Mayor’s ballpark plan has issues

Mayor Anthony A. Williams told Major League Baseball exactly what it wanted to hear: the District would fully fund a new ballpark if it was awarded a team.

However, Williams’ proposal raised new questions about the District’s pursuit of a team even as it considerably upped the ante for the city.

Williams last week said he would submit to MLB a proposal to build a $340million ballpark on the grounds of RFK Stadium and pay for it with tax dollars.

The goal was to end delay at MLB on a decision on the fate of the Montreal Expos — the franchise the District is trying to land — and bring to a close years of fruitless, frustrating effort by groups in the area get a team.

However, Williams’ plan does not guarantee baseball will return to the District. Some key questions remain:

Nowhere but RFK?

The District is proposing four sites to MLB’s relocation committee: the RFK Stadium property, M Street Southeast, New York Avenue Northeast and the current home of Benjamin Banneker Park in Southwest.

The Williams Administration and a prospective ownership group led by financier Fred Malek prefer the three downtown sites to RFK Stadium, and they like the New York Avenue site in particular.

It’s not hard to understand why. The best modern ballparks — Coors Field in Denver and Jacobs Field in Cleveland, for example — help revive adjacent downtown areas. That was the case with MCI Center, which aided the expansion of Washington’s downtown to the east.

RFK, conversely, is surrounded by parking lots and residential neighborhoods, presenting less obvious potential for spinoff commercial growth.

But a ballpark at RFK, with a projected cost of $340 million, presents no sticky land ownership issues and already has transportation infrastructure. That makes it by far the cheapest and most viable option.

The D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission insists any of the four sites can be financed without private funds, and it has worked the past several months to reduce the projected costs of a stadium and to tweak financing proposals.

The commission’s most recent cost estimates for the three downtown sites now top out at $385 million and are dangerously low, judging by recent precedent in baseball.

The Banneker site calls for building a portion of the ballpark hanging over Interstate 395, a situation believed to be without architectural or engineering precedent for a major outdoor stadium. The city does not own all the land it would need for the M Street and New York Avenue sites and would be required to assemble a stadium plot through myriad landowners.

Further, the cost of six of the last 10 baseball stadiums built exceeded $400 million when all land expenses and cost overruns were included. The two newest parks, in Philadelphia and San Diego, each topped $450 million.

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