CJ Lewis says:
April 9, 2015 at 1:13 pm
In truth, it would be very interesting to know “the impact of the team on the city.” For example, how many city residents have jobs working for the Blue Wahoos in some capacity? How much money does Blue Wahoos games generate for the city’s treasury? What is the directly attributable economic impact outside of the stadium? Many people wrongly believe that money going to the CMPA is money going to the City of Pensacola. Nothing could be further from the truth. The CMPA is a self-licking ice cream cone that mostly exists to take from the City to give to itself. If the City and CRA ever withdrew its regular subsidies to the CMPA, to include handing over 75% of the private parcel lease payments the CMPA demands it receive, the CMPA would collapse.
In 2005, UWF produced a study – Economic Impact of Proposed Community Park – that many claimed proved the Community Maritime Park economic development project would be a financial success. When I asked for a copy of the economic viability study the Council had to complete before executing the Master Lease Agreement with the CMPA, I was first referred to this old UWF study. When I pressed, I was told that the City was working on its own, new study. In truth, no such study was ever begun or finished. The City substituted an internal CMPA study that was a financial analysis of its master developer that it later fired. Because no Council members actually read the study, none noticed. I complained in vain. The Council then gleefully proceeded to vote 10-0 to certify as complete its study never even begun, a point verified by City Manager Al Coby in response to my public records request a few months later. Perhaps the most important study never done in the history of the City was falsified to accelerate turning some dirt by a few months. Worse, much of the groundwork for the Community Maritime Park was, as someone with the State Attorney’s Office so well put it, “pencil whipped.”
Fast forward to today, and we have no objective measure of the net economic impact of the Community Maritime Park as a whole or its piece parts such as the Blue Wahoos. The 2005 UWF study devotes three pages to Baseball to include assessing, “Much of the revenue generated by the team might have instead been spent on other entertainment if the baseball team were not present.” In 2010, we had the Pelicans playing at UWF, its economic impact that year presumably knowable. In 2011, the Blue Wahoos began playing at the Community Maritime Park. All along the way, up to the present, Downtown Pensacola has been rebounding in part to extensive city subsidies, the efforts of individual business people and perhaps even to the Obama Administration policies. At the end of the 2015 season, it would be very interesting if someone hired UWF to objectively identify and describe the net economic impact “in the city” directly attributable to the Blue Wahoos. I think we can reasonably say that people attending a game on Sunday would probably not be spending their money elsewhere. However, on the other days, to what extent would the money spent on Blue Wahoos games, and most people probably spend more for food and drink than a ticket, have been spent for something else whether a movie and popcorn or dinner at Dharma Blue?
Perhaps such a study could make a point of telling readers the truths the Council does not want the public to know, such as that Wahoos Stadium is owned by the CMPA not the public as they were promised when they voted in 2006 or that the total debt service on the municipal bonds, payable only by taxpayers with the CMPA and Blue Wahoos not on the hook and not contributing at all, will total up to just under $90 million not counting the negative impact on the Federal government treasury. This massively expensive project imposes a massive annual drain upon all city “and” county taxpayers. Worse, for so long as the Council continues to keep the Community Redevelopment Agency in existence, claiming that streets like South Palafox are slum & blighted, along with Aragon and Port Royal, when property values go up downtown, 95% of the new money from a 1983 baseline must be spent back downtown ensuring that those of us living in the northern reaches of the city feel little to no benefit from the Community Maritime Park that is not a “public” park no matter how hard the “private” CMPA wants us to believe.
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