pinion Bradenton Residents Should be Wary of Return on Big Investments

This week, the City of Bradenton moved forward with two questionable investments that residents should keep a close eye on. The city will pay the bulk of the freight on a $7.5 million renovation of McKechnie Field (through "bed tax" revenues) and purchase $300,000 in rundown housing property near Wares Creek. Together with the RiverWalk Project, blues festival and Pink Palace deal, the city is in the midst of a major gamble, and residents need to make sure that the parties involved aren't the only ones who see a handsome return.

Let's start with the McKechnie deal. I'll preface my thoughts with a disclosure that I'm a baseball fan who regularly attends Marauders games with my son, as well as a few Pirates games during spring training. Over the years, I've been to dozens of major and minor league parks and McKechnie is one of my favorites, which I've noted in a previous column glorifying it. That being said, I'm skeptical that the planned renovation will promote the kind of attendance that would justify its enormous expense.

Despite my affinity for baseball, I've never been a supporter of large public subsidies for their facilities. Study after study has found that they do not produce the financial impact that is promised and often end up being terrible investments for the municipalities that fund them. In my mind, if a Major League Baseball team can afford to pay a single player $20 million, then they don't need to have socialized talent development – especially when the total bill for a family going to a single Major League game can equal the cost of a month's worth of groceries. This is a free-market economy, so the corporation that owns the team should bear the full cost of bringing that ultra-profitable product to market and talent development is one of those costs.

Spring training does good business in Bradenton, though sellouts aren't all that common and usually require some help from a popular visiting team like the Rays or Yankees. Minor League Baseball, which returned to the city in 2010 after an 85 year hiatus, hasn't caught on nearly as well. I don't know how strong of an argument you can make that expensive stadium improvements will change that. In fact, there's an air-conditioned dome just to our north that a neighboring city is finding hard to fill, even with a winning big-league team (the Rays are second to last in the MLB for attendance).

There are a lot of potential reasons why full-time baseball hasn't found its niche, despite the area's longtime love of spring training. For starters, it's very difficult to get consistent support for anything in this area during the dog days of summer – especially if it doesn’t take place on water. It's flawed logic to presume that if an attraction isn't catching on, enhancing its venue will significantly change that. The renovations include an expansion in seating capacity of 2,000, but outside of corporate buyout nights or a handful of big promotions, there are usually 5,000 plus sitting empty during the summer. Installing covered seats, a boardwalk and a tiki bar behind the outfield fence aren't likely to change that. The outfield is generally the last place fans want to watch a game from and there are a lot of places to buy a cold beer at a tiki bar in Bradenton – none of which cost six bucks. Some of the work is necessary to maintain the facility, but much of it, like new seats, is cosmetic and will require major attendance increases to be justified. The city has done a poor job of articulating how that is going to happen given the current demand for the attraction.  

The city will also be using just under $300,000 in impact fee money to buy a bunch of houses that will likely have to be demolished, by its own admission. It will be purchasing them from developer John Neal, son of former state Senator and major political donor Pat Neal, President and CEO of Neal Communities. The city says the land will be used for ”future development,“ while the immediate public benefit will be ”access to Wares Creek.“ I'm not sure why we need access to Wares Creek. Most Bradenton residents can't throw a rock without hitting an already accessible body of such water.

The city is already on the hook for a major downtown redevelopment that will coincide with the build out of the last remaining portion of riverfront known as the sand pile. Last year, it seemed poised to spend well over $5 million in DDA funds on the Pink Palace until public opinion shifted and suddenly the deal was able to be done for only a fraction of that. All of these expenditures are marketed as improvements that will generate future economic activity, but what's most troubling is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of cohesion in the big-picture, master plan. In many ways, it seems as if city leaders are throwing a whole lot of money at the wall and hoping that a fair amount sticks, while some of the approaches seem to contradict each other. If RiverWalk is going to draw businesses to the area, then why does it seem that we need to further incentivize each one with some sort of public money and tax abatement deal?

This build it and they will come philosophy is suspect. Spending millions on closing through traffic for an odd and architecturally out of place bus depot, as well as other questionable plans that failed, such as the attempt to relocate Cafe Ezra downtown with a quarter million dollars in subsidies (most of which would have benefited the property owner rather than the business) do not do much in terms of building confidence in a successful result. It also bares mentioning that all of these tactics seem to speak to the sort of social engineering and government picking winners and losers in the marketplace that a board dominated by self-described conservatives would be against. 

John Neal seems to have done quite well in his land deal with the city, and I am equally confident that Fawley Bryant, NDC Construction and a host of other ever-present players will prosper in Bradenton's latest round of reinvention. But this city stands on the precipice of what could be a one-shot deal as it attempts to transition from a minor league city to the bigs. Some municipalities have knocked it out of the park when revitalizing their city centers in recent years, though a far greater number have struck out, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab. Bradenton residents should demand a coherent vision as to how all of these big-ticket expenditures are going to work in concert toward a meaningful end, as well as concrete expectations that political leaders can be held accountable for delivering. Simply spending money is no indication that success will follow.

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist and editor for The Bradenton Times. His column appears every Thursday and Sunday on our site and in our free Weekly Recap and Sunday Edition (click here to subscribe). An archive of Dennis' columns is available here. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the badges below.

Dennis Maley