Among the sharks

The Sacramento City Council last week approved spending more than $550,000 on consultants to help craft a plan for a new publicly subsidized basketball arena for the Sacramento Kings.

A lot of folks say we’re never going to see that money again, and that the council just wasted a perfectly good half-million dollars.

Others wonder why—when Sacramento is putting itself out there to build an arena that will be predominately used by folks who live outside of Sacramento—the electeds in Woodland and Roseville and Elk Grove can’t even be bothered to put up a few bucks for the consultants.

There’s also an argument to be made, however, that Sacramento needs some professional backup in the process ahead.

After all, the city will be sitting at the negotiating table with some hungry sharks. The representatives from the NBA, the Kings, the various developers, financiers and arena operators will all be angling to get the best deal possible for themselves, while trying to shift as much of the risk and cost onto taxpayers as they can.

Our new City Manager John Shirey, who recommended hiring the consultants, knows well how a city can get rolled at the negotiating table.

After all, the deal he helped put together to build new stadiums for the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals—he was city manager there at the time—is now widely regarded as having been a big giveaway to the teams and a terrible deal for taxpayers.

The stadiums cost much more than estimated, and sales-tax revenue needed to pay off the stadium construction plummeted with the recession.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, property taxes have already been raised this year to help pay off Hamilton County’s stadium debt, and more tax hikes and service cuts are on the way.

Of course, Cincinnati and Sacramento are apples and oranges. Californians are protected by Proposition 13 which makes it impossible to raise property taxes the way they do back east.

If an arena deal went sideways like it did in Cincinnati, we wouldn’t raise taxes at all. We’d just shut down more fire stations and libraries and parks. Assuming there are any still open at that point.

But that’s why we’ve got the consultants, to keep us out of trouble. The biggest single contract approved last week—$125,000—is going to sports-financing expert Dan Barrett and his Barrett Sports Group based in California.

A couple of years back, Barrett hired on as a consultant to Sarasota County, Florida, which wanted to refurbish its local baseball stadium in order to lure the Baltimore Orioles spring training operation to town.

But Barrett got caught up in a mini-scandal there when he suggested to one vendor, International Facilities Group, that he could “bring you guys up to speed and talk strategy and give you the best chance to get hired,” according to emails reviewed by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

IFG did get the contract, and some county officials were accused of rigging the bid. When a citizen group demanded to see Barrett’s emails—as part of a lawsuit against the stadium deal—Barrett initially said he couldn’t provide them, because the computer he used had suffered a “meltdown.”

Legal wrangling eventually prodded Barrett to turn over the damaged computer, according to the Herald, and at least some of the emails were retrieved. But opponents were unable to scuttle the stadium deal in court. And the Orioles did eventually go down to Florida.

But Sarasota is not mentioned anywhere in the long list of government clients Barrett includes on his website.

Of course, there no reason to think anything squirrelly would happen here in Sacramento—with Barrett or any of the other highly recommended consultants. Apples and oranges.