Dunedin frets over the future of Jays
As Toronto’s team pushes for updated facilities, city feels pull of its spring visitors
DUNEDIN, FLA.— When a gray-haired, goateed local strolls into Home Plate on the Trail, owner Cindy Phillips salutes him with a greeting familiar to diners at the restaurant across the street from the Blue Jays’ spring training stadium. “Hi, Honey Bear,” she says. The pair make small talk before the customer asks a question gaining urgency in Dunedin.
“Have they been talking about moving spring training somewhere?”
The answer has serious implications for the club, the city, and for downtown Dunedin business owners like Phillips, who says revenue increases by 40 percent every March.
After 41 years in Dunedin, the Jays’ lease on their minor-league complex and downtown stadium expires on Dec. 31. The team can renew year to year, but the club’s long-term future in Florida remains unsettled.
Team president Mark Shapiro says the antiquated stadium and cramped training complex place put the Jays at a disadvantage with their major-league peers.
The Jays have agreed to contribute $15.7 million to an $81-million renovation of their Dunedin facilities, but that proposal hinges on an April 25 local council meeting. Pinellas County officials will decide whether to contribute $46.1 million to the project, allowing them to petition the state for $13.6 million more. The city of Dunedin would pay $5.6 million and retain ownership of both sites.
Opponents of public stadium funding contend local taxpayers can’t afford to subsidize billionaire sports franchise owners. Criticism of the Dunedin deal was renewed this week when a report by a Tampa news station questioned the qualifications and work of Dr. Mark Bonn, the author of economic impact studies that have helped several teams secure public funding for stadium projects in Florida. The Jays and Dunedin commissioned Bonn’s firm to conduct an economic impact study for their stadium proposal.
Either way, state and city officials say they can’t afford not to support a stadium makeover. Spring training lasts six weeks, but they maintain the Jays are vital to Dunedin’s identity and economy.
“We have one of the best stadiums to view baseball, but it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles,” Dunedin mayor Julie Ward Bujalski says. “We expect attendance and sales to increase. It’s really important to Pinellas County’s economy.”
Shapiro became Jays president in 2015, with the end of the Jays’ Dunedin lease looming. Speculation quickly rippled that he planned to shift spring training to Arizona. During his tenure as Cleveland’s general manager, the Indians moved their spring complex from Winter Haven, Fla,. to Goodyear, Ariz.
Talk of a potential move by the Jays opened a raw wound in Florida, which has seen six major-league clubs depart for Arizona, most recently the Cincinnati Reds in 2010.
To strengthen the local sports industry, government and business leaders formed the Florida Sports Foundation, a non-profit tasked with attracting sport tourism to Florida. They also secure state funds for stadium projects keeping major-league teams in the state.
The spectre of another club moving to Arizona has the foundation’s attention, and the Dunedin proposal has its support — even if skeptics question investing public money in pro stadiums.
“Almost any governmental program, there’s some criticism,” foundation president John Webb says. “It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. We were going to lose more teams to Arizona if we didn’t do something.”
For his part, Shapiro says the club never planned to move spring training to Arizona. He says the Jays will have to consider relocating if efforts to stay in Florida collapse, but he’s certain 2018 spring training will take place in Dunedin.
“It feels like there’s a real foundation there to get a deal done,” he says.
Shapiro conducts the interview at Florida Auto Exchange Stadium in a second-floor office overlooking right field. The Jays currently have two sets of offices and weight training rooms in Dunedin, and the makeover would consolidate operations at their campus in town’s north end. Major-league players currently practise and use the downtown stadium, while the other site houses minorleaguers.
Stadium renovations would expand and refurbish seating, update outdated scoreboards and facades, and account for about half of the project’s cost.
Shapiro says he’s aware the Jays’ $15.7 million up-front contribution seems small given the proposal’s scope and partners. Last year’s opening day payroll was $136.8 million, while Dunedin’s entire 2017 budget totals $80.1 million. But Shapiro points out the Jays pay about $1.5 million a year for groundskeeping, where most clubs offload that cost to local government.
If the project goes forward, Shapiro envisions Dunedin as less a spring destination than a U.S. base of operations, noting nearby Tampa airport provides easy access to both Toronto and the Jays’ academy in the Dominican Republic.
Meanwhile, Ward Bujalski says spring training alone justifies municipal investment.
The Jays averaged 5,190 spectators at spring training home games last year, filling their stadium to 94.2 percent capacity. According to Bonn’s study, spring training generated $70.6 in local economic activity in 2016, with visiting Jays fans spending $9.4 million and supporting 214 full and part-time jobs. “(Downtown Dunedin) has momand-pop stores that are very successful, but they’re individually owned,” Ward Bujalski says. “They rely on that six weeks of influx of Canadians and other folks who do the spring training circuit. It helps those businesses get through the entire year.”
When those economic impact stats were presented at a public meeting in Dunedin last September, critics assailed them as inflated, saying the calculation overestimates the proportion of spring training ticket buyers who are out-of-town tourists.
Bonn, a marketing professor with a PhD in resource development, stands by his research.
“I work with people who specialize in sports economics,” Bonn said. “My (projections) are conservative. We take numbers that are outliers out of our data.”
Still, public subsidies for pro sports teams remain a fraught topic in Florida and beyond.
Last month the Oakland Raiders finalized their move to Las Vegas, where local government pledged $750 million toward a stadium even as money problems prompted Clark County to shutter a public school.
Local and state governments combined to cover roughly 75 per cent of the $639-million cost of building Marlins Park in Miami, which opened in 2012. Dade County issued bonds to fund its contribution and, according to a study by The Miami Herald, paying back a single $91-million loan will cost the county $1.2 billion.
University of South Florida economics professor Philip Porter has published several studies on public financing of pro sports stadiums, and says they lose money for governments. Taking the published Dunedin numbers at face value, he says Pinellas County would need $1.85 billion in new sales to recoup the public money invested. He warns that if governments issue bonds to raise the money, costs will climb even higher.
Ward Bujalski stresses local residents won’t pay new fees because much of the public money for this project comes from taxes, like those on hotel rooms, paid mainly by tourists.
Porter says using any tax money to subsidize a pro sports franchise owned by Rogers, a telecom titan worth $29 billion, comes with a steep opportunity cost. “Does Dunedin have such good schools, such a sparkling and efficient police department, such good roads and bridges and extensive health and living assistance for its poor that it can afford to subsidize million-dollar players and billiondollar team owners?” Porter wrote in an email to the Star. “The Mayor turns a blind eye to the data produced by academic scholars in favor of the unsubstantiated statements of MLB. I imagine MLB owners are generous political donors by Dunedin standards.”
But the team and the city cite their own opportunity costs if a deal doesn’t materialize.
Just south of Dunedin, the Phillies play at Spectrum Field, with room for 8,500 spectators and an outfield concourse dotted with concessions stands.
An hour south in Bradenton, the Pirates’ setup mirrors the one the Jays propose: a downtown stadium renovated in 2013 for $10 million, plus a comprehensive training and rehab complex a short drive away.
As other teams modernize Florida facilities, Shapiro says the Jays pay a price for not keeping pace.
“Our minor-league players don’t casually see the amount of work Josh Donaldson puts in in the (batting) cage, they don’t see Troy Tulowitzki taking ground balls,” Shapiro says. “There’s a power to those interactions . . . Every year we don’t have a new facility has a negative impact on us organizationally.”
Dunedin, meanwhile, doesn’t want to imperil a fruitful relationship with Toronto. The Jays are the only major-league team never to have changed spring training sites, and the team’s presence earns Dunedin media exposure worth $5 million a year, according to the city-commissioned study.
That publicity helps drive other tourism to Dunedin, Ward Bujalski says, further strengthening local businesses.
“You have to ask yourself: What would you replace that with if you didn’t have it?” she says. “That’s a huge chunk of change to try to replace.”
But Porter has studied cities that have lost spring training and says local economies rebound immediately, showing no long-term damage.
Even at Home Plate on the Trail, where photos of Jays stars adorn the walls, owner Cindy Phillips is aware of what the team does — and doesn’t do — for her business. She says she’d still make a profit without the spring training windfall.
Phillips also recognizes perks she can’t quantify, like the renewed buzz downtown when major-leaguers arrive and the new customers join the restaurant’s regulars.
“We would survive (without spring training), no question,” Phillips says. “But I don’t think it would be as much fun.
“And that’s why I go to work — because it’s fun.”
“We would survive (without spring training), but I don’t think it would be as much fun.” CINDY PHILLIPS RESTAURANT OWNER