Victory for taxpayers in Miami
Posted: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 6:33 PM
The taxpayers of Miami and Dade County may not even realize it, but they owe University of Miami President Donna Shalala a standing ovation. She just saved them more than $200 million.
The money was the estimated cost to the city and county of renovating the 70-year-old Orange Bowl, home of the Hurricanes and not much else. It is one of the most dilapidated stadiums in the nation, a rusting relic with a proud past but no future.
It is downtown, though, and handy enough to the campus of Miami, which is a private university that had a deal with the Orange Bowl to play its home games there. The current contract runs out at the end of this year, and the city wanted the university to sign a new lease and offered to pour all that money into the old building to make it habitable.
Shalala said she was tempted, but decided to move on up to Dolphin Stadium, which is privately owned by the NFL football team. The city may try to get the Marlins to move into a renovated or rebuilt Orange Bowl. Or it may just tear the old place down, which will be a sad day but also a necessary one. When a stadium’s only remaining virtue is that it is old, it’s time to ring down the curtain.
Miami will make more money – about $2 million a year – at Dolphins Stadium than it’s getting now. But we don’t know how much it would have made had it stayed put. All we know is that the city and county were willing to find a way to spend a lot of money that may have gone into schools and libraries and parks just so a private school would have a nice place to play its football games.
This isn’t unusual. Governments have been spending absurd amounts of money for more than 40 years to build stadiums and arenas for the benefit of professional teams owned by millionaires. The public largesse has dropped off some in recent years as taxpayers have fought back, but the faucets haven’t been turned off entirely.
When told no, teams suddenly discover they can afford to build their own parks. That’s what happened with the baseball Giants, the football Jets and Giants and the baseball Mets and Yankees, among others.
But you will never see an owner turn down an offer of free lodging.
That’s why Shalala should be congratulated. The Orange Bowl is a lot more convenient to ‘Canes’ campus, and it’s rotting bones hold a lot of memories. But she turned down the money.
“Is it appropriate for the University of Miami, a private university, to ask the people, the taxpayers of the city, to spend $200 million on six games a year?” she asked.
It is not, and it never has been. Yet she’s the first person to even raise the question. Hurray for her.
