Suicide Squeeze
How Minor League Cities Chase Economic Development with Big-League Stadium Schemes
Stephen Buckman and Alex Pemberton
Clemson University
Published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Volume 45, 2023 - Issue 8
ABSTRACT
Economic development practitioners often chase the next great idea to grow their economy, especially their downtowns. A project that many large cities have looked to as a panacea is the sports stadium. Smaller, mid-sized cities have also joined the stadium craze by poaching Minor League Baseball (MiLB) teams via flashy downtown stadium developments, often using the same playbook that large cities have employed. Recently, the City of Wichita, Kansas, undertook a minor league stadium project as an economic development strategy. This paper uses an urban regime theory lens to track the political deal-making and financial engineering that made it possible for Wichita to lure the “Baby Cakes” MiLB team from New Orleans. This study demonstrates that mid-sized cities use the same backroom deal-making perfected by their larger peers to push a fragile form of development that frequently makes minimal economic sense.
Introduction
The rebirth of cities over the last 20–30 years has been well documented. Cities have come back to life from decades of white flight and disinvestment. Often this gentrification of urban neighborhoods has helped cities spur growth and made great fortunes for developers and the property owners who sold out. The story of urban rebirth, however, has been unevenly distributed in favor of traditional powerhouse urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Boston and emerging tech centers like Seattle, Denver, and Austin. As these urban areas have prospered, mid-sized cities in middle America have largely been left behind.
With real estate costs in high-growth markets skyrocketing, investors and urbanites are increasingly looking to second-tier alternatives for greater value. Mid-sized cities once competed primarily on cheap housing and familial nostalgia; however, these traditional strengths are no longer enough to set a city apart from its peers and reap the financial and human capital gains from this broader focus. This reality has brought to mid-sized cities the polarized dynamic familiar to major hubs, with winners like Boise and Greenville booming while cities like Akron and Wichita struggle to compete.
To counter this polarization, mid-sized cities are mirroring established power cities and fueling their urban revitalization with themed districts and hipster neighborhoods, often driven by classic megastructure developments. No megastructure development has been more alluring for city governments and downtown business elites than the sports stadium. The most popular is baseball, which is prized for its urban nostalgia and high frequency of games that generate more consistent foot traffic than any other sport.
While large urban centers fight over major sports teams (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB), smaller markets are relegated to the minors. Minor league affiliates, especially in baseball, are much more transient than their major league counterparts and, in turn, more willing to pick up stakes and leave one city for another if the price is right. Between 1991 and 2012, more than half (95) of the 176 Minor League baseball (MiLB) teams that charge admission relocated (Berger, 2009; Conley, 2016; Davis, 2006) compared to just one Major League Baseball (MLB) team during that time (although two cities received MLB expansion teams). The ability of MiLB teams to relocate offers mid-sized cities unique opportunities to capture the attention of freewheeling owners by building stadiums, sometimes speculatively, with the hope of generating economic growth within their urban cores.
Though often controversial, major league stadium projects rarely encounter the outright failures experienced by smaller cities pursuing minor league teams. Among many examples, the Camden Riversharks decamped to Connecticut to avoid paying for maintenance on a decade-old stadium (Duhart, 2017) while officials in Ramapo, New Jersey, were convicted of securities fraud for crafting an illegal bond scheme to build a stadium after taxpayers rejected an earlier proposal (Liberman, 2017). This article seeks to understand risks this model of economic development pose to smaller cities through a case study of the effort by the City of Wichita and its boosters to attract a MiLB team by building a new downtown baseball stadium. The case study places considerable emphasis on the political and economic underpinnings of the endeavor. It focuses primarily on how Wichita’s urban growth coalition pushed the stadium development through, often via questionable means. Finally, the article provides a brief analysis of the Wichita project and the unique dynamics of mid-sized cities that enable such projects.
Literature review
The stadium economic development lie
The development of sports stadiums has been and continues to be a popular mechanism to create spatial economic development in a region. Stadium development tends to make a public relations splash, helping boost the status and egos of those involved, especially elected officials. Although stadiums are presented as a flashy economic development solution, they often turn out to be little more than fool’s gold.
While consulting firms and government officials tout stadiums’ economic development virtues and enticement of community revitalization (Chapin, 2004), many refute that claim. Much of the academic literature has shown, especially for standalone stadiums, there is little to no positive economic change in the immediate area (Baade, 1996; Baade & Dye, 1988; Cagan & deMause, 1998; Harger et al., 2016; Johnson, 1995; Rosentraub, 2009). Despite this, stadiums are one of the few private developments that often get 60% or more of their costs paid for by governments (Humphreys & Zhou, 2015). These large sums often yield little return on public investment. According to Harger et al. (2016), over US$22 billion in direct state and local government subsidies were allocated for new major professional sports stadiums and arenas in North America between 1990 and 2010. The scale of these numbers is often driven by the monopoly power that major professional sports command.
Stadiums can have a positive economic impact when they are an anchoring component of a megastructure development package (Buckman & Mack, 2012; Crompton, 2014; Rosentraub, 2009). Successful megastructure developments require coalition-building between the government and the public, particularly the business community. These coalitions depend on their ability to sell the project to the area’s residents, businesses, and investors. Therefore, it becomes essential to build alliances or urban regimes that can execute and promote the project from start to finish.
Minor league cities and baseball
Major league relocations face significant hurdles due to the finite number of teams and significant complexities for moving established teams. Minor league sports franchises present far fewer challenges, with baseball offering an appealing target for smaller cities. First and foremost, minor league teams do not hold the de facto monopoly of major league teams. MLB brands are tightly linked to their home cities and drive a more significant proportion of a team’s value than MiLB teams, which derive the majority of their revenues from attendance. MiLB teams are often private subsidiaries of their parent MLB team and rely heavily on cost-sharing with parent clubs. Additionally, MiLB stadiums can be built for a fraction of the size and cost, as they typically hold around 10,000 people compared to MLB stadiums that seat 40,000 or more.
A relatively compact footprint allows for MiLB stadiums to be placed on smaller lots, making them appealing for downtowns. They also require relatively little or no new parking structures, as established infrastructure can typically handle the mostly night and weekend parking needs of 70 home games a season (Van Holm, 2019). Due to the freedom of movement, business models, and smaller scale, new MiLB stadiums are perceived as potential economic drivers. Yet even as their popularity continues to grow, their economic impact on communities is at best minimal (Agha, 2012, 2013; Kimble, 2017; Roy, 2008; Van Holm, 2018, 2019), with immediate jumps in attendance their first year that fade away by year five (Roy, 2008). The economic activity that does occur with MiLB is more geographically localized and is often a matter of shifting money and development that would have occurred in other areas of the city. These activities contrast with MLB, which draws from a much larger geographic region and has greater potential to attract new development (Agha, 2012).
A 2019 study by van Holm highlighted MiLB’s more geographic-centered benefits. The study showed increased home prices and new construction in census tracts near new stadiums relative to other areas in the city. Compared with sample tracts in cities that did not build a stadium, however, this difference disappears. This discrepancy may play into the novelty aspect of new stadiums and suggests that MiLB stadiums are often beneficiaries, rather than drivers, of hyperlocalized development. Unlike their MLB counterparts, there appears to be little real economic development from MiLB stadiums. In turn, the true winners in these developments tend not to be the community or the economic growth of the area but rather the urban regime of government officials, developers, and team owners who spearhead the developments (Van Holm, 2019).
Urban Regime
The Urban Regime theory is key to understanding how cities and developers continue to leverage public monies to build stadiums in the name of economic development. The theory posits that dominant political coalitions and their governance (Feldman, 1997) reshape the urban fabric by replacing negative images with new images (Holcomb, 1993). Stone (1993) noted that “urban regime theory assumes that the effectiveness of local government depends greatly on the cooperation of nongovernmental actors and the combination of state capacity with nongovernmental resources” (p. 6). An urban regime, then, is a partnership that controls the economic development discourse within an urban area.
Similarly to Stone, Elkin examines the relational links that bind urban regimes. Elkin (1985) believes that “the extent to which land-use alliance shapes the activities of functional bureaucracies . . . the extent to which the personnel and the resources of city agencies are part of electoral politics . . . and the extent to which alliances between land interests and local politicians are a crucial part of an electoral organization created by politicians” (p. 14) define urban regimes. It is through these links that private land interests and politicians cement an alliance.
Much urban regime analysis is centered on the promotion of place development and the coalitions promoting this development for personal gain. This notion is particularly evident in Logan and Molotch’s idea of the “urban growth machine” which includes “vested interest groups with common stakes in development [that] use institutional fabrics, including the political and cultural apparatus, to intensify land use and make money.”
Coalitions with interests in growth of a particular place (large property holders, financial institutions, the local newspaper) turn government into a vehicle to pursue their goals (Logan & Molotch, 1987, p. 31). Invariably, growth machines become growth activists that influence government and public ideologies by setting urban agendas and economic development strategies. The notion that political power drives urban policy gives the urban growth machine its strength (Logan & Molotch, 1987). As we will show, this process rewards the urban regime over the citizens of minor league cities.
Methods
The Wichita case study is based primarily on extensive archival research. Research included meeting minutes, e-mails, studies, presentations, bond disclosure documents, and newspaper articles obtained via the internet and Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) requests. While the authors made dozens of KORA requests, we often did not receive all the requested information or were quoted prohibitively high prices to fulfill requests. This resistance to transparency is itself telling in understanding the workings of the urban regime.
Along with archival research, the authors engaged in informal conversations with key stakeholders. These conversations primarily provided background information and a more nuanced understanding of the events that took place, which supported the archival data and offered narrative clarity.
Wichita’s gamble
Wichita, Kansas, is typical of many declining, post-industrial cities in the American Midwest. Its economy is highly dependent upon a single, volatile industry—aircraft manufacturing. Once a thriving city with incomes and a standard of living well above national averages, it has struggled for footing in the 21st century economy. Among the changes that occurred were major corporate relocations out of the city and a severe downturn in the aircraft manufacturing industry post-9/11. As it became clear that Wichita was falling behind economically, it pursued several revitalization strategies with mixed results
Local governments and quasi-governmental organizations attempted a handful of megastructure developments. The first initiative, called the Dynaplex, would have placed a multiuse arena in the downtown area. Though it flamed out soon after its proposal in 2002, it laid the groundwork for the effort that led Sedgwick County to construct an arena in downtown Wichita (Kimble, 2019). With sales tax funding approved by voters in 2004 based in part on promises of revitalization by downtown boosters, the project solicits mixed reviews today as surrounding development failed to materialize (Lefler, 2014).
Public-private revitalization efforts started with successful redevelopment of the Old Town entertainment district, a formerly derelict warehouse district adjacent to the Central Business District. Following this, the city and a group of local real estate developers began to pursue redevelopment along the east bank of the Arkansas River, nearly a mile from Old Town. The WaterWalk project, launched in 2002, was to be a major mixed-use district—sold on glitzy renderings featuring destination retailers, offices, and living space surrounding a manmade canal and peppered with public spaces. According to the Wichita Eagle (Lefler, 2017a), “After 15 years and US$41 million in taxpayer subsidies to the WaterWalk, the city of Wichita has gotten no money from a profit-sharing agreement attached to the development deal. And it probably never will, the way the deal is structured.” Nearly two decades later, the site remains about half vacant land and the project is widely considered a failure.
Another failed effort set downtown development back even further. An undercapitalized duo, known colloquially as the Minnesota Guys, bought up nearly 25% of downtown office space across nearly a dozen buildings. The group separated the buildings floor-by-floor and sold the units as Tenant-In-Common condos to small-time, out-of-town investors (Voorhis, 2014). After receiving significant public subsidies, the Minnesota Guys and many of the condo purchasers struggled financially in the Great Recession and failed to significantly redevelop any buildings. As the buildings were slowly unified under new ownership, the Minnesota Guys spent years fighting over fifty counts of securities fraud (Voorhis, 2017). The suits were ultimately dropped in 2019 (Lefler & Leiker, 2019).
Though fiscally costly, the WaterWalk and Minnesota Guys’ failures are most notable for the damage done to downtown revitalization momentum and erosion of public trust (Wilson, 2012). Wichita continued to struggle economically into the 2010s, leading the Wichita Community Foundation to undertake a major initiative called Focus Forward. The foundation engaged Reach Advisors, led by former Wichitan James Chung, to conduct a data-centric analysis of the city’s economy. In September of 2015, Chung presented his findings (Chung, 2015). The Wichita Eagle characterized his report as a “sobering view” of Wichita’s economy and community dynamics (Wenzl, 2015). The impact of Focus Forward on the business community, civic sector, and political climate cannot be understated. It became, in many ways, the language of progress in Wichita. Civic and political leaders frequently wrapped the justification for their initiatives, including the ballpark project, in a veneer of alignment with Chung’s recommendations.
A new stadium
The opening stadium pitch
Shortly after Chung’s report, Jeff Longwell was elected mayor. The term-limited city councilmember campaigned on opposition to cash incentives and other public subsidies for economic development. This messaging resonated with Wichita voters in the wake of controversies like WaterWalk and the Minnesota Guys. At the time of Longwell’s election, Wichita was the largest American city, with a population of roughly 388,000, without affiliated baseball.
The Wichita Wranglers, then the AA-affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, left for a new stadium in Springdale, Arkansas, after the 2007 season. The following season, a locally owned independent team, the Wichita Wingnuts, took up residency in the 6,400-seat Lawrence-Dumont Stadium. Built in 1934, it was one of the oldest remaining baseball stadiums in the country and had long been afflicted by some degree of functional obsolescence.
The stadium site is on the far eastern edge of the Delano district, one of Wichita’s oldest and most storied neighborhoods. Known in its early days as the center of vice for the cowhands who came through town on drives, it had long been a middle- to lower-class area populated by downtown workers and their families. As downtown declined in the 1970s and 1980s, so declined Delano. This decline was widespread throughout the city core, and Wichita’s inner-city neighborhoods generally remain characterized by economic and social distress.
Figure 1. Wichita Downtown River Corridor
It was with this backdrop that Longwell began to hint that a vision for the west bank was on deck and an updated stadium would be the anchor of the area (see Figure 1). As early as September of 2015, he was publicly talking about a ballpark district. “We need to make sure we look at all of these potential opportunities and try not to judge by our likes. And ask, instead, what the community needs . . . If we’re going to do this right, I don’t know that it needs to be US$50 million. I don’t know what the magic number is, but I think the place can be renovated fairly reasonably cost wise” (Lutz, 2015). In the summer of 2016, he announced that the city would pursue a major-league-affiliated MiLB team. The announcement affirmed the stadium as the city’s number one project, “without a doubt,” to improve the quality of life in Wichita (Heck, 2017).
The set-up pitch
Over the following year, as Longwell and city economic development staff quietly engaged potential prospects in the AA and AAA ranks, the drumbeat for a bolder, shinier stadium grew stronger. For instance, long-time sportswriter and columnist Bob Lutz moved from discussing the possibilities of renovating the current stadium (Lutz, 2016a) to declaring that a new stadium was necessary to compete for an affiliate baseball team (Lutz, 2016b) in a series of more than half a dozen Wichita Eagle editorials.
Along with a vote in October of 2017 to hire a consultant to lead the pursuit of affiliated baseball and negotiations with teams, the Wichita City Council allocated up to US$200,000 for stadium repairs if necessary for the Wingnuts to play the 2018 season (Lefler, 2017b). Despite this investment, a period of extended radio silence led The Wichita Eagle’s editorial team to wonder aloud if affiliated baseball was a realistic possibility (Seminoff, 2017). More than a year after announcing the pursuit of affiliated baseball, Longwell finally hinted at the annual Chamber of Commerce meeting on November 7, 2017, that an announcement was imminent. “I would highly recommend buying a ticket (to a December 7 Chamber event) for potentially some really big news,” Longwell said (Eldridge, 2017). December 7th came and went without an announcement on Wichita’s baseball future. It was later revealed that a prospective AA team engaged by the city around this time had rejected a move to Wichita due to its lack of a thorough plan for project financing (Horwath, 2019). The franchise, then the San Antonio Missions, instead moved to a new US$45 million downtown stadium anchoring an entertainment district in Amarillo, Texas.
A May 3, 2018, story in the Wichita Eagle noted that “the Wingnuts shocked local baseball fans with the announcement on Twitter.” The story quoted the team’s general manager, “What we know, from our conversations with the city, is that 2018 is going to be the last year for Lawrence-Dumont Stadium” (Lefler & Leiker, 2018). This acknowledgment marked the first public statement by a relevant party that Lawrence-Dumont Stadium would be replaced, rather than renovated. In the same article, city manager Robert Layton noted challenges posed by the condition of the stadium but was noncommittal toward redevelopment. He stated that “no final decisions have been made, but it appears that it would just not be prudent for us to invest substantially in that stadium and so we continue to look at alternatives.”
In August of 2018, Longwell declared in a radio appearance, “We’re really close to being able to announce all of this. We do know that (Lawrence-Dumont Stadium) is coming down. There’s not anything there that we can save. Structurally, it’s not sound anymore.” This pronouncement marked the first time a city official publicly stood firmly on one side of the renovate vs. replace debate. The January 2018 structural survey of Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, obtained through an open records request, noted several areas of deterioration that were “very similar to the conditions observed during our previous assessment performed in April and May of 2017.” It did not declare the stadium structurally unsound. Thus, the basis for Longwell’s statement in August 2018 is unclear. According to Cagan and deMause (1998), this process is common for cities seeking to build a new stadium. “The first step is usually the obsolescence claim—alleging that your old stadium is obsolete, insufficient to cater to the demands of modern fans, or even on the verge of physical collapse” (Cagan & deMause, 1998, p. 64).
Figure 2. New stadium rendering.
Amidst the subtle move from renovation toward a new stadium, the financing began to take shape. The city council voted on December 6, 2016, to approve the expansion and amendment of an existing Sales Tax and Revenue (STAR) bond district to include the stadium site and nearby commercial areas (see Figure 2). This expansion supported an additional US$19.5 million in STAR bond funding in part by allowing the existing district to redirect surplus revenues toward the new stadium project. A Phase II STAR bond project plan, approved in May 2017, noted that US$18–22 million in STAR bond financing could be supported. The STAR bond financing ultimately doubled after the failure to land the San Antonio Missions (AA) franchise led Wichita officials to focus at the costlier AAA level.1 The project upsizing was approved without an updated economic impact analysis or feasibility study, and the consultant who produced the original report required for STAR bond approval has stated that his analysis was no longer applicable given the changes to the project cost.2 Wichita City Manager Robert Layton stated that the city adjusted the third-party analysis and did its own “stress test” to underwrite the project and support the upsize, which City of Wichita and State of Kansas Commerce Department officials approved without public question (Swaim, 2019g).
At the April 11, 2017, council meeting, a 20-year tax increment financing (TIF) district was established to trace the area of the expanded STAR bond district along with additional commercial areas. The West Bank Redevelopment District TIF project plan, approved in June 2017, anticipated US$21 million in project costs would be funded from “proceeds of the City’s full faith and credit tax increment bonds.” The plan projected that assessed values would rise from US$3.7 million in 2017 to US$25.4 million by 2025—a 686% increase.
After two years of promises punctuated by silence, the Wichita Eagle broke the big news: “Wichita is close to a deal with the New Orleans Baby Cakes Triple-A baseball team” (Rengers, 2018a). The next day, Mayor Jeff Longwell confirmed that the New Orleans Baby Cakes had filed a relocation application with MiLB to move to Wichita (Lefler, 2018a). At the next city council meeting, the City approved a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with team ownership and an agreement for a US $2.2 million payment to the Wingnuts to buy out their lease on Lawrence-Dumont Stadium (Lefler, 2018b).
The MOU set the maximum cost of the stadium at US$75 million, US$3 million of which would go toward a Hall of Fame Museum to honor the National Baseball Congress legacy. Additional allocations included US$6 million for a pedestrian bridge to connect the stadium site across the river to downtown. The council approved the documents despite frustration over having received them just hours earlier. The city manager “assured the council that there is still time to make changes in the agreement before the final deal is made.”
The Ballpark Facility Use and Management Agreement, essentially the team’s lease for the new stadium, and the Ballpark Development Agreement were introduced and approved by the city council on October 23, 2018. The agreements are most notable for the tension between the written text of the documents and their public representation by city officials, as detailed in the following sections.
The deal
Development costs and revenues
Throughout the process, city officials represented the costs of constructing the stadium to be shared between the city and team—US$75 million from the city and US$5–7.5 million from the team. The team’s contribution to the project was misleading at best. Provisions in the agreement declared that US$5–7.5 million in furniture, fixtures, and equipment required by the team remained the sole property of the team and required its removal upon the end of the team’s occupancy in the stadium. City officials confirmed this stipulation during a social media town hall. These provisions eliminated any financial contribution from the team to the permanent features of the stadium or its construction.
The representation by city officials that the team is responsible for all maintenance of the stadium was also misleading (Frye, 2019). The team’s routine maintenance liabilities are capped at US$7,500 per single item of repair or replacement and a total of US$75,000 per year. The City is responsible for anything over these thresholds. The Ballpark Management Agreement places the burden of capital repairs and improvements squarely on the City of Wichita. These costs do not appear in any public documents. A response to an open records request seeking an estimate of capital improvement costs indicated that no such forecasting has been conducted. The same section of the agreement includes a provision requiring the team and City to meet every two years to discuss needed capital improvements and states that the City cannot unreasonably withhold consent to the Team’s requests. There are no caps or guidelines that clearly define reasonableness for these requests. Similar provisions have been leveraged by teams to void contracts and move to a new city, including the aforementioned Camden Riversharks and the NFL Rams franchise (Gibson, 2012).
Furthermore, revenues from stadium operations such as parking, concessions, and merchandising flow solely to the team. The lack of any revenue sharing is unusual in a public-private stadium development. Finally, the city offered optimistic estimates for revenues from naming rights, projecting US$10 million over 20 years. Naming rights for INTRUST Bank Arena, a much larger and more prominent facility nearby, went for US$8.25 million over 25 years in 2009. Unlike the Amarillo financing plan which won the deal with the San Antonio Missions, the City of Wichita had no agreements in place for naming rights or sponsorships at the time of its deal with the Baby Cakes franchise.
The Ballpark Management Agreement requires the team to pay a management privilege fee (essentially stadium rent) of US$350,000 annually. The city presented this income as funds available for paying bonds. However, the city’s representation does not account for a capital reserve fund which will divert US$250,000 annually from rent beginning in the seventh year of the contract. The Wingnuts’ buyout of US$2.2 million, paid out over the first 6 years, is also unaccounted for in the city’s cash flow projections. These obligations mean that US$5.7 million of the US$7 million the city claims it will receive from rent is allocated to other uses. Only US$1.3 million from rent will be available to repay stadium debts, just over eighteen percent of the total represented by the city.
City of Wichita officials (Rengers, 2019b), team representatives (Wichita City Council, 2019), and contractors (Faulx, 2019) have repeatedly claimed that the facility will host over 200 events throughout the year, including around 70 minor league baseball games. This claim is in tension with the Ballpark Management Agreement, which limits the number of city-sponsored events to ten per year and provides the team with veto power over events that it, at its sole discretion, deems to be “commercially unreasonable” or will cause excessive make-ready work. Aside from promises by the team, the agreement does not include any requirement for the team to host even a single non-baseball event at the stadium.
Furthermore, the city is unlikely to realize revenues from two non-MiLB uses at the levels projected. The Ballpark Management Agreement offers the National Baseball Congress (NBC) Tournament one week of use per year; however, the tournament is a 2-week event. Meanwhile, bad blood between the city and NBC leadership resulted after the city reneged on an earlier promise to include offices and support space for the NBC’s operations within the stadium (Swaim, 2019d). The city also projected that the baseball stadium would host six FC Wichita soccer matches per year; however, the facility home to FC Wichita received a US$22 million, STAR bond funded upgrade in 2018. This upgrade combined with the turf damage caused by soccer engenders doubt that FC Wichita will host a significant number of matches at the stadium. Projections for the STAR bond plan assumed nearly 30% of taxable sales generated at the stadium would come from the NBC Tournament, FC Wichita, and special events which terms of the team’s agreement render unlikely. No publicly released documents account for these changes to initial assumptions, and responses to requests by the authors of this article for an updated analysis indicate that none has been conducted.
In summary, the team’s expense obligations are capped while the city’s obligations are limitless; the inverse is true for revenues. Public representations of the deal by city officials were often misleading and even outright false, while key assumptions for revenues were unsupported. Finally, major expenses were absent from the city’s financial analyses and its initial projections were not updated to reflect the actual deal terms.
The stadium multiplier
The week after the approval of the agreement came another big announcement: a major mixed-use development would take the place of the Metropolitan Baptist Church adjacent to the stadium site. A partnership between the church and Riverfront Partners, the “Riverfront Village” development would bring eating and drinking establishments, including “a rooftop restaurant or two, in addition to offices, retail, and residential uses” (Rengers, 2018b). The announcement of this proposal lent credence to Longwell’s vision of a stadium that would spur tremendous development along the west bank and throughout Delano.
Riverfront Partners wouldn’t give an estimate of necessary development incentives for the US$127 million project. Since the project sits within the boundaries of both the STAR bond and TIF districts, the tax revenues generated by Riverfront Village will contribute to the stadium’s funding; however, stadium costs will limit the ability of Riverfront Village to receive those incentives. The validity of this proposed development was also questionable, as it ostensibly promised what the same developers were unable to deliver just across the street at the US$38.4 million River Vista apartment development. That project received US$10.4 million in direct public financing, in addition to a US$3.3 million write-down on the city’s sale of the land. After a five year-long development process which saw numerous changes to the project plan, it was sold to a Kansas City–based real estate investment trust for just US$31.5 million (Northmarq, 2020).
Moving forward
With the announcement of the team’s relocation and approval of ballpark development and management agreements, the project began to move forward rapidly. Demolition of Lawrence-Dumont Stadium commenced on November 5, 2018. A minor controversy surrounding the qualifications of the winner of the design-build contract ensued when a competitor questioned the winning team’s qualifications (Rengers, 2018b). The winning team’s ties to Mayor Longwell would be echoed in a larger but unrelated controversy nearly a year later.
The first design concepts for the facility were widely ridiculed by the public and characterized as “underwhelming” by members of the City of Wichita Design Council upon their presentation in January 2019 (Lefler, 2019). Members of the design team said the plan remained under development and would be tweaked and brought back for further consideration. The city council approved a modestly revised plan at its February 12 meeting. A ceremonial groundbreaking followed the next day, where team owner Lou Schwechheimer declared: “We made a commitment to come here, and we’re all in” (Swaim, 2019a).
The curveball
On March 3, 2019, the Wichita Eagle reported (Swaim, 2019b) that the city planned to sell approximately 4.5 acres of city-owned land around the stadium to team ownership for a dollar an acre. The deal also included a purchase option for a separate parcel across the river that would put an additional 2.6 acres under the team’s control for up to eight years.3 The only previous public reference to the land deal was a single paragraph tucked into the 300-page STAR bond disclosure, which had not been covered by local media and was not widely known to the public. Details of the land deal were not made public until late Sunday evening, with a vote scheduled for the city council meeting the following Tuesday. The delay in releasing the agenda packet that included the agreement, which is typically posted on the Friday before the council meeting, was blamed on a technical malfunction in the city’s system.
Questions surrounding the deal grew the following day when Mayor Longwell declared, “If we don’t sign it, they’re not coming” (Swaim & Rengers, 2019). The uproar was immediate and intense. The old stadium had been torn down, and the public—assured by city officials and team ownership— believed that the team was coming. Furthermore, the team had announced their intention to leave New Orleans, effectively rendering them homeless if the deal fell through.
Meanwhile, the City of Wichita had already sold US$42 million in revenue bonds tied to the team’s move. While the city holds no obligation to cover the STAR bonds, the political blowback from a highprofile failure to perform would pose challenges to the City of Wichita receiving that incentive in the future. It also could have sunk the program entirely, as it was already on thin ice with a sizable portion of the Kansas state legislature, and eliminated a widely-used economic development tool.
The team ownership had no prior experience in real estate development (Rengers, 2019a) and refused to release the names of any development partners pending approval of the land deal. Team owner Schwechheimer declared, “Our handshake is our bond . . . . The private development is what’s critical because it allows us to create the family values. Our top ticket price is going to be 15. USD” He also said that the agreement would be critical to changing Wichita’s reputation as a “failed minor league market.”
Several citizens expressed displeasure with the deal and its process at the following city council meeting. One speaker stated that, “As a citizen, it feels like we’re being held hostage” (Swaim, 2019f). These protests led the council to delay the vote for two weeks. In that time, the Wichita Eagle and other media outlets released a deluge of stories chronicling the deal and similar stadium-oriented developments nationally. Coverage included the critical reaction of sports economists to the deal (Rengers, 2019b), key facts of the deal (Swaim, 2019f), and the purchase of nearly two blocks of land west of the stadium by a developer associated with Riverfront Partners (Swaim, 2019d).
Mayor Jeff Longwell claimed that the private development agreement—the third leg of the deal required to bring the Baby Cakes to Wichita—could not be publicly disclosed earlier due to MiLB rules and a request from the Pacific Coast League. This claim was brought into question when The Wichita Eagle released a January 2018 letter from a MiLB official to Longwell (Swaim, 2019c). The letter informed Longwell that the team was in potential violation of MiLB rules by engaging in discussions with teams before seeking the league’s approval, but did not forbid the discussion of deal terms once announced. In light of the public outcry over the lack of transparency surrounding this side deal, the city council called a special meeting and voted to move the March 19 meeting to the evening to allow for greater public attendance (Swaim, 2019e).
The March 19 agenda item began with a nearly half-hour-long presentation by team ownership that featured glitzy renderings of the proposed development, including previously scrapped features such as a Ferris wheel beyond the outfield wall. City staff spoke about the quality of the Ballpark Village Master Plan, which they said represented the highest design quality the city has ever seen. However, the plan was still a draft document at the time of the meeting. Next, the leader of the proposed Riverfront Village project, George Laham, presented his plans. His lengthy pitch before the meeting’s general public comment period was atypical, especially as the proposed project was not on city-owned land or under the agreement’s purview.
The first public speaker was the pastor for the church whose property Riverfront Village would consume, who stated that “God had led his congregation to believe that this project would be a benefit to Wichita” (Wichita City Council, 2019). The remainder of the nearly four-hour-long meeting was filled with public comment, in which 31 people expressed mostly critical thoughts on the project and the land deal. Many comments were directed at the lack of transparency, the design of the stadium, and its surrounding infrastructure. The council voted 7–0 to approve the land deal, the last hurdle to Wichita securing a team and building a stadium.
Extra Innings
Since the deal was finalized, several complicating factors have emerged. First, the project has seen significant additions that have added to the total cost. Second, Mayor Longwell lost a reelection bid amidst several ethics controversies. Third, Wichita’s economy was hit with major layoffs, followed by disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Costs
The City of Wichita approved a US$3 million purchase of land assembled to the west of the stadium by Jerry Jones (Lefler & Swaim, 2019). Local commercial real estate experts interviewed for this paper characterized the appraisals commissioned by the city to support the purchase as inconsistent with industry standards. For instance, the Jones assemblage was split in two and appraised separately, with the values assigned to each half used in part to determine the value of the other. The economics of the deal and its associated timeline suggest that Jones, a Longwell campaign donor and member of the Riverfront Village team, was running a parallel process to assemble land for the stadium’s parking needs.
The city also received a federal grant to move its transit center out of downtown proper to a then undetermined site adjacent to the baseball stadium (Andres, 2019). The US$14.2 million grant requires a minimum direct local match of US$3.5 million. The site was later confirmed to be the land assembled by Jones (Reynolds, 2020). The cost of the Jones land, including demolition of 20 existing structures, and construction of parking raised the total capital costs of the stadium development to at least US$89.7 million.
Controversy
Mayor Longwell was embroiled in scandal later in 2019 after the Wichita Eagle reported that he steered the contract for a US$500 million water treatment facility to a group comprised of personal friends and campaign contributors, circumventing the unanimous committee recommendation of a better established competing bidder (Swaim, 2019h). The public controversy, combined with lingering animosity surrounding the ballpark deal and ties to a dirty campaign trick involving a fellow Republican city councilman, county commissioner, and state representative (Shepherd, 2019), led to his defeat in the November election.
Setbacks
The Wichita economy has been dealt a series of harsh blows. First, the Boeing 737 Max grounding led to layoffs of 2,800 employees at Spirit AeroSystems, a key supplier for the troubled aircraft and the largest Wichita-area employer. The coronavirus pandemic added to these losses, with an additional 1,450 layoffs at Spirit and several thousand more at other aircraft manufacturers (Shine, 2020). The city anticipates the impact of the health crisis on area employment to be twice as severe as the Great Recession (Stavola, 2020). This untimely economic carnage is likely to stall development plans for the projects around the stadium. For instance, the Riverfront Village project has been put on hold indefinitely (Reynolds, 2020). These setbacks put the city at increased future risk for revenue shortfalls.
Of course, the most direct impact from the pandemic was the cancellation of MiLB games for the 2020 season, which was estimated to result in nearly US$1 million in losses to the city (Reynolds, 2020). The cancellation delayed the stadium’s opening day and first management fee payment (Swaim & Barber, 2020) until 2021. Team owner Lou Schwechheimer died of complications from Covid-19 in July 2020, throwing into limbo the surrounding development for which he was the sole owner and removing the charismatic face of affiliated baseball’s return to Wichita (Barber & Eldridge, 2020). Several key executives have left the team since Schwechheimer’s death (Eldridge, 2021).
Other complications are confounding project efforts. The new team name, the Wichita Wind Surge, was met with nearly universal derision upon its announcement (Tobias, 2019). After nearly doubling the size of the project to secure the AAA-level team, the franchise was demoted to AA before playing its first game as part of a broader restructuring of the minor league system (Minor League Baseball, 2020). In addition, the stadium has yet to find a naming rights sponsor (Barber, 2020), and none of the associated development projects have commenced. The first Wind Surge home game, against the Amarillo franchise which rejected Wichita in 2017, drew a below-capacity crowd of 7,908 to the 10,000-seat stadium.
Discussion
Wichita’s example highlights two main differences between major league cities and minor league cities— scale and movability of minor league franchises. The ease of relocation for MiLB teams means that potentially hundreds of smaller cities can realistically seek to lure a team with the development of a stadium. Thus, cases like Wichita’s will be much more common as competition reduces bargaining power. Meanwhile, the relatively small scale of these projects often allows for financing that does not require public referenda. Rather, financing tools are at the sole discretion of elected officials, city staff, and economic development agencies. As a result, there is reason to believe that struggling small- and mid-sized cities will follow a similar path devoid of public input, coalition-building, and accountability.
Wichita’s pursuit of minor league baseball highlights how municipalities often take undue risks to develop stadium projects. The confluence of a declining city’s desperation for a return to prosperity, political leaders’ egos and business connections, and the imbalance in leverage between teams and cities contribute to these decisions. The process in Wichita displayed textbook markers of urban regime theory, especially the hand-in-glove relationship between the stadium project and the real estate endeavors by members of Riverfront Partners. A notable departure, however, was the lack of involvement from the broader business community and quasi-governmental organizations. In particular, the organization primarily responsible for regional and downtown economic development played little substantive role. The city was insular to a fault and seemed to be oriented almost exclusively toward internal consensus. Its failure to develop a coherent coalition ultimately led to an incomplete strategy and lackluster community support.
The risks of stadium projects are often obscured by dubious and incomplete projections enabled by the separation of funding mechanisms from the developments that support them. Unlike most incremental tax financing mechanisms that bonded only when construction begins, the City of Wichita bonded this project without solid commitments for surrounding development and even before a contract with a team was fully in place. Relatedly, a critical risk factor in this deal is that the ability of the project to cover its costs relies heavily on development projects that are not directly tied to the project and over which the city has little to no control. Our analysis, after adjusting the city’s projections to reflect the final deal teams, concludes that the stadium and development by the team will generate revenues equal to only a third of total project costs, even without accounting for financing costs. The rest of the revenues needed to cover expenses will have to be generated by development projects from unrelated parties, tilting the balance of bargaining power further away from the city and narrowing its locus of control.
There are several ways these risks could have been mitigated and the bumps in the process avoided. First, the project started with a “shoot from the hip” approach, culminating in the failure to close the deal with the Double-A team it initially targeted. Amarillo’s attention to detail helped gain the trust of that franchise despite Wichita’s considerable advantages, such as a population twice the size (Beilue, 2017). This represented a turning point in Wichita’s process, as the only other franchise looking to move was a Triple-A club with even greater bargaining power. Without a deliberate strategy, Wichita found itself in position akin to a failed suicide squeeze play, in which a baserunner gets stranded between third and home after the batter misses a bunt. Unwilling to wait perhaps until another election cycle for a better-suited team to come along, Wichita chose to charge forward with an attempt to shoehorn a Triple-A team into a Double-A plan and market. This resulted in a doubling of costs and deal terms uniquely favoring the team over the city, only to wind up with a Double-A team in the end.
Instead, the city should have developed solid plans for the district design, deal terms, and financing before the pursuit of a team began. Then, the city, its related economic development entities, or preferred private developers should have worked to secure prospective anchor tenants for the surrounding development. These steps would have ensured a consistent vision and reduced risks by improving clarity and leverage in negotiations with prospective teams, while mitigating questions that ultimately arose around transparency. Finally, a stronger culture of civic engagement and a more robust local journalism ecosystem could have sharpened the project and its process by casting a closer eye at all stages.
Wichita’s paucity of accountability journalism, local watchdog organizations, and skilled community advocates is characteristic of mid-sized cities. Local media outlets largely played the cheerleading role described in growth-coalition theories of urban development. The most notable break was from the Wichita Eagle, which exhaustively reported on the project after the land deal was revealed. However, its threadbare staffing and the absence of other investigative outlets likely limited the amount of attention devoted to the project prior to the appearance of major controversy. A more critical conversation early on could have honed the project, sparing controversy and salvaging trust in government that was left greatly tarnished. While more research is needed, weak accountability ecosystems are likely a contributing factor to the relatively smooth sailing that stadium projects encounter in smaller cities.
Conclusion
Wichita’s story is one that many cities have experienced. Once a city of prominence, it has fallen on hard times and grown desperate for a return to prosperity. In Wichita’s attempt to grow, the city’s power brokers sought salvation in a silver bullet and like many cities before them, its leadership thought they found it in a sports stadium. While major sports cities have successfully pursued stadium development, the events in Wichita highlight how the process often plays out for smaller cities.
The example of Wichita is representative of how smaller cities fall for the myth of a stadium’s economic impact as promised by its urban growth machine. In fact, smaller cities may be even more vulnerable to false promises because they lack the resources for robust, third party analysis and critique. Meanwhile, minor league stadium projects continue to prove big and flashy enough to be irresistible to politicians, yet small and simple enough to complete in a single political term without need for public referenda. These dynamics lead us to conclude that minor league stadium projects will not fall out of favor any time soon. Despite widespread knowledge of their economic inefficacy and political peril, the incentives for teams and the urban growth machines of mid-sized cities are too strong. The guardrails inherent to larger projects in larger cities are too weak or nonexistent at smaller scales to act as considerable constraints.
With this inevitability in mind, we recommend that cities which choose to pursue MiLB stadium projects develop a deliberate strategy, adhere strongly to an honest assessment of their capacity and bargaining position, and assume a risk-mitigation framework. Those who don’t will find, like Wichita, that another savvy MiLB franchise has caught them in a squeeze.
Notes
1. The increased project cost also required US$16 million in general obligation bond funding from the city’s Capital Improvement Program, contrary to claims that the project would be funded exclusively by revenues generated by the project. The city later approved a Community Improvement District, which levies an additional 2% sales tax within a defined area, to fund an additional US$16.5 million.
2. The STAR bond program is notoriously lax regarding feasibility studies and verification and was at the time under threat of sunsetting by the state legislature.
3. The agreement would require development in three phases: 30,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, restaurants, and/or hotel/hospitality space within 15 months of the stadium opening, completed within 18 months of start; 20,000 additional square feet in commencing within the following 12 months and finishing within 18 months of start; and a final 15,000 square feet commencing within 12 months of the second phase and completion within 18 months of start. The three phases, thus, require 65,000 square feet of commercial development over 8 years following the opening of the stadium. Nonperformance would trigger repurchase of the land by the city for the amount paid, approximately $4.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
About the authors
Stephen Buckman is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate Development at Clemson University and holds a PhD from Arizona State University. His research is centered on resiliency as it pertains to real estate development, public private partnerships, and community real estate development.
Alex Pemberton is a real estate developer and investor based in Nashville, Tennessee. He holds a Master of Real Estate Development from Clemson University, where he focused on urban redevelopment, public-private partnerships, and development finance.
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