Bangor, Maine. That franchise became a road team known as the Grays and folded with Elmira after the 2005 inaugural Can-Am season. The league had 10 teams in 2007 and has lost 40 percent of the league members since then.
But St. Lawrence is moving ahead and has signed a memorandum of understanding through the not for profit Ramapo Local Development Corporation and Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC. The document is not a binding legal paper but it lays out what is ahead for Ramapo taxpayers and the baseball team owners. RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have 18 months to finish a deal after the clock started on June 4, 2010. It is not as though Ramapo had many suitors at the town's doorstep for the new stadium. It is going to be a tough go for anyone to sellout a 3,500-seat baseball stadium in Ramapo and in the "secondary" markets of Rockland and Orange Counties in New York and Bergen County in New Jersey.
The contract between the town and the team will be for 20-years, which is quite a stretch considering the Can-Am League is just playing a sixth season after reorganizing following the failure of the Northeast League. The Northeast League began in 1995 and merged with the Northern League in 1998. The two groups split after the 2002 season.
The league has never enjoyed financial stability in 16-years of various incarnations.
The Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball deal could fall apart on August 15, 2010 if a number of conditions have not been met. Ramapo and RLDC have to find money to support the construction (with or without Ramapo taxpayers' approval) and have to get all the necessary land approvals. Lawsuits could delay or scuttle the project entirely. Bottom 9 Baseball also has to be in a league by October 8, 2010.
Assuming Bottom 9 Baseball gets into the Can-Am League (and pays a million dollars or so for that right) and is set to go and Ramapo or the RLDC gets the stadium funding together, the new facility will be built over the winter and will be ready to open on June 6, 2011. Bottom 9 Baseball will be throwing a million dollars or four percent of the estimated costs into the venue. The team will pay $175,000 a year in rent. It would take more than a century for Ramapo to get back the construction costs at that rate. The team threw a couple of bones to Ramapo. The municipality will get a dollar for each ticket sold (not including those seats in the stadium's 20 luxury boxes – the town will get some money from those seats and some money from the sale of the stadium's naming rights. What are the odds that a Ramapo Stadium can get any money for naming rights when the New York Giants/Jets Meadowlands Stadium, the Dallas Cowboys Stadium and the Golden State Warriors facility are still unnamed?)
The team will give Ramapo two dollars from each car parked in the stadium's lot for a game. The town will also get 10 percent of the concessions whether it is food, beverage or merchandise sold at the stadium. The team will keep signage rights in the building. Based on Can-Am League attendance figures, the Town of Ramapo will get somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 a game if the town and team is lucky.
Revenues will come in at $500,000 and that is a big maybe from games in real world projections not Town of Ramapo hired economist projections.
Ramapo taxpayers better understand that this stadium will be a loss leader no matter what both sides say. Ramapo officials think the team will bring in $900,000 in stadium related revenues. The bad news, the revenues figure is grossly overstated, the good news for Ramapo is that at this point they are not being asked to pay the team's expenses like New Orleans and Indianapolis and Glendale, Arizona residents are doing for pro sports teams. The bad news is that Ramapo will have to find money somewhere to pay from the annual $1.3 million stadium debt. That money won't be coming from local college baseball teams (Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas College and Dominican College) or high school baseball or stadium concerts, as the seating capacity is too small for anything but small acts.
There is also a question of infrastructure (road repairs, sewer installation and other improvements) and other costs including police. Can the area also handle game day traffic, although that would seem to be a moot point considering the lack of attendance in the Can-Am league? (Cars used to back up on Route 59 for the old Rockland Drive In Movie and clog traffic for an hour back in the 1950s into the 1970s on rare occasions.)
Another question that should be answered: Who is paying RLDC's legal fees? St. Lawrence or the town?
There is also a clause about radio and TV and how Ramapo and the RLDC will get some advertising money from broadcasts and telecasts of the team. Many Major League Baseball teams, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and National Football League teams have revenue sharing deals with local radio stations and a radio network. Ramapo has two radio stations.
There is a major radio problem, the stronger signal of the two Rockland radio stations (a 1,000 watt daytime) broadcasts in Polish and the other is a 500 watt station daytime that doesn't cover the entire county. Most games will be played at night when the station's signals are diminished under rules established by the Federal Communications Commission. The money that can be charged for a commercial on a small radio station for an independent baseball league team might amount to tip money at a local diner.
There is always Internet radio.
Unless some local access cable TV company wants to put some games on TV, there will be no TV. The affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones franchise in the Short Season A Ball, New York-Penn League is owned by the New York Mets and there are a couple games on TV on SNY and maybe a game here or there on WFAN. The Yankees' Staten Island affiliate in the New York Penn League is on the YES Network once in a while or a blue moon, whatever frequency is less.
The terms of the Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball agreement heavily favors the baseball team which is not surprising.
If the stadium is not done by June 6, 2011, Ramapo will pay Bottom 9 Baseball a penalty of $2,500 a day for every day the stadium is unusable or up to $175,000. If construction of the stadium starts and Bottom 9 Baseball cannot get into a league, Bottom 9 Baseball has to give Ramapo $675,000.
If the stadium isn't built and the RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have an agreement and the agreement is canceled out because there is no stadium by September 30, 2011, Ramapo taxpayers are on the hook for $500,000 as a penalty for Ramapo not living up to the contract.
Bottom 9 Baseball gets exclusive use of the stadium 85 days a year, which is the summer when an outdoor stadium in the northeastern part of the United States should be most utilized. Ramapo gets the stadium 280 days a year, mostly in the winter.
There is a high baseball team mortality rate in the Can-Am league. Chris St. Lawrence probably doesn't want to know all of this but Ramapo residents should. Independent baseball teams have had a tough time in New Jersey, and now the malady is spreading a bit north of the New Jersey border into Ramapo, New York.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
LAST UPDATED ( MONDAY, 19 JULY 2010 08:27 )
MONDAY, 19 JULY 2010 08:27
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-potential-sports-financial-fiasco-in-the-making-just-north-of-the-new-jersey-new-york-borderhttp://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/a-potential-sports-financial-fiasco-in-the-making-just-north-of-the-new-jersey-new-york-border
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE POLITICS OF SPORTS BUSINESS
About eight miles north of the New Jersey-New York border after Chestnut Ridge Road in Montvale turns into Route 45 in New York State (near Exit 12 of the Palisades Parkway), there is supposed to be a baseball park built by June 6, 2011. The Town of Ramapo, (New York) Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence has decided that his town needs an independent baseball league team in the financially challenged Can-Am League.
Ramapo needs something to distinguish itself from other New York City suburban communities in St. Lawrence's thinking and a money-losing stadium hosting a team in a shaky independent baseball league with baseball players who were stars in high school or college or older players who have been in the Major Leagues but have been injured or past their prime with virtually no chance to make it to "The Show" is just the thing.
The Cam-Am League has six (two from New Jersey) teams playing in 2010. St. Lawrence wants to see Ramapo included as the league's seventh team in 2011 and he has authorized the town to build a $25 million ($16.7 million for the stadium the rest for land acquisition), 3,500-seat park for an owner who wants to cast his lot in a league that doesn't seem to have too many fans. According to the Can-Am website, the league's attendance through July 17 should cause Town of Ramapo residents real concerns as they are the ones who will pay for St. Lawrence's dream.
The Quebec City-based Capitales have had the most customers so far this year with 69,735 tickets sold in 23 dates or about 3,031 a game. The Jersey Jackals, a team that plays games at Yogi Berra Stadium on the grounds of Montclair State University, have sold 46,779 people in 22 openings or an average of 2,126 a date. In Brockton, Massachusetts, near Boston, the Rox franchise is nearly on par with the Jackals in getting fannies in the seats. Brockton has attracted 49,162 people in 24 games or an average of 2,048. In Worcester, Massachusetts, the Tornadoes team has played 23 home games and has sold 43,111 tickets or 1,874 a game.
The Augusta, New Jersey-based Sussex Skyhawks have had a difficult time selling tickets since the team began in 2006. This year the team has played 22 home games and has drawn just 40,513 or an average of 1,841 an outing. The team's attendance has dropped every year since 2,006.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts's Colonials franchise has played 19 home games and is averaging 870 tickets sold per game. Colonials baseball has drawn 16,532 fans this year.
This is the grim financial picture of the league that St. Lawrence wants his taxpayers to invest in by building a stadium for prospective owners. As St. Lawrence was making his push to get a stadium funded and a prospective owner, the East Ramapo School District (which is part of the Town of Ramapo) was making plans to lay off workers and was closing a school, the Hillcrest School which is not far from where the stadium with a promise of a few minimum wage per diem jobs will be built.
St. Lawrence has not yet used the old bromide that the stadium will be an economic engine and a job creator. Can-Am League players don't get paid much money either. Independent baseball differs from minor league baseball in a significant way. Major League Baseball teams pick up the salaries for managers, coaches, players and trainers in the farm system which eliminates a significant payroll item for owners, in the independent leagues, owners pay for everything. There is a tight salary cap in the independent leagues.
The Can-Am League has a long list of defunct teams: Atlantic City, N.J., Elmira, N.Y. (Elmira lost an affiliated baseball team after Major League Baseball in 1990 took a look at minor league baseball parks and established new guidelines for affiliated teams that demanded minor league team owners or local municipalities spend hundreds of millions of dollars across the United States and Canada to upgrade existing minor league facilities or build new ones. Elmira's local officials said no and Elmira lost a New York Penn League team – Elmira was a Baltimore Orioles affiliate for years and one of the team's managers was Baseball Hall of Famer Earl Weaver – Elmira has been on the outside since the 1990 Major League-Minor League Baseball agreement.), New Hampshire (Nashua), New Haven, North Shore (Lynn, Ma.) and Ottawa, Ontario.
A 2005 team was support to play in Bangor, Maine. That franchise became a road team known as the Grays and folded with Elmira after the 2005 inaugural Can-Am season. The league had 10 teams in 2007 and has lost 40 percent of the league members since then.
But St. Lawrence is moving ahead and has signed a memorandum of understanding through the not for profit Ramapo Local Development Corporation and Bottom 9 Baseball, LLC. The document is not a binding legal paper but it lays out what is ahead for Ramapo taxpayers and the baseball team owners. RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have 18 months to finish a deal after the clock started on June 4, 2010. It is not as though Ramapo had many suitors at the town's doorstep for the new stadium. It is going to be a tough go for anyone to sellout a 3,500-seat baseball stadium in Ramapo and in the "secondary" markets of Rockland and Orange Counties in New York and Bergen County in New Jersey.
The contract between the town and the team will be for 20-years, which is quite a stretch considering the Can-Am League is just playing a sixth season after reorganizing following the failure of the Northeast League. The Northeast League began in 1995 and merged with the Northern League in 1998. The two groups split after the 2002 season.
The league has never enjoyed financial stability in 16-years of various incarnations.
The Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball deal could fall apart on August 15, 2010 if a number of conditions have not been met. Ramapo and RLDC have to find money to support the construction (with or without Ramapo taxpayers' approval) and have to get all the necessary land approvals. Lawsuits could delay or scuttle the project entirely. Bottom 9 Baseball also has to be in a league by October 8, 2010.
Assuming Bottom 9 Baseball gets into the Can-Am League (and pays a million dollars or so for that right) and is set to go and Ramapo or the RLDC gets the stadium funding together, the new facility will be built over the winter and will be ready to open on June 6, 2011. Bottom 9 Baseball will be throwing a million dollars or four percent of the estimated costs into the venue. The team will pay $175,000 a year in rent. It would take more than a century for Ramapo to get back the construction costs at that rate. The team threw a couple of bones to Ramapo. The municipality will get a dollar for each ticket sold (not including those seats in the stadium's 20 luxury boxes – the town will get some money from those seats and some money from the sale of the stadium's naming rights. What are the odds that a Ramapo Stadium can get any money for naming rights when the New York Giants/Jets Meadowlands Stadium, the Dallas Cowboys Stadium and the Golden State Warriors facility are still unnamed?)
The team will give Ramapo two dollars from each car parked in the stadium's lot for a game. The town will also get 10 percent of the concessions whether it is food, beverage or merchandise sold at the stadium. The team will keep signage rights in the building. Based on Can-Am League attendance figures, the Town of Ramapo will get somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000 a game if the town and team is lucky.
Revenues will come in at $500,000 and that is a big maybe from games in real world projections not Town of Ramapo hired economist projections.
Ramapo taxpayers better understand that this stadium will be a loss leader no matter what both sides say. Ramapo officials think the team will bring in $900,000 in stadium related revenues. The bad news, the revenues figure is grossly overstated, the good news for Ramapo is that at this point they are not being asked to pay the team's expenses like New Orleans and Indianapolis and Glendale, Arizona residents are doing for pro sports teams. The bad news is that Ramapo will have to find money somewhere to pay from the annual $1.3 million stadium debt. That money won't be coming from local college baseball teams (Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas College and Dominican College) or high school baseball or stadium concerts, as the seating capacity is too small for anything but small acts.
There is also a question of infrastructure (road repairs, sewer installation and other improvements) and other costs including police. Can the area also handle game day traffic, although that would seem to be a moot point considering the lack of attendance in the Can-Am league? (Cars used to back up on Route 59 for the old Rockland Drive In Movie and clog traffic for an hour back in the 1950s into the 1970s on rare occasions.)
Another question that should be answered: Who is paying RLDC's legal fees? St. Lawrence or the town?
There is also a clause about radio and TV and how Ramapo and the RLDC will get some advertising money from broadcasts and telecasts of the team. Many Major League Baseball teams, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and National Football League teams have revenue sharing deals with local radio stations and a radio network. Ramapo has two radio stations.
There is a major radio problem, the stronger signal of the two Rockland radio stations (a 1,000 watt daytime) broadcasts in Polish and the other is a 500 watt station daytime that doesn't cover the entire county. Most games will be played at night when the station's signals are diminished under rules established by the Federal Communications Commission. The money that can be charged for a commercial on a small radio station for an independent baseball league team might amount to tip money at a local diner.
There is always Internet radio.
Unless some local access cable TV company wants to put some games on TV, there will be no TV. The affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones franchise in the Short Season A Ball, New York-Penn League is owned by the New York Mets and there are a couple games on TV on SNY and maybe a game here or there on WFAN. The Yankees' Staten Island affiliate in the New York Penn League is on the YES Network once in a while or a blue moon, whatever frequency is less.
The terms of the Ramapo-Bottom 9 Baseball agreement heavily favors the baseball team which is not surprising.
If the stadium is not done by June 6, 2011, Ramapo will pay Bottom 9 Baseball a penalty of $2,500 a day for every day the stadium is unusable or up to $175,000. If construction of the stadium starts and Bottom 9 Baseball cannot get into a league, Bottom 9 Baseball has to give Ramapo $675,000.
If the stadium isn't built and the RLDC and Bottom 9 Baseball have an agreement and the agreement is canceled out because there is no stadium by September 30, 2011, Ramapo taxpayers are on the hook for $500,000 as a penalty for Ramapo not living up to the contract.
Bottom 9 Baseball gets exclusive use of the stadium 85 days a year, which is the summer when an outdoor stadium in the northeastern part of the United States should be most utilized. Ramapo gets the stadium 280 days a year, mostly in the winter.
There is a high baseball team mortality rate in the Can-Am league. Chris St. Lawrence probably doesn't want to know all of this but Ramapo residents should. Independent baseball teams have had a tough time in New Jersey, and now the malady is spreading a bit north of the New Jersey border into Ramapo, New York.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
LAST UPDATED ( MONDAY, 19 JULY 2010 08:27 )
Sunday, March 7, 2010
In Ramapo, NY, a $25 Million Present for Independent Baseball
In Ramapo, NY, a $25 Million Present for Independent Baseball
By Evan Weiner
March 8, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m3d7-In-Ramapo-NY-a-25-Million-present-for-independent-baseball
(New York, N. Y.) -- Congratulations to Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence in the New York City suburb of Ramapo, New York. Supervisor St. Lawrence has landed an independent league baseball team in the Can-Am League. All Supervisor St. Lawrence needs to do is commit $25 million over 30 years to build a 3,500-seat baseball park in Ramapo Woods and hope to find an owner for the venture.
If that happens, Ramapo will join a league that is more of a floating crap game than a stable organized entity. The league will start the 2010 season with six teams, Brockton, MA. Little Falls, NJ, Pittsfield, MA, Quebec City, QC, Augusta, NJ and Worcester, MA. The Worcester team played in Nashua, NH in 2009.
The CanAm League had eight teams in 2008, but Ottawa and Atlantic City folded after the season. This is a league with a long history of instability in the five years it has existed as teams in Elmira, NY, New Haven, CT., and Lynn, MA have also failed. The CanAm League has twice featured traveling teams called the Aces and the Grays. The Grays traveling squad was supposed to have played in Bangor, ME but the owners pulled out and the league took over to keep an even amount of teams. Unlike minor league baseball affiliated teams, the owners of independent baseball leagues have to pay the salaries of the rostered players, managers, coaches and athletic trainers which means money is extremely tight and sometimes runs out.
It is also a league with a salary cap and players live with host families. The CanAm League has had some players go onto Major League Baseball organizations with eight CanAm League players having their contracts sold to Major League organizations in 2009 and there are a number of CanAm League players in Major League Baseball spring training camps.
It is in this environment that Christopher St. Lawrence is wagering about $25 million so that his town can be a player in independent baseball.
St. Lawrence is jubilant about bring the first independent league baseball team to his town. He believes that the Ramapo Woods Stadium will break even and that the town will be able to pay off the debt on the money that is needed to build the facility.
The rose color glasses were still on when St. Lawrence talked about the economic impact of the team and the stadium in Ramapo. The reality is St. Lawrence is willing to buy a bill of goods but he doesn’t think so and that is the problem. The Ramapo stadium is rather small potatoes to use a Donald Trumpism when compared to the new football stadium in Indianapolis which is costing the city a lot of money that Indianapolis doesn’t have. Indianapolis budgeted a certain amount of funds for the upkeep of the new facility and figured wrong.
St. Lawrence ought to be more familiar with federal law when it comes to stadium and revenues when it comes back to paying down the debt. Only eight cents out of every dollar generated inside a facility built with public funding goes back to the public unless a very specific lease arrangement is worked out. Given the history of the CanAm League with just Brockton and Little Falls still in the league as this incarnation of the CanAm League begins season number six, it is very likely that the lease St. Lawrence signs with any owner will be a sweetheart deal.
If St. Lawrence is lucky, the team owner will use the franchise as a tax write off or as a toy and doesn’t care about losing dollars and will keep the team funded.
There are some other issues surrounding the stadium building that need to be called into question. There will be construction jobs, those are not permanent and those workers are not going to be paid any more money on this project that say building a factory. St. Lawrence also claims there will be 25 permanent jobs and about 75 part time jobs created because of the stadium and franchise.
St. Lawrence’s $25 million investment will create some job all right. Those 25 permanent positions if connected to the baseball team will be minimum wage positions, which probably will not have benefits and will be entry-level positions at best. The part time jobs will be parking lot vendors, concession workers and will be per diem positions. The New York Times did a story in 2009 about a Columbia University sports management student who swept floors in the Sussex team clubhouse. That will be more typical of the type of employment available with the Ramapo team and at the stadium. St. Lawrence would be better off funding a supermarket, which typically has four or five different shifts with full time workers, workers who live in the community and circulate their money in a community. That is a far better economic plan than building a stadium although there is an intrinsic value to having a team in the community of community pride, feeling good when the local guys win.
Those stadium-related jobs would not be economic engines.
St. Lawrence’s stadium will need more business than just an independent league baseball team which has the doors open for business just some 50 times in a 365 day calendar year. There are 315 other days where there is no business, so there is a suggestion that minor college programs, Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas and Dominican can use the facility along with some local amateur baseball programs. That is all fine and good but when you spend $25 million in a tough economic environment, you better have other planned usage of the facility year round.
St. Lawrence apparently thinks local cable TV and local radio will carry Ramapo games, which will bring money and interest into the team. There are community access station and there could be an Internet presence but there will be no regional cable TV network and there are three in the area, Madison Square Garden, the Yankee-Nets YES Network and the Mets-Time Warner-Comcast SNY but St. Lawrence should not hold his breath waiting for a cable deal from any of those three entities and the two radio stations in the area present unique challenges. One station has a Polish talk and cultural format; the other has a terrible signal and has just 83 watts of power at night.
The Ramapo stadium will have all of the requisites required in sports today, 25 luxury suites and fan “amenities” in a setting in the woods with the mountains in the background. It is not really about baseball no matter what St. Lawrence and his allies are selling. It is about ambience, about well to do customers buying luxury boxes or selling naming rights to a stadium even for independent league games. It is about being a player in pro sports.
Twenty-five million dollars is not a high price these days for a stadium but a small municipality like Ramapo can ill afford the price tag when the entire economic picture is fully painted. New York State is going to cut back funding to all municipalities in the state and somewhere, somehow, taxes will be going up in Ramapo or services will be cut back. But Ramapo has the $25 million and St. Lawrence wants independent baseball and that is what Ramapo might get in 2011.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
March 8, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m3d7-In-Ramapo-NY-a-25-Million-present-for-independent-baseball
(New York, N. Y.) -- Congratulations to Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence in the New York City suburb of Ramapo, New York. Supervisor St. Lawrence has landed an independent league baseball team in the Can-Am League. All Supervisor St. Lawrence needs to do is commit $25 million over 30 years to build a 3,500-seat baseball park in Ramapo Woods and hope to find an owner for the venture.
If that happens, Ramapo will join a league that is more of a floating crap game than a stable organized entity. The league will start the 2010 season with six teams, Brockton, MA. Little Falls, NJ, Pittsfield, MA, Quebec City, QC, Augusta, NJ and Worcester, MA. The Worcester team played in Nashua, NH in 2009.
The CanAm League had eight teams in 2008, but Ottawa and Atlantic City folded after the season. This is a league with a long history of instability in the five years it has existed as teams in Elmira, NY, New Haven, CT., and Lynn, MA have also failed. The CanAm League has twice featured traveling teams called the Aces and the Grays. The Grays traveling squad was supposed to have played in Bangor, ME but the owners pulled out and the league took over to keep an even amount of teams. Unlike minor league baseball affiliated teams, the owners of independent baseball leagues have to pay the salaries of the rostered players, managers, coaches and athletic trainers which means money is extremely tight and sometimes runs out.
It is also a league with a salary cap and players live with host families. The CanAm League has had some players go onto Major League Baseball organizations with eight CanAm League players having their contracts sold to Major League organizations in 2009 and there are a number of CanAm League players in Major League Baseball spring training camps.
It is in this environment that Christopher St. Lawrence is wagering about $25 million so that his town can be a player in independent baseball.
St. Lawrence is jubilant about bring the first independent league baseball team to his town. He believes that the Ramapo Woods Stadium will break even and that the town will be able to pay off the debt on the money that is needed to build the facility.
The rose color glasses were still on when St. Lawrence talked about the economic impact of the team and the stadium in Ramapo. The reality is St. Lawrence is willing to buy a bill of goods but he doesn’t think so and that is the problem. The Ramapo stadium is rather small potatoes to use a Donald Trumpism when compared to the new football stadium in Indianapolis which is costing the city a lot of money that Indianapolis doesn’t have. Indianapolis budgeted a certain amount of funds for the upkeep of the new facility and figured wrong.
St. Lawrence ought to be more familiar with federal law when it comes to stadium and revenues when it comes back to paying down the debt. Only eight cents out of every dollar generated inside a facility built with public funding goes back to the public unless a very specific lease arrangement is worked out. Given the history of the CanAm League with just Brockton and Little Falls still in the league as this incarnation of the CanAm League begins season number six, it is very likely that the lease St. Lawrence signs with any owner will be a sweetheart deal.
If St. Lawrence is lucky, the team owner will use the franchise as a tax write off or as a toy and doesn’t care about losing dollars and will keep the team funded.
There are some other issues surrounding the stadium building that need to be called into question. There will be construction jobs, those are not permanent and those workers are not going to be paid any more money on this project that say building a factory. St. Lawrence also claims there will be 25 permanent jobs and about 75 part time jobs created because of the stadium and franchise.
St. Lawrence’s $25 million investment will create some job all right. Those 25 permanent positions if connected to the baseball team will be minimum wage positions, which probably will not have benefits and will be entry-level positions at best. The part time jobs will be parking lot vendors, concession workers and will be per diem positions. The New York Times did a story in 2009 about a Columbia University sports management student who swept floors in the Sussex team clubhouse. That will be more typical of the type of employment available with the Ramapo team and at the stadium. St. Lawrence would be better off funding a supermarket, which typically has four or five different shifts with full time workers, workers who live in the community and circulate their money in a community. That is a far better economic plan than building a stadium although there is an intrinsic value to having a team in the community of community pride, feeling good when the local guys win.
Those stadium-related jobs would not be economic engines.
St. Lawrence’s stadium will need more business than just an independent league baseball team which has the doors open for business just some 50 times in a 365 day calendar year. There are 315 other days where there is no business, so there is a suggestion that minor college programs, Rockland Community College, St. Thomas Aquinas and Dominican can use the facility along with some local amateur baseball programs. That is all fine and good but when you spend $25 million in a tough economic environment, you better have other planned usage of the facility year round.
St. Lawrence apparently thinks local cable TV and local radio will carry Ramapo games, which will bring money and interest into the team. There are community access station and there could be an Internet presence but there will be no regional cable TV network and there are three in the area, Madison Square Garden, the Yankee-Nets YES Network and the Mets-Time Warner-Comcast SNY but St. Lawrence should not hold his breath waiting for a cable deal from any of those three entities and the two radio stations in the area present unique challenges. One station has a Polish talk and cultural format; the other has a terrible signal and has just 83 watts of power at night.
The Ramapo stadium will have all of the requisites required in sports today, 25 luxury suites and fan “amenities” in a setting in the woods with the mountains in the background. It is not really about baseball no matter what St. Lawrence and his allies are selling. It is about ambience, about well to do customers buying luxury boxes or selling naming rights to a stadium even for independent league games. It is about being a player in pro sports.
Twenty-five million dollars is not a high price these days for a stadium but a small municipality like Ramapo can ill afford the price tag when the entire economic picture is fully painted. New York State is going to cut back funding to all municipalities in the state and somewhere, somehow, taxes will be going up in Ramapo or services will be cut back. But Ramapo has the $25 million and St. Lawrence wants independent baseball and that is what Ramapo might get in 2011.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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