Yes, bring back the Expos, but not at any cost
It would be great to have the Expos back, but not at any cost or without public input
A couple of weeks ago, baseball writer Tracy Ringolsby (whose big cowboy hat used to be a regular feature at the Big O when the Colorado Rockies were in town) did a piece for Baseball America on Major League Baseball’s pending expansion.
It was right there in black and white, a proposed eight-team North Division in a 32-team league: the Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Minnesota Twins, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays — and the Montreal Expos. (Out on the coast, Portland would be part of a new West Division.)
It’s all part of a sensible realignment and a 156-game schedule with each team playing six home and six away games against division rivals, meaning the reborn Expos would see the Red Sox, Yankees and the Blue Jays a dozen times a year. The regional structure would mean less travel time and a reduced environmental footprint, not to mention enough savings to make up for the six games each team would drop from its schedule.
All well and good. But there was a missing ingredient in the report: while Portland has a $150-million grant for a baseball stadium set aside by the state of Oregon, Montreal has no such financing plan in place and there wasn’t any indication as to who would be paying for the new $500-million ballpark that would have to be part of any attempt to bring Major League Baseball back to this city.
In other words, grab your wallets. Here we are in the midst of a hard-fought municipal election and incumbent mayor Denis Coderre has been mum on the subject of a new ballpark. This is Kid Kodak himself, the guy who will act as head cheerleader for any project that costs a whole lot of money and brings a whole lot of publicity for Hizzoner.
When mayoralty rival Valérie Plante charged early in the campaign Coderre plans to hand a blank cheque to the investors in order to repatriate the Expos, Coderre responded this isn’t the time to talk about funding for a new stadium and the time for public debate is after the team’s return has been finalized.
Au contraire, M. le maire. This is precisely the time for public debate with as much as $500 million in public funding at stake for a mega-project Coderre is keeping under wraps until such time as he can ram it through under cover of a new mandate, protests be damned.
Like Ms. Plante, the mayoral candidate for Projet Montréal, I am not opposed to the return of the Expos. However, I do believe the public should be fully informed of what’s in store before the vote and I am opposed to Coderre’s secretive, arrogant, high-handed approach — especially when this kind of money is on the line.
If Coderre thought this was a project voters would love, he would be waving the baseball pennant night and day. The fact he’s keeping it hidden indicates taxpayers are about to be fleeced again for yet another Coderre boondoggle like the granite tree stumps, the bridge lights, the Formula E fiasco.
Any development of this size deserves a thorough public airing at election time. We’ve had years of hysterical development in Montreal, towers going up all over the city, streets choked with traffic, with little or no consideration given to the nature of the city we are building or who (other than the developers) really benefits from all this construction. Coderre and his developer pals, it would appear, are bent on turning Montreal into a stage set for Blade Runner 2087: a polluted, suffocating, utterly inhuman environment.
Whether Coderre is preparing to bulldoze one of the last significant green spaces on the island in Pierrefonds or cutting 1,000 trees in Parc Jean-Drapeau for an amphitheatre to accommodate Evenko or green-lighting one ugly condominium project after another, he is dragging this city in the wrong direction.
If you want to see cities moving toward a more human scale, look to Europe, where Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Vienna, Hamburg and Stockholm, among others, show the way to a less polluted, more communal future — the polar opposite of the direction Coderre is taking us.
Even if we like the direction, we have to question the expense. My son attends a small, closeknit high school where the doors on the bathroom stalls don’t close properly, where there is no money for basketball or handball teams and no budget for a drama teacher or a vice-principal. It’s a microcosm of schools all over this province, which remain stubbornly underfunded while governments squander billions on automobile races and sports stadiums.
Perhaps that’s what the people of Montreal want: circuses over schools, condos instead of green space. But at the very least voters should be consulted now — not after a new ballpark is a done deal cooked up in a backroom by Mayor Bulldozer.
Baseball is a beautiful game. With the right ballpark and right ownership, a reborn Expos team could thrive in this city. But not that long ago we were thoroughly fleeced for the stadium that would kill the original Expos. Let’s hope we’ve learned our lesson.
This is precisely the time for public debate with as much as $500 million in public funding at stake for a mega-project Coderre is keeping under wraps ...