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Doubling down: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu plunges ahead with controversial pro soccer stadium plan, even as critics warn of cost overruns and the loss of public parkland
Is it a $200 million-plus boondoggle that will leave Boston reeling at a time of rising taxes and falling city revenues?
Or a big win-win for city schools and local soccer fans?
That’s the big question as Boston Mayor Michelle Wu forges ahead with a hotly contested plan to develop an 11,000-seat stadium and school athletic complex in one of the city’s oldest parks.
On Monday, Wu announced that the city had inked a ten-year stadium lease deal with the team of local investors who are behind plans to bring a National Women’s Soccer League franchise to Boston.
Headed by Jennifer Epstein, a member of one of Boston’s most prominent real estate families, it is group that includes Linda Henry, CEO of the Globe, wife of the paper’s billionaire owner John Henry, and a limited investor in the project.
Maybe taking advantage of the sleepy holiday week, Wu and city officials also publicly released a copy of the official lease agreement by the team with the city for the proposed stadium.
City officials and the investors group, Boston Unity Soccer Partners, had refused for months to disclose the terms and details of the deal, triggering criticism both in the local media and from project opponents.
Owners of the new soccer team, BOS Nation, would pay the city $400,000 a year for the use of the stadium after its planned 2026 opening, while also sharing advertising and other revenue with the city as well.
Overall, the plan calls for a much larger stadium and athletic complex to be built where decrepit White Stadium now stands in historic Franklin Park, part of Frederick Olmsted’s famed Emerald Necklace.
“Our goal here was to set a new standard for public benefits,” Wu told reporters at a briefing on the stadium lease deal.
However, the agreement did nothing to win over critics of the stadium plan, from a top sports business expert to neighborhood activists, who wasted no time in pointing out several flaws.
One of the biggest issues is the lack of any protection for Boston taxpayers from future cost overruns, with the city’s share of the project having just nearly doubled to $91 million.
The ballooning price tag comes as Boston homeowners brace for a 10.5 percent annual increase in their taxes as city spending rises and revenue from the no-longer-booming commercial real estate market falls.
Office tower values have crumbled amid the shift to remote work, resulting in a drop in taxes paid. Meanwhile, openings of new office, lab, and apartment buildings, which have added tens of million in new tax revenue each year to city coffers, are grinding to a halt amid a steep drop off in construction activity over the past two years.
In a recent interview on GBH’s Boston Public Radio, Wu recently vowed to “pay for our half of the stadium, no matter what it costs."
“It’s a massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to private investors that puts Boston on the hook for future cost overruns, all for an oversized project that would forever damage Franklin Park,” said Egleston Square resident Renee Stacey Welch in a press release put out by stadium project opponents.
Andrew Zimbalist, one of the world’s top sports business experts, told Contrarian Boston that the city’s current $91 million share of the stadium’s construction costs could potentially rise by millions, if not tens of millions, more.
That stands in contrast to the $5 million to $15 million that it would likely cost Boston if it were to just rebuild White Stadium for use by city schools without doing a professional soccer stadium, said Zimbalist, professor emeritus of economics at Smith College, citing a similar project in Lowell.
And Zimbalist noted that football teams from Boston schools, which had traditionally used White Stadium, won’t be allowed to use the new soccer venue.
“This is being done in the name of benefiting the students and the main use of White Stadium has been high school football and that is being axed out,” Zimbalist said.
City officials do not appear to be taking fully into account additional costs that would increase with the opening of a professional sports stadium, such as transportation, security and sanitation.
Zimbalist also questioned the 10-year term of the lease, which stands in contrast to the 30-year lease teams usually sign in deals for new stadiums.
That could leave Boston in a vulnerable position should BOS Nation decide that it needs more seats and an expanded stadium, or decides to move to another venue altogether.
The proposed stadium would be one of the smallest in the National Women’s Soccer League, with others in the 20,000 seat range.
Meanwhile, neighborhood opponents of the project who have filed a lawsuit in a bid to stop it, contend the project would privatize part of one city’s oldest and largest parks.
BOS Nation would use the stadium up to 40 times a year: 20 games and 20 practices, under the terms of the lease.
The new stadium, along with new school athletic facilities, will cover seven acres, up from the White Stadium’s five acre footprint.
An additional 1.25 acres of parkland will be paved over next door to make way for the “Grove,” a Fenway Park-like concessions area that has been pitched as a public gathering place, but will be closed off during game days for soccer fans.
“In return for a blank check to BOS Nation’s investors, Franklin Park would lose acres of public parkland, 145 trees in the park would be cut down, and BPS football teams would be evicted from their own stadium during the entire regular season,” said Jamaica Plain resident Melissa Hamel.
Skepticism and close scrutiny, perhaps even contrarianism, are warranted in examining the public-private partnership proposed for White Stadium. Still, the kind of cynicism and fear of downside risk vs. a limited vision of the opportunity that is endemic in Boston is the primary discourse I have seen in this case - and in this article. While not a perfect analog, I recall many of the same complaints about the Daly Field reclamation project led by Simmons University. The $13.5 million investment was private, but the environmental and community access complaints sound familiar. My impression is that this public private partnership did what DCR and the rest of state government could not or at least did not.