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Volume 115, Number 193 - Tuesday, May 11, 1999
Well, duhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
by John Friedlander
Sharp between-the-lines readers already know how I feel about the Patriots Stadium deal.
For those of you who missed the Snoopy dance I performed on the proposed stadium's toxic-infested grave when the deal went bad two Fridays ago, I'll explain why the stadium cave-in is the best thing to have happened to Connecticut since the ice melted under the Whalers a few years back.
Connecticut needs an NFL football team like Bill Clinton needs another intern. Some of us may have enjoyed the idea of a glittering bauble adorning the ego of the Capital City, but many of us saw through the hype. We saw instead towering egos, massive disregard for common sense, and the pathetic image of a leader trying to buy respect.
Now we're playing the blame game, savaging Robert Kraft for using poor defenseless little Connecticut in his unscrupulous plot to improve his deal with Massachusetts. This is ridiculous. Kraft played a game every high-schooler knows from painful experience: flirt with Party B to ensure the attention of Party A. Kraft's methods may have been slimy, but the real fool here is the guy who was so impressed with the idea of the Goodyear blimp hovering over Hartford that he lost all sense of good judgement: Governor John G. Rowland.
The descriptive phrase I liked most about Rowland's stadium ambitions, uttered by an observer who prefers to remain nameless, is "world-class dumb." There is no easier phrase to describe the depths of non-sense that have distracted Connecticut's leadership from meaningful work for so many months. It is a waste of perfectly good vituperation to heap all the criticism on the now-absent Robert Kraft, and it is unfair to let our governor off the hook too easily. Kraft may have taken advantage of Connecticut, but it was the Governor who allowed that to happen. It was the Governor who made foolish promises he couldn't keep, and it was the Governor who nearly sold out Connecticut taxpayers to the interests of an out-of-state millionaire.
The Governor has been criticized in the past for not being a detail guy. I admire a strong leader, and I laud Rowland's willingness to think big. But any real estate developer will tell you that the devil is in the details. In this case, it wasn't hidden little surprises that tripped up the deal, it was big, obvious, moose-in-the-headlights things. In fact, the list of matters Rowland chose to ignore is pretty frightening, considering how much we depend on him to define our future. With "failure is not an option" as his rallying cry, Rowland failed to notice that:
- No sane person would realistically expect the NFL to approve of the
Patriots moving from the sixth largest TV market to the twenty-seventh. The
NFL isn't about football, it's about money. Moving twenty-one places further
away from the cash register is unthinkable in today's market of inflated
player salaries and More-Is-Better and Winning-Is-The-Only-Option.
- The present tenant of the stadium site apparently wasn't consulted in
advance to ensure its willingness to donate the site for free. When -
surprise, surprise - CTG wanted compensation to move its operation, the
unexpected $45 million fee threw a significant delay and a major cost
increase at a project with an already high price tag and a tight construction
schedule. Rowland's shock at CTG's resistance against an uncompensated
land-grab is incomprehensible.
- The payment issue aside, CTG produces steam for heating and cooling most
of Hartford's major downtown buildings. CTG's operation is a major and
complex part of the city's municipal infrastructure. Apparently it never
occurred to the Governor that moving it might be tricky enough to warrant
special attention in advance.
- The stadium footprint would also have required removing the old Hartford
Times building. Aside from being a grand old building, the basement
apparently houses the hub of the city's computing operations - all of which
would have had to move.
- Two rivers flow under the stadium as it was proposed: the Whitehead
Highway, which pipes traffic between downtown Hartford and Route 91, and the
Park River, which runs underground in the same general area. It apparently
never occurred to the Governor that the construction challenges of building a
stadium over these obstacles might be more difficult than anticipated.
- The Governor at first promised a move-in day that would allow the
Patriots to start the 2001 season in Hartford. When word finally penetrated
the Governor's circle of yes-men that the CTG snafu might slow things down,
the Governor retreated to a 2002 delivery date. But even this schedule
required the CTG move and the stadium construction to proceed flawlessly. No
allowance was built in for unexpected delays. Given the list of likely
problems above, how smart do you have to be to avoid making promises like the
Governor made to Robert Kraft - promises that ultimately turned out to be too
fanciful for Kraft to believe?
- The development agreement with the Patriots required a vast amount of
new surface parking - at least 70 acres worth. Downtown Hartford has only 300
acres of area - much of it in Bushnell Park. Where would all this parking go,
and how would devoting such a large expanse to such a relatively low-value
land use affect the local economy for the next thirty years - the term of the
proposed agreement with the Patriots? Shouldn't the Governor have addressed
questions like this? He didn't.
- The Governor said that "no one walks away from the most lucrative deal
in history unless there's some other reason," as if offering Kraft the
richest payout in NFL history -funded by Connecticut taxpayers - is something
he should be proud of. He also seems to hint at some dark conspiracy on
Kraft's part - as if having the brains to make a rational business decision
automatically makes Kraft a villain.
- On top of all this, Rowland pressed the stadium deal through as though
Connecticut's future was determined by this one project. He skulked around
behind closed doors, strong-armed the Legislature, overrode existing law,
browbeat opponents and sidetracked other critical projects to pursue a
project that virtually every credible authority - and the experience of every
other city that has publicly funded a stadium - indicated would not return
the benefit he forecast. When the deal fell through he acted as if his pocket
had been picked. Even in failure, he hasn't acknowledged his errors, nor even
taken credit for the smartest thing he did through the whole process: though
news accounts state that he might have actually pulled the plug on the deal,
he has never even spun the story to say "I wanted a good deal for
Connecticut, and I said 'No' when the deal got too good for the Patriots."
Hartford and Connecticut dodged a bullet when the Patriots pulled out of town. Middletown's bullet - the new Long Lane facility - is back on the same problematic fast-track now that the stadium fanfare has fizzled. Let's hope the public remembers this debacle next time Governor Rowland cooks up another back room deal.
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