Larry Lucchino – RI Future

June 26, 2016June 26, 2016

PawSox are still looking for money and one fan is not happy

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He’s a lifelong unionized worker, has gone to PawSox games for the last four decades, and knows cities intimately as a former telephone worker. Dan Murphy also went to every Listening Tour stop last summer when owner Larry Lucchino was trying to get a new stadium built by the taxpayers in Providence as one of the leaders of the grassroots resistance, vociferous in his rejection of the proposed deal then and now still opposed to public funding for renovations of private buildings, be it McCoy Stadium or the Superman building in downtown Providence.

Recently the pre-bid press conference was held at McCoy Stadium for “proposals from qualified firms to prepare a master plan study (the “Study”) of the McCoy Stadium facility and surrounding area located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The intent of the Study is to develop a master plan for significant repairs, upgrades, system replacements and/or improvements to McCoy Stadium and the surrounding area. The State of Rhode Island has regularly financed capital improvements to McCoy Stadium.” This comes more than a year after the late Jim Skeffington and Lucchino told the public a study had already been done and found that renovations for McCoy were too costly.

At a moment when bankruptcy is being floated in regards to the capital city, school buildings are in abject shambles, the birthing unit of a Pawtucket hospital is due to be closed, and unemployment and under-employment still high, Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien and state leaders are seriously considering this in two different instances. Murphy has read through the bid solicitation document for the PawSox and remains unimpressed.

“You can’t buy it with capitalism and pay for it with socialism, it doesn’t work that way,” he said. “If the state owns a piece of it and it looks like a good deal, then it’s worth considering. Other than that, no. To make rich people richer? No way! Neither one of those facilities is life-essential, like a hospital or a police-fire station combination or something to that effect. This is just a stadium and its just a building and they’re not going to make anyone any richer except for the people who own them.”

Click the Player Below to Listen to More of This Interview!

Is there any indication that Lucchino has any interest in keeping the team in Pawtucket for at least the next 25 years? “Oh God no. They’re shopping around, they’re holding their cards close to the vest. I think this whole song and dance they’re doing now with they’re supposedly rebuilding the trust and all that crap? They’re not looking to do that. They’re looking at the fans that go to a certain amount of games every year, and you can count on them like clockwork, they’re not bothering with them, just like they didn’t bother with us last year. They assume we’ll keep coming and if we don’t we’ll be replaced with the new hipster-type fans.”

Murphy’s years of going to the PawSox games have helped him learn about the neighborhood surrounding McCoy intimately. “I think their only investment in the community surrounding McCoy Stadium would be to level it and to build it into something that they want. That’s about it. If you recall when we were putting up with those dog-and-pony shows last summer, [team president Charles] Steinberg never really had anything good to say about the neighborhood around McCoy, he saw that as a negative, almost like it was a ghetto or a slum or something. It’s a lot of three-decker houses that were very well-kept and that’s a very clean neighborhood. Walk around it sometime! It’s a very clean neighborhood. But that whole neighborhood is going to get the kiss of death if Lucchino and his boys get their way.”

What is Lucchino like in comparison to late owner Ben Mondor? “Ben Mondor brought almost like a warmth, a trust, a friendship, a guy that you would sit down with and have a beer, even though his social and financial stature is way different than your own. He was a good guy. That’s the way he was looked at and people supported what he wanted to do because he never wanted to bring that stadium above the people who went there. He wanted to keep the team in Pawtucket, he wanted to keep the games being played there, he wanted to stay in that stadium if at all possible. He was your typical Rhode Islander, even though I believe he was from Canada originally,” he says.

“Lucchino, his history has been just build a stadium and flip it or rebuild a stadium and flip it. He’s not a baseball man, he’s a businessman and the same thing with his whole crew with him, his yes-men.”

“I don’t think they are above moving [the team] right when [construction] is starting to happen. It’s strictly business.”

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February 14, 2016February 15, 2016

Lucchino moves to gentrify Pawtucket

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A source within the Pawtucket business community has disclosed the other half of the equation that most failed to mention when reporting on Pawtucket Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino’s address to the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, his alleged efforts, apparently with full support of Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien, to gentrify the historic communities of color out of the city.

McCoy Stadium has been adjacent to a large swathe of African, Latino, and low-income white renters who live in multi-family housing units for some time. Now Lucchino is courting the business community around the stadium and encouraging them to buy up the properties so to contribute to an “urban renewal” effort that no one asked for or needed until Lucchino came to town.

Gentrification, called a “benign ethnic cleansing” by writer John Strausbaugh, has been going on for several years in Pawtucket. Unless artists and white LGBTQQI people are conscientious and mindful of their impact on a community, these demographics can oftentimes find themselves as the foot-soldiers of the Caucasian invasion Lucchino and Grebien now wish to throw into overdrive with a sports stadium.

It bears mentioning that sports projects, such as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics or the repeated Super Bowls in New Orleans, have contributed to the gentrification of those historic cities of color. It also bears mentioning that Lucchino was recently seen in the entourage of Hillary Clinton at a Boston stop on the campaign trail before the the New Hampshire primaries. Mrs. Clinton and the policies of her husband are considered much to blame for the gentrification of the past two decades, particularly in regards to the anti-poor “Welfare reform” and “tough on crime” legislation that included housing regulations. When I talked with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report this past summer, he emphasized that capital is eager to reclaim the metropolis and return the communities of color to a pre-World War II status quo, dispersed and marginalized politically and socially in the hinterlands as they were before the Great Migration was shifted into overdrive by the wartime economy under FDR.

At this point, the situation is divided into a rather unfortunate either/or situation. PawSox fans either have to say goodbye to their beloved team, something I get the impression many can handle considering the behavior of Lucchino and company, or they can get behind a renovation project, totally financed by the taxpayers, that will turn McCoy into a bulldozer of communities of color that probably will be far too expensive for these fans to attend anyways. Unless Lucchino comes out in the next few weeks with a plan to create community land trusts for these housing units or, alternatively, Grebien institutes a series of rent control policies, we are looking down the barrel of a very ugly rifle whose shot sounds eerily like Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

February 6, 2016February 7, 2016

Two major rip-offs Rhode Islanders should not pay for

In a touch of irony, two news stories came across my desk today that share a common trait, instances where the rich and well-to-do are trying to make the taxpayers fork out cash for what is not supposed to be a public problem. In fact, their issues are totally due to poor business decisions made by people who should have and did know better.

First was a letter co-signed by Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien and PawSox chairman/owner Larry Lucchino. In half-repentant tones that would only be considered genuine by the naive or gullible, the two make the first thrust at what has been long-expected, namely, a taxpayer-subsidized “renovation” of McCoy Stadium that is totally unwarranted and undeserved, particularly considering that the building was just given a makeover some years ago. Invoking a baseless notion of “competitive advantages” given other teams in the minor leagues by “newer facilities”, they are starting the opening round of a public fleecing.

If baseball players are so disadvantaged by sub-standard facilities, why are there so many players from Central and South America playing in the major leagues? Every year the boys of spring include among them a sizable number of talented players who grow up in poverty, played in sub-standard settings, and were successfully scouted by Americans with alluring promises of glory. Of course when they arrive on our shores, they discover that the minor leagues pay a pittance of a salary and that their fantasies of glory may indeed be just that, but such are the empty promises of men like Lucchino. That Mayor Grebien would play ball with such a fleecing shows perhaps his constituents should think wisely about who gets their vote next November, particularly in light of how Lucchino is in the business of professional gentrification.

The other bit of news is equally laughable. It would seem that the Cardi Corporation and the Department of Transportation are in a bit of a public tiff over the deterioration of the ‘I-Way’ bridge that redirected traffic on Interstate 195 several years ago. After a car crashed into a guard rail several years ago, it was revealed that the structure failed to meet Federal Highway Administration requirements. Cardi is now expecting the state (read: taxpayers) to reimburse them for the construction of a new guardrail.

As irony would have it, I have had a source for some years who was intimately involved in the construction of the highway as a unionized construction worker and inspector. This source indicated that, from start to finish, there was a host of corrupt practices to be seen in the creation of the structure, from the fabrication of the skeleton beams in out of state to the pouring of the cement. The I-Way, as is the case with almost every public construction project in Rhode Island, was a magnet for buffoonish corruption of every kind. When it was revealed several years ago that there was a state office operating in the upper floors of a gentleman’s club, it was barely mentioned that the office was located in that venue because it was just adjacent to the I-Way and Cardi’s offices on Allens Avenue. Cardi knew very well that they were cutting corners when they built that bridge and they did so anyway because of the bizarre inter-relations between the construction business, the asphalt/concrete industry, and various political and criminal families that have always had your transportation safety solely at heart.

This is a no-brainer. Larry Lucchino and the Cardi Corporation do not deserve any public monies. Lucchino made a bad business decision by getting into a seamy deal with the late James Skeffington, who thought his connections to the Democratic Party machine made this an automatic venture capitalist success. The Cardi Corporation should have just built their bridge properly. Meanwhile, as two corporate bodies with deep pockets come begging for a bail-out, Providence and the wider state is in a severe economic situation. Our schools are crumbling, the impoverished are left to beg, and the social safety net is a joke in comparison with the rest of the world.

November 10, 2015February 15, 2016

On the new PawSox management

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The recent announcement of the new management team of the Pawtucket Red Sox, with Dr. Charles Steinberg as president, Dan Rea III as senior vice president/general manager, and Jeff White as treasurer, struck all the activists who spent the summer stirring up a protest about the proposed construction of a new stadium in Providence as team owner Larry Lucchino doubling down on his proposal to help gentrify Providence. The three are veteran spokesmen for Lucchino and all made cameos this summer on the listening tour circuit, refusing to actually listen to the public and instead telling we poor stupid Rhode Islanders from on high how they planned to save us from ourselves.

In a recent article for the Providence Journal, Steinberg, whose training as a dentist just screams professional sports business acumen, said he wants to see ‘passion again’ in Pawtucket. Yet only four months ago he and the other two, along with Cyd ‘Vicious’ McKenna, were publicly insulting and antagonizing the very community they now claim they want to nurture.

Meanwhile, Jorge Elorza and Gina Raimondo continue to jump back and forth between appealing to the vast majority of sanely cynical citizens, who see this as a bail-out for a business model Lucchino’s type likes to impose on America’s past time, not to mention a Baltimore-styled gentrification move for Providence, and appeasing big-name Democratic Party donors who are getting cranky over not getting their way. The great political writer Paul Street has coined the phrase ‘Dismal Dollar Drenched Democrats’, one that is totally fitting herein.

If we look at the new leadership, we see a group of individuals who are more dedicated to the bottom line than the community. Steinberg is a long-time hanger-on of Lucchino’s coattails, having followed him to San Diego, Baltimore, and Boston, where they left less-than-desirable legacies. Rea is a year younger than me and does not remember when Bill Buckner let the ball roll through his legs during the World Series while White is obviously a number-crunching middleman with no interest in sports.

Leaving aside these surface observations, there is something much more important to note. Rea is a history baccalaureate graduate of Harvard, a finishing school of neoliberal public relations, and White comes from a long career of neoliberal financial restructuring deals. This school of thought, as fantastically described by Dr. Michael Hudson in a recent CounterPunch podcast with Eric Draitser, is a get-rich-quick ideology that stuffs the pockets of the few while defenestrating the taxpayers and treasuries. It is true that urbanized stadiums are quickly becoming the norm of baseball. Yet it is also true that baseball is functioning as a major lever of gentrification. During the summertime listening tour, McKenna reused as a talking point the idea that she as a Providence resident wished she could feel safe walking along the waterfront location on the old I-195 land corridor. The underlying implication, that those darned brown people make it unsafe, is a profoundly disparaging race- and class-based remark. Her invocation of the notion that a new baseball park would promote pro-active policing is certifiable lunacy when one recognizes the negative impact such policies have on people of color. Considering how Lucchino’s previous hosts in Baltimore were not exploding into demonstrations of celebratory glee for the police department last spring, only a member of the Chicago Cubs could miss how insidious this whole thing truly is.

Anyone who has followed this story in even a passing fashion this year can plainly see how truly desperate the ownership is now. Without any psychic abilities, it seems like they are ruing the day the late James Skeffington talked them into this because he thought he could pull a fast one and get his way due to the fact he had long-time connections going back to when his buddy Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy handed him a sweetheart real estate attorney deal. If one refers back to the original pitch at the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation he made with Lucchino, he looked genuinely stunned that people reacted in such a fashion to what he thought was an open-and-shut hustle. Now that Skeffington has passed on, the team is being led by a bunch of non-Rhode Islanders, which means they have absolutely zero connections and are left with a franchise whose reputation they destroyed and that they thought they could flip at a profit within five years. Why exactly are Rhode Island tax payers supposed to aid and abet such a scam?

At this point, with Lucchino threatening to pack up and leave town unless we pay his bills, I would offer a simple single word: SEYA!

August 14, 2015February 15, 2016

Lucchino’s bad business in Baltimore

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Previously I posted a story about PawSox owner Larry Lucchino’s luck in San Diego with PetCo Park, host venue of the Padres. But make no mistake, San Diego was no aberration. A simple Google search shows that Camden Yards, also touted by PawSox Listening Tour doyen Dr. Larry Steinberg as a stellar success, has been everything but.

In fact, the home field of the Orioles was cited by the right-libertarian magazine Reason as “a symbol of downtown-development delusion.” You know there is definitely something amiss when a magazine known for unabashed love of Ayn Rand is throttling the billionaire class.

Let us begin with the aforementioned Reason article. In the name of full disclosure, I would be remiss if I did not say I am opposed to its ethos and find the political economy it subscribes to simply illogical. But with that said, they are pretty rough here on Lucchino’s Camden Yards, going as far as blaming the subsidy to the Orioles for the protests that took place last spring in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police, writing “those looking for a villain in Baltimore’s economic woes may want to fix their gaze up at the owner’s box[.]” The author writes further:

Today Camden Yards, the ballyhooed baseball stadium in downtown Baltimore, will feature something never before seen in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball: an official game played with not a single paying spectator in sight…It’s no surprise that Camden Yards would play such an important symbolic role in the ongoing civic breakdown of Baltimore. The stadium has long been the prototype for showering tax dollars on millionaire sports owners in the name of spurring downtown urban renewal.

In November 2013, Bloomberg Business‘s Darrell Preston, Aaron Kuriloff, and Rodney Yap filed a report on Oriole Park. The picture they painted less than two years before the imagery we saw broadcast on television last spring was dire. A report that was heavy on the numbers, the long quote I am including here has a significant amount of gravity. Titling their piece REBIRTH ELUDES BALTIMORE AS CAMDEN REALITY LAGS PROMISES, they wrote:

Camden Yards also launched a trend of placing stadiums in the middle of cities in an attempt at redevelopment, as public officials nationwide mistook its appeal as a sports venue for success as a development catalyst, said Tim Chapin, chairman of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University. In fact, he said, the widespread belief that Camden Yards launched a rebirth in downtown Baltimore isn’t true…Camden Yards now borders neighborhoods where the number of employers is lower than in 1998, six years after it opened… Unemployment is rising in these areas, as are their rankings against other neighborhoods for violent crime and the percentage of properties in foreclosure. By 2011, the stadium area was home to fewer businesses than in 1998, according to census data. The zip codes around Baltimore’s stadiums saw a 7.8 percent drop in the number of businesses from 1998 to 2011.

That final point is important to note because the PawSox are promising that their new stadium will be a catalyst for development, whereas the record shows the exact opposite. As I have also noted previously, the parcels chosen by the PawSox have already been designated not just as a public park but as an important site for waste water mitigation, the hinge of an all-important master permit that will shorten development times significantly. If that permit is voided, that could result in the I-195 land remaining vacant. And it seems from these accounts that Lucchino has a long-standing habit of causing just that.

To close out, here is an article from The Baltimore Sun in 2012. Titled WAS CAMDEN YARDS WORTH IT?, the prognosis is an astounding negative. And what is especially impressive is the apt comparison the authors make to Boston and Fenway Park, something that might be a tad relevant to this discussion also.

None of the cities that banked on downtown “stadium stimuli” have reversed their population losses. Between 2000 and 2010, Baltimore lost 30,193 residents (4.6 percent of its population), St. Louis, 28,895 (8.3 percent), Pittsburgh, 28,859 (8.6 percent), Cincinnati, 34,340 (10.4 percent), Cleveland, 81,588 (17.1 percent), and Detroit, 237,493 (24.9 percent). Meanwhile, some cities that have refused to subsidize stadiums have fared much better. Consider Boston…There, the baseball team plays in a 100-year-old ballpark that is privately owned by a property tax-paying entity…Boston city proper is much healthier and more vibrant than Baltimore City precisely because, three decades ago, Boston took a more organic approach to urban renewal…From 1947 to 1972, manufacturing jobs declined by 43 percent in Boston versus 25 percent in Baltimore. From 1950 to 1980, Boston’s population fell 30 percent compared to Baltimore’s 17 percent…By 1975, Boston’s crime rate was higher than Baltimore’s, and by 1979, Boston’s median household income was lower than Baltimore’s. But in 1980, Massachusetts voters passed Proposition 2 1/2 , forcing Boston to cut its effective property tax rate by an estimated 75 percent within two years. …While Boston has 10 percent more residents than it had in 1980, Baltimore has 21 percent fewer. Boston’s inflation-adjusted median household income rose 51 percent between 1979 and 2009, but Baltimore’s grew only 2 percent. We continue to struggle with high poverty rates and tens of thousands of properties that are vacant or in disrepair.

Dr. Steinberg has consistently claimed that, when Larry Lucchino showed up in Boston, he was a major figure in opposing the replacement of Fenway Park. Anyone familiar with that movement knows that is a little bit of a stretch, in fact the SAVE FENWAY campaign was a grassroots effort that got a big boost when BoSox players also took up the cause. But it is also pretty obvious for an outside observer that the city officials of Boston probably just balked at Lucchino’s requests in light of their progressive tax code and host of regulations. It remains to be seen if Rhode Island will follow the example of Boston from either two decades ago, when they decided to preserve Fenway, or just this past month, when Mayor Marty Walsh refused to pay the tab for the International Olympic Committee.

August 13, 2015February 15, 2016

Larry Lucchino’s losing record in San Diego

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Last week when I sat down to talk with Dan Yorke, one point he brought up was that stadium opponents have their hands tied until Speaker Mattiello releases the terms of the new deal he is working with the PawSox ownership. I agree with that, but with one caveat: there is always the paper trail to indicate what direction things are going in. Larry Lucchino is a veteran player in the baseball stadium construction game, so the idea he might deviate from a long line of tricks and tropes is highly dubious.

The current word from Speaker Mattiello’s office is that this will be a ‘revenue-neutral’ or ‘revenue-positive’ deal, a very slippery set of words. But Arlene Violet hammers it home in a piece for The Valley Breeze:

[T]he taxpayer is now being serenaded by the House Speaker with a sweet tune that any proposal would have to be “revenue neutral.” It’s a great soundbite but devoid of reality. In their book “The Field of Schemes,” authors Neil de Mause and Joanna Cagan expose this ploy and the steps taken as the project unfolds to shift costs and risks to the public while the rich welfare recipients turn the public money into private profit.

That does not bode well for Messrs Lucchino and Mattiello. But if one looks into Petco Park, one of the highly-touted ‘success’ stories on Lucchino’s resume, a site that Dr. Steinberg consistently cited in his Listening Tour presentations, the prognosis is dire. While affiliated with the San Diego Padres in the late 1990’s, Lucchino was able to push through a deal that was funded by publicly-approved bonds, Proposition C, called a ‘public-private partnership’ back then also. However, due to both a budget crunch and fiscal restructuring under California state law, the taxpayers were left on the hook facing a debt of up to $271 million. And it appears that Lucchino has not changed his tune over the past two decades. If one visits another story from the San Diego Reader titled CHARGERS: LOOK AT PETCO PARK FAILURE (how encouraging!), the comments section is illuminating.

Oh, the lies that were told in that 1998 election! The ballpark was to be revenue neutral; hotel tax receipts would service the bonds. Bureaucrats later admitted to a grand jury that they had been pressured to jiggle those numbers to make it look like TOT revenues would service the bonds. [Emphasis added]

In fact, as this slideshow presentation for the book PARADISE PLUNDERED: FISCAL CRISIS AND GOVERNANCE FAILURES IN SAN DIEGO (sounds cheery!), Petco Park not only failed to be ‘revenue-neutral’, it contributed in no small fashion to a major fiscal emergency for the city, resulting in austerity measures and cuts to pensions and public services. And considering Rhode Island has already done those things, one is left with only morbid fantasies to explain what might be offered up next. Will we put state heirlooms on the auction block or perhaps cut to the chase and sell the children into debt bondage?

July 14, 2015July 15, 2015

PawSox versus the public: I-195 land inspires dueling imaginations

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2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5875 — The site looks like a big empty lot…

The parcel of land in Providence being eyed as the site of a new stadium by the new owners of the Pawtucket Red Sox became the scene of dueling imaginings as Charles Steinberg led a group of PawSox employees on a tour of the site with Paws, the PawSox mascot and PawSox ballplayer Matt Spring. Steinberg invited those in attendance to imagine the ballpark his boss, Boston Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino, wants to build on this land with public money.

Meanwhile, a Facebook group calling itself “No new stadium for Providence” invited supporters to see the parcel of land as the park it was originally intended to be. “The public is invited to preview the park by picnicing, walking dogs, kicking soccer balls, blowing bubbles, flying kites (it is that big!), riding bikes and tossing wildflower seeds all over this huge, breezy, sunny space.”

Steinberg’s patter was essentially the same as the talks he’s been giving at the various cities he’s done his “Listening Tours” in. Steinberg talks about baseballs being batted into the water (by left-handed batters), the stadium being open for public use year round and the businesses that will crop up around the park. Members of the public critical of the planned stadium openly scoffed at the idea that the park would bring business downtown.

If either side were making new arguments, I didn’t hear them.

Some of the PawSox employees engaged with the public, as Steinberg wrapped up his tour and the crowd broke up into smaller groups. When a critic said, “No one who lives here wants a stadium here,” a PawSox employee answered that he lives in the area, “and I would love to see a stadium here.”

My best count is that out of 30-40 PawSox employees and 50-60 members of the public there in opposition, only one person not employed by Larry Lucchino, RI Future contributor Mark Gray, was willing to publicly declare himself as being in favor of moving the PawSox to a new downtown stadium.

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5866 — …but it’s on the water, and has plenty of geese.

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5919 — There are small sections filled with wild flowers.

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5931 — the PawSox brought their own home plate…

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5946 — … plus Matt Spring and Paws.

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5952 — PawSox employees and the skeptical public listened to Charles Steinberg…

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 5969 — Charles Steinberg

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6001 — The public is doubtful.

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6037 Games — Imagine a park here…

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6069 — Mark Gray

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6141 — Paws, imagining a baseball park…

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6194 PawSox — PawSox employees don’t like the attitude of the skeptical public…

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6216 — Matt Spring and Paws at Home Plate, but the public wasn’t buying into it…

2015-07-13 It's Your Park 6242 Games — Right field or a picnic area?

June 26, 2015June 28, 2015

Mayor Grebien rallies support, says new owners are no Ben Mondor

The potential move of the Pawtucket Red Sox to downtown Providence has caused heated debate between the public and the General Assembly since the idea was first floated earlier this year. On Thursday, opponents of the move rallied outside of the State House to express their passionate disapproval for the move.

Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien shared his own memories of McCoy Stadium at the rally, saying that he knows that he’s not the only one with such an emotional attachment.

“Like many of you, the first baseball game I ever attended was at McCoy. As a kid, I used to go to McCoy with my parents and grandparents to enjoy the games and see the future Red Sox greats before they were household names,” he said.

“I am certain all of you have similar experiences and traditions that you hold dearly as well. The memories and traditions formed at McCoy are things we all cherish. Memories we fear Rhode Island’s kids may never get to experience for themselves.”

Grebien continued to speak about the stadium’s previous ownership under Ben Mondor, and how Mondor was dedicated to the Pawtucket community as well as the team. The new ownership does not hold such sentiment.

“The new ownership has a very different business model, one that some could say is totally contrary to what exists there now. It lacks the vision, compassion, and commitment to the core principles that have made the franchise so successful,” Grebien said.

After his speech, Grebien added that the citizens of Pawtucket have not been involved in any of the business decisions the new owners have made. Residents have not even been made privy to the feasibility study that was reportedly conducted to determine the condition of McCoy.

“What we’re trying to understand, and what we’ve asked for from the ownership, is a feasibility study that they’ve done to give us an idea. How bad is it? If it’s bad, show us it’s bad,” he said.

Grebien is not the only one who feels this way, though. Sam Bell, the Rhode Island State Coordinator for the Progressive Democrats of America, has his own reasons opposing the PawSox becoming the ProvSox.

“There’s so many issues,” he began. “It starts with the basic principles of the public planning. Taking away a public park, flooding the area with surface parking, clogging out businesses, creating massive amounts of noise that disrupts the residents who live there.”

According to Bell, most people who he has spoken with who live or work around the vacant I-195 lands, which is where the new stadium would be built, do not want it there. The request for public money to help fund the project is also wrong in Bell’s eyes.

“It’s the public’s money. The amount they’re asking for is grotesque,” he said. “The amount they are asking for here is obscene to a degree that we often don’t even see.”

“I actually think it’s bad for Providence, to move it into that location, which is going to be a park, and it would hurt Pawtucket to leave it. One of the great things about this is that there’s so many issues and people come at it with so many different perspectives, but everyone agrees, we have to stop this deal,” Bell added.

Economic development has been one of the biggest talking points in support of a new stadium. Sharon Steele, a board member of the Jewelry District Association, finds that exact reason is why everyone should be fighting against a stadium. If a stadium were to be built, it would only bring minimum wage jobs, rather than small businesses that could directly benefit the community. Steele also mentioned that the park would help to draw in business more so than a stadium.

“Parkland is a hugely important center place for appropriate development,” she said. “Whether you look at Central Park, or you look at all the other magnificent parks across the country, and the I-195 land was specifically made for economic development, and a stadium simply does not fulfill that specific requirement.”

With both the House of Representatives and the Senate in recess until September, it’s hard to say what the fate of the PawSox will be. Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello has given his support for the move, but he has also said that he will not go against what the public ultimately wants. Unless something major happens between now and September, the public seems to believe that the PawSox should stay right at home, in Pawtucket.

June 10, 2015

State House leaders presented 13,000 signatures opposed to PawSox move

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David Norton, representing Organizing For Pawtucket, delivered petitions to Governor Gina Raimondo, Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Teresa Paive-Weed on Tuesday afternoon. Over 13,000 Rhode Island residents signed the petition demanding that the PawSox stay in Pawtucket and that no tax dollars be spent on the construction of a new stadium in downtown Providence.

According to the press release:

Today we are delivering 13,000 petition signatures to Rhode Island leadership. As the most powerful legislator in Rhode Island, Speaker Nicholas Mattiello has the power to say NO to PawSox principal owner Larry Lucchino. We are calling on him specifically to take action on this issue.

13,000 Rhode Islanders and people at every point across the political spectrum in Rhode Island – from the Tea Party to the Progressive Democrats – are in agreement: Speaker Mattiello, MAN UP and tell PawSox principal owner Larry Lucchino NO!

A small group, followed by news cameras, first went to the Governor’s office, where a staffer politely accepted a box containing copies of all the signatures. The group then went to the third floor and to the Speaker’s office, where the reception was a good deal more chilly. At one point the Speaker’s staffer got up and left the room, only to return a moment later to tell Norton to place the petition on the floor next to her desk.

The surprise came at the Senate President’s office, when Paiva-Weed opened the door to her office herself. Perhaps the Senate President was equally surprised to see a group of news cameras and activists at the door when she opened it, but if so, she didn’t show it, much.

Paiva-Weed graciously accepted the petition and promised to keep the interests of Pawtucket in mind during negotiations.

You would think it would be all but impossible to ignore 13,000 signatures.

You can watch the petition signature delivery below:

May 20, 2015

Andrew Zimbalist’s ‘problematic’ history

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Smith College sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has a long history delivering consulting reports that contain exactly what his clients want to hear. Has House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello hired the best person to “independently assess and review” the Pawtucket Red Sox proposal?

In 2013 Andrew Zimbalist was interviewed by Stephen Nohlgren for the Tampa Bay Times about moving the Tampa City Rays to a new stadium downtown. When asked if the Rays need a new stadium, Zimbalist was adamant that the answer was yes. When asked where the stadium should go, Zimbalist replied in a way that should be familiar to Rhode Island residents paying attention to his statements regarding the proposed downtown stadium.

Downtown Tampa. It’s very important in today’s economics that stadiums be located as close to a business district as possible — particularly baseball, that can play six or 7 games a week. It enables the team to attract members of the business community to the stadium at the end of the work day and sell season tickets and premium seating.”

It was at this time that Tampa Bay sports reporter Noah Pransky first discovered that Zimbalist was a paid consultant for Major League Baseball. The Tampa Bay Times, in response to this information, said, “The Times did not know of any ongoing relationship between Zimbalist and Major League Baseball when it published an interview with him on Jan. 21. If we had, we would have disclosed that to our readers.”

Zimbalist seems to make a habit of avoiding full disclosure. Amy Anthony of the Associated Press exposed Zimbalist’s ties to Major League Baseball for Rhode Island readers the day after Speaker Nicholas Mattiello hired Zimbalist as a consultant for $225 per hour. This was not information either Zimbalist or Mattiello felt the need to disclose when the hiring was announced.

Zimbalist and Mattiello further failed to disclose that Zimbalist had toured the proposed downtown Providence site for the PawSox stadium with the late James Skeffington. It is impossible to imagine that Skeffington, who co-owned the PawSox with Boston Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino, did not give Zimbalist the full on sales pitch with the tour.

Neil deMause is a journalist and a regular contributor to Vice Sports, Al Jazeera America, Extra!, City Limits, the Village Voice, and other publications. He’s the author of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit for which Zimbalist was an important source.

I asked him about Zimbalist’s reputation as a gun for hire.

“I think gun for hire may be overstating it a little bit,” said deMause, “he is certainly willing to work for anyone who wants his services. And at times, it has caused problems for him.”

Zimbalist, says deMause, “was one of the first economists to really look seriously at stadium financing and has done a lot of great work on that. He also, in the last 10 to 15 years, has started doing a lot of consulting work. He has worked for various different sides. He has worked for cities trying to evaluate whether or not they should spend on teams and he has worked for the owners of the Brooklyn Nets, trying to argue that New York City should put money into an arena.

“One reason I think its problematic is that once you start taking money from someone who has a stake in the game, you have an incentive to spin your findings to make who’s paying you happy.”

One “problematic” example from deMause is a blog post he put together entitled “Zimbalist v. Zimbalist” in which Zimbalist’s statements made at different times for different audiences are contrasted.

Most of this public spending will be of direct benefit to the community, and a significant share will come back to the state and city. … As an investment, the Yankees‘ stadium plan is a winner for the Bronx and all of New York.
-Andrew Zimbalist, New York Times op-ed, 1/22/06

Practically every stadium that’s come on stream in the last 20 years in the United States has been accompanied by a consulting report – these are hired-out consulting companies – that are working for the promoters of the stadium. They engage in a very, very dubious methodology. They make unrealistic assumptions and they can produce whatever result they want to produce.
-Andrew Zimbalist, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 12/22/04

Together with the development of surrounding commercial space and the prospect for a new Metro-North platform, the project will be a major facelift for the area and help gentrify the South Bronx.
-Andrew Zimbalist, New York Times op-ed, 1/22/06

The notion that you’re rejuvenating the waterfront because you put a baseball stadium there frankly is silly. … It’s used for four hours a day when it’s used. And those four hours have tens of thousands of people inside the stadium. They’re not outside milling around on the streets buying shirts and hot dogs. They’re inside spending money on concessions that are managed by the owner of the baseball team.
-Andrew Zimbalist, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 12/22/04

At the time, deMause found Zimbalist’s opinions on a proposed Yankees stadium “puzzling” and “baffling.” deMause called an op-ed Zimbalist wrote for the New York Times, “shoddy work.”

For an example of seriously shoddy work from Zimbalist though, we have to go to 2008, when Zimbalist appeared in court as an expert witness in a dispute between the City of Seattle and the Sonics. As reported by Greg Johns,

“Zimbalist… told attorneys in a pretrial deposition that he produced a unique report on the Sonics’ situation after researching the situation, seeking up-to-date opinions from other economists and spending 20-25 hours writing the paper.

“But [Sonics attorney Paul] Taylor put page after page of Zimbalist’s Seattle report on a screen, adjacent to a 2005 report the Smith College professor prepared for a similar case involving the Anaheim Angels.

“The wording was virtually identical in both reports, with ‘Anaheim’ or the ‘Angels’ simply replaced by ‘Seattle’ or the ‘Sonics.’

“‘Did you just go into your computer and change words?’ Taylor asked.

“‘I have notes I use to draft my reports,’ Zimbalist responded.

After Taylor presented more and more identical pages, Zimbalist allowed that ‘it seems to be the same language.’

When Taylor asked Zimbalist ‘how many thousands of dollars’ he charged the city of Seattle for preparing his report, Zimbalist replied, ‘I have no idea what I have invoiced to date.’

“I think the problem,” said deMause to me in our interview, “is less the billing than that he took the same research and came to the opposite conclusion. That was a little problematic.”

When Zimbalist was working as a consultant for the New York Nets to secure public financing for a new arena in Brooklyn, says deMause, he was trying to find out, “how many people would go to a game in Brooklyn from outside New York. This is a huge issue, because is [the arena] really going to bring in new spending or will it be the people who are going to be in the city any way?”

deMause continued,

So he didn’t have Nets season tickets residents numbers, I don’t know why he didn’t, so he took the Jets number and he said, okay, they play in New Jersey, it’s pretty much the same thing… and uh, maybe? I mean, they have a different fan base, people travel to football games on weekends and basketball games during the week…

“That wasn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do, but it’s a temptation to say, okay, this will show the finding that I’m being paid for. It will make the client happy. It’s economically legitimate, so sure, why not?

“That’s where Andy runs into criticism. Is he sticking to what he thinks is the absolute best economic answer to some of these questions, or is he justifying what the client wants?”

Speaker Mattiello is paying Zimbalist $225 per hour plus expenses, according to the contract acquired by RI Future. For this Zimbalist is to act as a consultant and adviser to the House Policy Office, “independently assess and review the Pawtucket Red Sox Proposal,” “provide a weekly progress update to the Director of the House Policy Office [Lynne Urbani]” and “be responsible for submitting to the Joint Committee on Legislative Services a summary” of his findings.

Zimbalist is “still a good economist,” says deMause. “I learned a ton from him when my co-author and I were working on our book. And he’s inspired a good, new generation of economists.”

However, “There are so many people out there who do not have this conflict of interest you could hire that it seems questionable to hire Andy Zimbalist when you could get Victor Matheson or a Brad Humphries or all these other people.”