W hile baseball fans in Washington eagerly await Opening Day at the Nationals stadium on South Capitol Street, they remain blissfully unaware that the sparkling new facility’s costs will far exceed the $611 million “cap” approved by the D.C. Council in 2004. Or that the balance will be coming out of their pockets, one way or another. In response to Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s inquiry about the “ultimate project cost,” D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission Chief Executive Officer Greg O’Dell told council members Feb. 6 that the total price tag of the new stadium has now reached $674 million — $63 million over the cap taxpayers were promised would not be exceeded — due to settlements in some eminent domain cases and increased site remediation costs.
According to the city’s official 2007 budget figures, the District’s contribution to the stadium was supposed to be $630.8 million — compared to $20 million from the team’s owners, an investment group that includes local developer Theodore Lerner. Lerner has an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion and was listed in Fortune magazine as one of the 400 richest Americans. But thanks to the council, he’s getting a $610 million gift while D.C. taxpayers are paying 97.4 percent of the cost of his baseball team’s new home. But when the estimated costs of settling the remaining eminent domain cases, a $140 million lawsuit filed by D.C. developer Herb Miller, and another $50 million to upgrade nearby roads and the Douglass Bridge (an expense that was quietly removed from the stadium’s budget and stuck in the Department of Transportation’s) are all added up, the bottom line comes closer to $759 million — making a farce of the so-called “cap.”
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This is certainly not the deal sold to city residents, who were left holding a stack of unpaid bills for the baseball stadium just as Mayor Adrian Fenty announced a proposal to spend another $150 million to cover half the cost of a new soccer stadium, not to mention $236 million more for infrastructure upgrades. The money for the soccer stadium, the mayor explained, will come from the city’s “excess” baseball tax revenue, now running $10 million to $20 million annually. But with the baseball stadium $168 million over budget, there won’t be any excess baseball revenue. This unbudgeted liability is a financial foul ball heading straight at D.C. taxpayers. Unfortunately, there’s no screen to protect them from being hit right between the eyes. And so far, neither the mayor nor the D.C. Council have warned them to duck.
