I'd be much less disappointed about that number if we ended up with a Fenway Park. As it is, we spent a ton of money on a park that nobody really seems too fond of. The best anyone can say is that it's not bad and it's got good sightlines.
"Not bad" and "good sightlines" shouldn't cost 2/3 of a billion dollars.
If our money wizards were honest about the eventual "all-in" costs of the stadium, the figure is far north of $750 mil.
Through the art of flim-flam and financial chicanery, they have instead handed us a pig in a poke and buried millions of stadium-related costs where the sun doesn't shine.
did this estimate include the costs of displacing the businesses and artists who used to occupy this area?
nope, just the construction and land acquisition costs.
the stadium is another example of "process" gone haywire- at the expense and to the detriment of people who strived to make the old area work .
ONLY $20 million from team owners?
Boy did they get a steal from the city...
Froggie,
They got a steal from the city because the owners were not known at the time the stadium deal was done. MLB owned the team, and rightfully so, they didn't want potential owners trying to influence the bidding by promising to make payments to the stadium.
Thus, the current owners did not negotiate the stadium deal, DC negotiated it with MLB. And this was the best they could do. Had MLB sold the team first, I'll bet DC could have gotten a much juicier contribution from the team owners (and likely a more coherent contribution as well - Nats Park, to me, is a textbook example of bad design-by-committee).
Commenting by HaloScan
