Brewers Will Get Their $$$

I went to a ball game at AmFam Field with some friends last week. It was a cool and windy day, so the roof was closed, making it pleasant inside. Our seats were great. My over-priced brat was made better by Stadium Sauce. And the Brewers shut out the Astros in a game that went just over two hours thanks to the pitch clock. It was fun and though somewhat pricey, I thought it was more than worth it.

And yet, if the state were to snub the Brewers’ demand for $300 million in taxpayer money to maintain and renovate their ballpark I’d be fine with that. In fact, I’d cheer and I’d cheer even if it meant the club picked up and moved to Nashville or wherever. It’s time state and local governments started rejecting this extortion from billionaire owners who can afford to pay for their own physical plants.

In another excellent piece on this subject, Urban Milwaukee editor Bruce Murphy, reports that the Brewers are messing up their lobbying efforts to get $290 million (more like $372 million when you count interest) out of the state’s projected $7 billion surplus. Murphy writes that the Brewers spent $450,000 on lobbyists who appeared to work exclusively with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Evers obliged and put that $290 million in his budget, but then predictably, the Republicans took it out. They routinely strip everything out of Evers’ proposal and start from scratch.

To make matters worse, the Governor’s proposal came as a surprise to Vos, whose ego was bruised. So, he set up his own group to work out a different deal with the team. But Murphy raises interesting arguments to suggest that maybe the deal won’t happen after all. He documents the plunging interest in what was once that national past-time. He notes the average baseball fan is 57-years old. He observes that the political middle has been pretty much wiped from the Legislature and that anti-Milwaukee sentiment is as high as ever among Vos’ caucus members.

He also notes that, when we add the money spent on the original stadium, this would work out to be the biggest public subsidy in Major League history in one of its smallest markets.

There’s a lot of good stuff in Murphy’s article and it’s worth reading in its entirety, but alas, in the end I have to believe Vos will make this happen. The bottom line reason is that the Milwaukee business community still counts for a lot even in the new rural-populist GOP. And, of course, Vos is from Southeast Wisconsin so he knows that as well as anyone. He’s just not going to let Michael Grebe, et. al., down.

My guess is that he’ll use the new sales tax authority already proposed for the city and county of Milwaukee to leverage more money out of the local governments. Anything that sticks it to Milwaukee will play well in his caucus. Then maybe he trims Evers proposal by $100 million or so to claim that he saved state taxpayers a bunch of money. It’s even possible that he could get the Brewers to pretend to kick in more. They can do that for free because the real cost of what the Brewers need to do to the ballpark is probably under $100 million according to a detailed study conducted by the stadium authority. The Brewers commissioned their own study to run the numbers up by something like four times higher.

I wish I could say that Wisconsin and Milwaukee would lead the country in telling billionaires to pay for their own baubles. But given the realities of Republican politics in Wisconsin I just don’t see that happening.