Ballpark Sites Troubling Virginia

The Washington Times ^ | 14 May 2003 | Eric Fisher

[steve-b]

The Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority is struggling to find a viable site for a ballpark to house a professional team, even as Major League Baseball nears a decision on the future home of the Montreal Expos.

Just two months before baseball plans to announce the fate of the Expos, the authority faces determined resistance from the public to its favored sites and has had no success in persuading owners to sell the land necessary to build a stadium.

[steve-b]

Several local fan groups, including the Arlington Baseball Coalition, have conducted their own pro-Virginia baseball events.

The other paper in town describes this in more detail. Basically, the stadium subsidy seekers have resorted to trolling sports bars with petitions, on the theory that the patrons will decide that signing up is the easiest way to end the interruption and return to the evening's business of getting drunk and/or laid. A classic illustration of why the Founders wanted political life to have some qualification more stringent than maintaining a pulse for twenty-one years.

[TBP]

The team and teh ballpark are going to be in DC anyway. See you at New York & Florida about 2007! Until then, see you at DC Stadium.

[tom h]

"There is no such formal opposition in the District to the proposed ballpark along New York Avenue NE, the favored site."

Uh ... excuse me? The New York Avenue site is in one of the worst neighborhoods in Washington DC -- druggies and prostitutes and poverty of the most wretched kind. I'm excited about baseball in the capitol but not in the District, and not in that location. How many Reston residents will be traveling to the most wretched part of the metro area to watch a lousy team?

I also wish the media would be honest about the durned location.

[steve-b]

That's precisely the point. A stadium at NY Avenue would at least produce some benefit (though the corporate-welfare giveaway is still unjustified) by displacing the mess occupying the location currently. On the other hand, a stadium at Pentagon City would be an unmitigated fiasco, displacing other high-value (and, unlike the stadium, taxpaying) development.

[chambley1]

Just look at what's happening in Massachusetts regarding stadiums:

http://www.castlecoalition.org/report/pdf/states/massachusetts.pdf

[steve-b]

I suppose that's why the Cafritz Foundation attorney mentioned a formal request to have that site removed from consideration.