Stadiums Need More Support
For years, supporters of Baltimore's publicly financed baseball and football stadiums have argued that Marylanders voluntarily paid for the structures by buying lottery tickets dedicated specifically for the Stadium Authority.
No longer. The Maryland Lottery now says that sales of the sports-related games have sagged so much that it needs permission to use proceeds from other lottery games to pay for the stadiums for baseball's Orioles and football's Ravens. Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell (D-Baltimore County), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has obliged the agency by introducing a bill to that effect.
The measure, Senate Bill 104, is scheduled for a hearing in his committee today.
Critics of the publicly financed stadiums are finding little comfort in saying "I told you so." They had argued throughout the 1990s that state-paid arenas weren't widely popular. Powerful political leaders--primarily Glendening and his predecessor, William Donald Schaefer, both Democrats--championed the financing plans, always contending that no Marylanders would have to pay for the stadiums against their will.
It began in 1987, when Schaefer and other stadium supporters struggled to find politically acceptable means of financing a new home for the Orioles and a new football arena in hopes of attracting a team to replace the departed Colts. They settled on a plan to designate the profits from some games of the well-established state lottery system for the newly created Stadium Authority.
The games, primarily instant scratch-off tickets, were to be clearly marked for the Stadium Authority. They also were to have sports-related themes.
The funding plan worked for a while, but it's insufficient now that the lottery must generate $32 million this year for the Stadium Authority.
"Sports tickets are generally our poorest selling scratch-offs," Lottery Director Buddy Roogow told Finance Committee members last month, according to the Annapolis Capital. "People don't like them."
Over the years, he said, lottery officials have struggled to think of new ideas for sports-related games. "We have cows playing tennis," Roogow said.
Under Bromwell's proposal, which legislators say is likely to be enacted, Roogow's agency will be free to use proceeds from any lottery games to fulfill its obligations to the Stadium Authority. Critics say it amounts to a governmental bait-and-switch, but it's too late to do anything about it, now that both stadiums are built.
"The Stadium Authority said this was going to be funded through a special sports lottery and it would rise or fall based on whether there was enough support from the public," said Sen. Christopher Van Hollen Jr. (D-Montgomery), who opposed the 1996 financing plan for the Ravens stadium. "Well, the public has spoken."
The proposed lottery plan isn't as offensive, Van Hollen said, as the state's decision to let Ravens owner Art Modell sell the stadium's naming rights to PSINet for about $10 million over 20 years.
He and other legislators tried to outlaw such an arrangement in the 1996 General Assembly, but stadium supporters insisted on keeping the option open.
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