Gary Cartwright
Arlington's Team
It was the Super Bowl of negotiations: Cowboys owner Jerry Jones versus Dallas mayor Laura Miller. He wanted Dallas to build his storied franchise a new stadium. She didn't want the city to pay for it. That's why the 'Boys will remain in the 'burbs.
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On her vacation in July, Miller read a page-turner called Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: The Battle Over Building Sports Stadiums, which finds that most sports teams have given up trying to peddle the economic benefits of publicly financed stadiums. A few years ago the Yankees were demanding that New York pay half the cost of a new park, but recently the team announced plans to build a $700 million open-air stadium with its own money. That's why Miller finds it fascinating that Jones is still trying to run his con on Arlington. "All they have to do," Miller told me, "is walk over to the Ballpark and see there is nothing happening." The area just south of the Ballpark—the very spot where Arlington plans to build the new Cowboys facility—is a blighted neighborhood with the highest crime rate in the city. All the promised offices, high-rises, and retail shops that were supposed to line a river walk and border a man-made lake never materialized. Similar promises were made to Irving when Texas Stadium was built with local sales tax revenue. What you see today is a parking lot that stretches to the horizon. Cities that splurge on stadiums enjoy a certain cachet of civic pride, but the only real winners are wealthy team owners. In most cases, the team ends up owning the stadium once the bonds are retired, which greatly enhances the value of the franchise, at taxpayer expense. It's worth remembering that managing general partner George W. Bush parlayed an original $606,000 stake in the Rangers into almost $15 million when the team and its sparkling new stadium were sold to Tom Hicks for $250 million.
When Miller was a firebrand columnist for the Dallas Observer, she loved to blister then-mayor Ron Kirk and the city council for giving tax dollars to projects like the American Airlines Center. In fact, the AAC is the reason she stopped writing about politics and started practicing it. In February 1998 Miller saw a front-page photograph in the Morning News of Kirk with his arms around two multimillionaire sports-team owners, Hicks and Ross Perot Jr. "They had struck a deal, and it made me sick," Miller told me one afternoon in August in her fifth-floor office at city hall. Her first instinct was to attack the arena in her column; then she realized that the only way she could make a difference was "to go down to city council and participate in this madness." When her husband, state legislator Steve Wolens, argued that running for a seat on the council was a bad idea, she pleaded, "Please! I have to see what happens to their brains when they go down to city council. They change." Even now, in her first full term as mayor, the mere mention of the AAC causes Miller's eyes to spark and blaze. "They show all the pretty watercolors of the private development that they will build once the arena opens, and then nothing ever happens," she told me. She recalled her arguments just before the council voted to approve $43 million for mixed-use development around the AAC: "They tell us they're going to have a store, including a Wolford, where they sell French panty hose for fifty dollars a pair. Well, I talked to Wolford in New York, and you couldn't get a Wolford next door to a basketball arena at any price." The mixed-use complex has never gotten off the drawing board.
In the Cowboys' defense, they are not pretending the stadium will lead to new development; rather, they are selling the sizzle of hosting big and profitable events such as the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four, and maybe even the Texas-OU game. They promise that Arlington will reap billions in economic impact and cite the $330 million that they say Houston pocketed for hosting the Super Bowl last February. A cost-benefit study commissioned by the City of Arlington estimates that a Cowboys stadium would generate $238 million a year in economic impact, but other experts in the field claim that the study uses faulty assumptions and poor methodology. Andrew Zimbalist called the report "standard puffery."
Miller is not averse to helping business. Looking out her office window, she pointed out dozens of skyscrapers sitting vacant. "See the one with that art deco clock tower?" she asked, indicating the Mercantile Bank building, which was once a downtown showplace but has been vacant now for nearly ten years. "We put $21 million on the table for any developer willing to redo it."
Miller puts a higher priority on her big-fix projects than on a new taxpayer-financed stadium. The Trinity has been an eyesore and a disgrace since 1932, when the city rechanneled the river as a flood-control project. Since then, the section of the river that flows through downtown has been a muddy, smelly concrete ditch, a hangout for derelicts and a repository for old truck tires and abandoned refrigerators. As a council member in 1998, Miller voted against the original Trinity River plan because it was mostly a highway project. As mayor, however, she commissioned a drastic redesign: The new plan is a greenbelt of lakes, a forest, a white-water course, playing fields, boardwalks, jogging trails, footpaths, and meadows, resulting in a public space ten times the size of New York's Central Park. The river will be returned to its original meandering course, except for a couple of lakes. The first of three suspension bridges, all designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, will break ground in September 2005. It will be followed by a gleaming white forty-story arch of cables and spires. "I'm not going to spend $325 million on a football stadium for eight home games a year, but we'll spend much more than that on the Trinity," Miller told me. "To the whole world outside Texas, we are Southfork and the Dallas Cowboys. That's what we are. But I promise you, this will change our image."
Jones has kept a low profile during the stadium hustle, leaving the political advisers to work under the direction of his eldest son, Stephen. Stephen told Miller that the Cowboys could get $10 million a year for stadium naming rights. Over thirty years, that's $300 million. Then they get another $100 million from the NFL stadium fund. That's $400 million. Negotiations should have started with the question, How do we get the other $250 million? But that's not how Jerry Jones operates, not as long as he's got a supply of patsies. However, Arlington residents may be tiring of the patsy role. Since approving the baseball stadium in 1991, voters have repeatedly rejected bond issues. The largest city in America without public transportation, Arlington voted down mass transit in 2002.
I hope that Jones reconsiders Fair Park, because it's the perfect location for everyone—the fans, the city of Dallas, all of North Texas, and the Cowboys, especially given their place in history and status as a class organization. Set against the glittering skyline of a revitalized downtown, connected to a handsome river and the Great Trinity Forest, the stadium could be part of a grand entertainment district and a benefactor to a part of Dallas that's always gotten the short end. Do I think it will happen? Not really. I don't believe that Jones was ever interested in Fair Park or Dallas. It was just a wedge to try to separate first Irving and then Arlington from their own good judgment.
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