Development

Fenway foes play hardball

by Ben Geman

As the Boston Red Sox work behind the scenes to win political support for their $600 million-plus plan for a new Fenway Park, consumer advocates have gone public with a report claiming that the project would not provide enough economic benefits to justify public subsidies.

The Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MassPIRG) last week released Major League Steal: The Economic Folly of Public Subsidies for a New Red Sox Stadium. "Is it appropriate for our dollars to support the private gain of a business venture like major-league baseball?" asks MassPIRG legislative-affairs director Rob Sargent. "The answer is no."

The study takes aim at a report released last summer by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Boston Visitors and Convention Bureau. According to that report, the team's plans for a new 45,000-seat ballpark would yield thousands of new jobs and $204 million a year in increased fan spending in Boston. But the MassPIRG report says the earlier study uses suspect attendance projections and overstates likely spending by fans. Each new permanent job created by the Sox project, MassPIRG says, would cost $300,000. Although the Red Sox have yet to complete a financing package, observers believe the team will seek as much as $300 million in public funds for the new plan (which would displace several Fenway business, including the Boston Phoenix).

Both Red Sox officials and the Chamber of Commerce dispute MassPIRG's report. Team spokeswoman Kathryn St. John -- who says the level of public money needed for the plan remains undetermined -- says the team is "comfortable" that the new park would draw in a million more fans annually. She expresses confidence that "the public investment is going to be returned through a number of benefits, such as the added taxes generated and the added economic benefit to other facilities in town -- the hotels, the restaurants."

The Chamber of Commerce, too, defends its rosy findings. "We explored all the details and made very conservative assumptions," says Jim Klocke, the chamber's government-affairs director.

Sargent, though, insists that the earlier report "layers unrealistic assumption on top of unrealistic assumption" when calculating the new park's effects on the area. "It's not clear," he says, "that there would be any economic benefit to the taxpayers as a whole."