If Nashville really wants to keep its sports teams, why not eliminate the middle man, namely the team owner?

If a pro sports team is such a unique expression of a city's identity, a unifying force and an engine of economic expansion, then why aren't cities assuming control of them to keep them from bolting to other cities?

It is not like it would be unprecedented:

You're probably familiar with eminent domain as the means by which the government forcibly takes private land to make way for a highway or public building or hyperspace bypass, having only to pay whatever a court decides after the fact to be fair market value.The legal principle goes back hundreds of years, and doesn't have a great rep, especially as courts have expanded the notion of "public use" to include taking people's houses to hand over to private developers so long as it would promote "economic development"—even if there was no guarantee that the development would stick around more than a few years.

In the eyes of the courts, though, there should be no legal difference between a few acres of dirt and other private property such as, say, a pro sports franchise ....

Say you're a city council with a pro sports team demanding $200 million or so in public cash for a new building—let's call them the "Milwaukee Bucks"—under threat of leaving town if its owners' demands aren't met. Instead of reaching for your municipal checkbook, you respond by drawing up eminent domain paperwork.

In the best case scenario, the mere threat is enough to force the team owners to lower their subsidy demands. In the worst, yes, you're stuck paying close to $600 million for an NBA franchise, but keep in mind two things: first off, that's how much the current Bucks owners just paid on the open market for the franchise, so presumably somebody thinks they'll bring in enough revenue to make that worthwhile. Plus, if you don't want to be stuck with the risk of the Bucks not earning back your investment, you can always re-sell the team to new private investors—even if you need to sell for $50 million or $100 million less in order to get new owners to agree to an ironclad lease, that's still cheaper than handing over $200 million for nothing.

In my opinion, the Metro Nashville mayor's office and the metro council both failed to do their due diligence in exploring the possibility of filing eminent domain in response to Sounds' and Brewers' (the Sounds' previous parent club) insinuations that they could always go elsewhere if they did not get a new ballpark. We already saw them back off the west bank downtown when Karl Dean made it clear that a new amphitheater was going in there. I will forever hold against Hizzoner and whipped council members that they did not call the team's abandonment bluffs.

Public ownership of sports teams is not such a radical proposal. Local sports reporter, J.R. Lind, proposed public ownership for when the Nashville Sounds deal was announced in 2013:

[Karl Dean's plan] also includes $750,000 from a $50 million mixed-use development the Sounds owners — developers by trade — promise they will build.

Promise based on what? According to Mayor Karl Dean, little more than their word. There is not, and will not be, a contract pledging the Sounds to build this project. Pressed on that, Dean said if the Sounds didn't build the development, somebody would. Probably.

For the city — any city — to make a three-decade, $65 million [now $70 million and rising] commitment based on a handshake arrangement with absentee ownership is head-scratching at best and mind-numbing at worst.

But if that's the level of commitment the city is already willing to make, why not go whole hog?

Why not just buy the team?

The value of the Sounds is hard to pin down (though, presumably, it's gone up with the promise of a new stadium). But Forbes' recent estimate of the 20 most valuable minor league teams did not include the Sounds. The 20th ranked team on that list — the Oklahoma City RedHawks — came in at $21 million.

For, say, $20 million, the city gets the team ... and it gets the revenue. Not just the increased sales taxes budgeted in the financing plan — all of it. Ticket revenue, beer money, parking costs. All of it.

And if the mayor is to be believed, the city doesn't even need the Sounds for the $50 million ancillary development. It's going to happen anyway.

Right now, the city is spending at least three times the total value of the Sounds — that's being generous — to build a stadium. Doesn't it make more sense to own the entity outright?

Instead all of the pie-in-the-sky Jefferson-Street-rejuvenation wishful thoughts they have been spreading around in PR campaigns, Metro government could have been working on ways they would start spending the revenues that have already started rolling into team owner Frank Ward with season ticket sales and merchandising profits.

Despite the option that taking the Sounds by eminent domain or buying them would have been a more financially responsible act on Metro government's part than subsidizing their private enterprise, the Mayor likely never would have considered public ownership because he might have angered wealthy campaign donors who have financial stakes in the Sounds' ownership team. A deal that would have been more financially responsible to and more demonstrably lucrative for Nashville taxpayers probably never surpassed his own self-interest. Angering the special interests might risk Hizzoner's future political aspirations for higher office.

Things could have been done differently. But they were not. And Nashville missed its shot at a title.

Grantham Is Talking against Local Liberal Bloggers

Nashville is Talking's Christian Grantham says that it would be "nice to see some liberal bloggers stand up to elected officials who work with private developers to seize people's personal property."  I agree.  It would be nice to see liberal bloggers stand up to elected officials who work with private developers under many different conditions; that possibility is one of the reasons why I write Enclave, including posting on eminent domain issues.  Local liberal bloggers seem generally uninterested in development issues.

But I also feel ambivalent about the degree to which conservatives leap to fight eminent domain on an overblown and sweeping premise of property rights.  Besides the fact that I have a whole bunch of items I feel the need to write about, I have been less motivated to jump on this story because of the speed to which conservative bloggers he mentioned jumped to it in the name of overwrought property rights (which I believe should be balanced by a host of other human rights).

I believe that if developers or other corporate entities--instead of governments--were the primary agents involved in taking a person's land, conservative outrage would evaporate because their axes are generally not ground against taking people's land, but against anything that the government does beyond maintaining a military, leveraging tax money for private interests, or appointing conservative ideologues to government positions.  Christian seems a bit naive in assuming that conservative bloggers are fighting private interests rather than taking up their usual crusade against government.

Maybe if there had been less shoot-from-the-right-hip zeal about this problem, I would have felt a sense of urgency to write against it (rather than writing on the subjects I have.  And I naturally gravitate to underreported stories to begin with).  But no one can accuse me of falling absolutely the other way:  I am just as hard on government abuses as anyone else, but I don't give strong-arming businesses a free pass as others do.

As long as Christian is insinuating hypocrisy on the part of liberal bloggers, I have my own questions.  One of those:  if conservative bloggers are so committed to law-and-order and crime-fighting why haven't any of them joined me in calling upon the State of Tennessee to provide overnight security measures for public properties widely used like Bicentennial Mall State Park?  And another:  why hasn't Nashville is Talking encouraged them to do so?

NCDC: Eminent Domain Will Not Be Used for River Redevelopment

This morning's Tennessean has responses from Riverfront businesses, which all seem valid. The only one I want to take a swipe at is saving the East Bank for acres of surface parking lots--which sit unused for a major chunk of each year--in the name of guarding the sanctity of the Titans "tailgating experience." I have been all over the Downtown area on game days, and I have watched Titans fans create pleasant tailgating experiences wherever they park. The tailgating experience is not restricted to the East Bank, and redevelopment will not kill that experience. The businesses that could locate in the proposed mixed-use areas would obviously attract a number of game-day fans with lots of cash to spend. The money spent around LP would just flow in different ways. And you cannot convince me that Titans' executives have not thought about the possibilities of promoting block parties in the proposed neighborhoods that would sit around LP Field. The proposed mass transit loop would take care of getting remote tailgaters in more efficiently than the current bus arrangement. The "tailgating experience" is not sacred and it would simply adapt accordingly. What makes the tailgating experience is the party, not the proximity.

It should be a positive signal to businesses from the Nashville Civic Design Center Director that eminent domain will not be used to force property sales for redevelopment.

I Guess He's Willing to Demand that People Sacrifice Property Rights for A Border Fence

Local blogging Republican Candidate for Some-Office-in-the-Future, Bob Krumm, wants a border fence along the Mexican border (and none for Canada?) based on a piece in Reverend Sun Myung Moon's conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, which reported a plan to smuggle Afghan and Iraqi terrorists through tunnels used by Mexican gangs to smuggle drugs into the US.

Leaving aside the argument that tunnels go underground (thus rendering surface-obstructing fences moot), I would have to say that Bob Krumm's wish for a 6,500 mile fence is impractical and even dangerous to Americans on the border if you consider the complexities and legal implications (let alone the cost, which Republicans are generally unwilling to pay unless they can borrow the money) of actually building a border fence.

Quoting a report on one such plan for the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, the Texas Observer opines:

[T]he tactical infrastructure within several of the 21 sections [from Rio Grande City, TX to Brownsville, TX] would also encroach on multiple privately-owned land parcels. Some proposed fence sections could also encroach upon portions of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge and Texas State Parks in the Valley.

....In addition to the possibility of legal entanglements from eminent domain proceedings, the Department of Homeland Security must also leap over environmental laws, and if it wants to use the levees, it probably needs Mexico’s assent as well. Then, of course, there is the widespread opposition from residents and elected officials from the Rio Grande Valley.

City of St. Louis Asks Court for Ruling Against Activist for Mural Opposing Eminent Domain

Neighborhood activist (graffiti artist?) protesting government's land-grab to help developers will have to defend his code-breaking sign (freedom of expression?) in court.

Raked over the Coal in 1984

While the Tennessee Valley Authority is lately casting itself as committed to green technologies, according to one NY Times writer--who squared off with a former TVA Chief Economist (now the "Marathon Oil Company Professor of Energy Policy" at LSU)--a shotgun marriage had to be arranged for the electricity behemoth and the idea of clean air:

TVA has indeed had to accept compliance with the Clean Air Act and with land reclamation standards. The courts forced it to do so. The years of legal battles with environmentalists which finally, in 1977, gave TVA no alternative but to start obeying the law, and the terrible damage wreaked in the meantime by TVA's own smokestacks and by the mining practices of its coal suppliers, are matters of public record.

TVA seems to be in unusual type of animal. According to one source it "is a political entity with a territory the size of a major state, and with some state powers (such as eminent domain), but unlike a state, it has no citizenry or elected officials."

It sounds more like a shadow state, and I keep seeing these videos recorded over the past weekend of Kingston law enforcement telling activists that they cannot go on the Emory or Clinch Rivers because TVA owns them. That seems like an odd arrangement in a republican democracy. Does the U.S. Coast Guard patrolling those rivers serve at the pleasure of the TVA CEO?

Convention center costs barreling overbudget, gaining momentum and risks after second courtroom loss

In July, Mayor Karl Dean and his MDHA minions lost a jury trial they hoped would hold the line on the low-ball offer they made to Tower Investments to get land for the new Music City Center. They might have low-balled the figure to hold down costs to make the convention center project sexier to the Metro Council, but they lose they did.

Now they have lost their appeal of their July failure to a judge, who upheld the jury's decision:

The Metro Development and Housing Agency, which was in charge of acquiring land for the Music City Center, hoped Circuit Court Judge Joe Binkley would reduce a critical July jury verdict in the contentious eminent domain case against development firm Tower Investments. Instead, Binkley agreed with the jury’s verdict that MDHA undervalued the land, which the city condemned and took from Tower to construct the new convention center south of Broadway.

Binkley rejected motions filed by MDHA seeking a new trial or to have the $30.4 million jury verdict reduced.

As a result, the convention center’s land acquisition budget remains busted, and the budget for the entire $585 million project will be left with a razor-thin contingency. A spokeswoman for MDHA did not rule out a possible appeal, opening the door for the 2-year-old case to be dragged on even longer.

“I don’t reasonably disagree with what [the jury] did,” Binkley said from the bench, citing state law that allows a judge to grant a new trial if he “reasonably disagrees” with a jury verdict. “And I do not find that the evidence preponderates against the verdict. I approve the verdict.”

Metro Finance Director Rich Riebeling, who is one of Mayor Karl Dean’s top aides, declined to comment as he left the courtroom.

So, was Karl Dean's right-hand man, Mr. Riebeling evacuating quickly to avoid having to answer tough questions about what might have to be cut from the Metro budget to pay for this monument to the tourism industry or was he headed out to figure which groups of constituents might be least angered by cuts to their basic services in exchange for a colossus that looks bigger every time we count the costs?

The Mayor's Office is in a catch-22. The Music City Center Authority swore emphatically that the project would not go over budget. If Metro appeals Tower again and loses, the budget-busting costs grow absurdly astronomical. And what have they salvaged for the other two legal cases they have to fight over land acquisition? They have already redirected tourist taxes that were subsidizing pro hockey to cover this project. How will they keep their promise? How can they if they risk losing another trial with two others in the pipeline? Metro's other budget items have been drastically cut over and over again, so how will we pay for these convention center losses and still benefit from Metro services?

Meanwhile, In New Orleans ...

The power brokers in the Cresent City (also referred to now as "The Sliver On The River," given the few neighborhoods that were untouched by Katrina's flooding) are double-teaming lower class and minority property owners with a recommended moratorium on issuing building permits and a design to use "eminent domain" to seize blighted property once the rebuilding deadline passes.

And, since the City Recovery Commission is beholden to federal money, the Bush Administration is probably going to have influence over any plan, and this White House is not exactly known for being community-based or neighborhood-friendly. President Bush's only stop last week while he was in New Orleans "was held in a gleaming visitor's center in the Lower Garden District neighborhood that never suffered serious damage." Exercises in bad taste like that indicate that the replaced and displaced New Orleaneans who want to rebuild rather than sell may enjoy only slim chances.

But from the looks of the 500 residents who showed up to confront the commission last week, city officials may have a fight on their hands, and I don't mean that figuratively. As one community activist shouted to the 500 in front of the commission:

"The question that we have for ourselves is: Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?" .... Many in the chamber responded with shouts of "No!"