Cityscrapes: San Antonio’s insider ballpark deal deserves public scrutiny, public vote

City officials are giving us a new ballpark to house the beloved San Antonio Missions team. And it’s quite a deal, or so they tell us.

For one, it won’t cost taxpayers a dime, they assure us. And city officials fought hard to make sure the well-off owners of the Missions actually have to pay something — a whole $36 million, or about 20% of the stadium cost — while the rest is to come from other public sources. And did they mention there will be no direct use of our property taxes?

All of this sounds great. Except that it’s not entirely the case.

Most of the ballpark’s approximately $126 million in public cost would come from incremental property tax revenues generated by the promised development surrounding the stadium and from the far larger Houston Street Tax Increment Revitalization Zone (TIRZ). The wonder of using the TIRZ to pay for stadium bonds is that it neatly avoids the requirement for a public vote that would be necessary if the city used its regular, general obligation bonds to foot the cost.

There’s also reason for concern because the tax increment dollars proposed for funding the stadium aren’t really a deal for the public, nor are they free. They simply redirect the new tax revenue from the area in a fashion that keeps it locked up for years. That money won’t be contributing to the overall city and county property tax base, meaning it’s not able to potentially reducing our — yours and mine — property tax burden.

For those who haven’t been in San Antonio all that long, the Houston Street TIRZ began in 1999 as a way of aiding developer Federal Realty in revitalizing Houston Street. The stated goal was to reshape the area into a new office and retail district in the heart of downtown.

Federal promised major new national retailers — Barnes & Noble and Bath & Body Works, for example — would line Houston Street. We just had to pay for new access from the River Walk to the street level, building façade improvements and other upgrades.

But even after Federal’s plan failed to deliver on those promises, we kept on paying with TIRZ dollars as the district was expanded from 20 blocks to 180 acres stretching from San Pedro Creek to Cesar Chavez.

That growth added new tax revenues for more public spending: to fund parking subsidies for office tenants, to fund improvements to the Alameda Theater, to provide part of the cost of San Pedro Creek improvements, to subsidize the new Hilton Canopy hotel, for Legacy Park — all without a public vote by those using property tax dollars locked up by the TIRZ.

So, the proposed funding mechanism for the new Missions ballpark isn’t just a matter of keeping the potential property taxes from new downtown development locked away from other uses for years. It also keeps the new public spending commitments largely invisible, free from a public vote or much of any public discussion and debate.

That doesn’t sound like the new sports facility is “paying for itself.” It also sounds pretty far from the “score” the Express-News ’ editorial board described the deal as.

But there’s yet another, larger issue with the ballpark deal neatly negotiated without a broader plan for the future of the west side of downtown. That deal, of course, was done behind closed doors with no community input.

The public investment in the improvement of San Pedro Creek greatly increased the potential for private profit from new development adjacent to and near the Culture Park. Developer Graham Weston and his firm Weston Urban stand to profit from that, even without a single public dollar for a new Missions stadium.

We, the public, have already aided those properties with public spending. The property owners should be paying us back , not pressing the city and county to pour even more public dollars and benefits into their landholdings. That’s all the more reason why we can and should expect the Missions’ ownership to foot the majority of the cost for their new stadium, not the other way around.

Let’s have a full public conversation over the realities of the deal, and let’s allow San Antonio voters to make the final decision rather than have a rushed deal pushed through City Council. San Antonio’s been down that path too many times before, and by now we know where it gets us.

Heywood Sanders is a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.