Two out of two economists agree: Maryland’s $600m Orioles subsidy is idiotic

There’s a long article in the Baltimore Sun this morning on the Baltimore Orioles owners’ plan to arrange a lease extension in exchange for $600 million in public cash, which would be used to redo not just their Camden Yards stadium but the surrounding area. Much of the piece consists of rehashing team execs’ interest in replicating the “ballpark district” created for the Atlanta Braves around their new suburban stadium — which we’ve known about for a while now — though it doesn’t exactly make clear how that would work in the considerably more crowded confines in Baltimore:

The footprints in Baltimore and Atlanta are comparable in size. The Battery is nearly 80 acres (the main campus, including the ballpark, is 57 acres) and the stadium authority-owned Camden Yards complex is 85 acres. Of course, half of that land is occupied by the stadiums. M&T Bank Stadium is 20 acres, Oriole Park is 21 acres and Camden Station is 27 acres, per property records. The remaining 17 acres include several parking lots.

That “of course” is a huge caveat: The Braves owners had a huge swath of undeveloped land to deal with, while the Angelos family members who own the O’s are looking at trying to squeeze in a whole lot of mixed-use development onto a few parking lots that are shared with the Ravens stadium next door. How that would work is left entirely as an exercise for Sun readers.

The fun part of the article, though, is when it gets around to revisiting the throwdown over the Braves project between economists J.C. Bradbury, who conducted an economic impact study and found it was a massive money pit for Cobb County taxpayers, and Andy Zimbalist, who was hired by the Braves to craft a rebuttal and said maybe it won’t be a money pit if everything breaks right. The Sun then asked both Bradbury and Zimbalist what they thought of the Orioles plan, and got these replies:

“[This] appears to be one of the worst financial deals in recent memory,” Zimbalist said.

Bradbury has repeatedly studied the downsides of publicly funding stadiums, which remains a common practice nationally. He calls it a “curious example of persistent government failure.”

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