In a season when government budget cuts are legion, hundreds of workers have lost their jobs and public services have been scaled back, one area of spending seems to be immune from the grim reaper's tax-cutting scythe: big-ticket sports projects.
The latest examples: Jim Norman's Championship Park and the sports marketing agency that he was instrumental in founding a decade ago.
Last week, Hillsborough county commissioners voted to more than double the amount of tax dollars they're giving to the private nonprofit Tampa Bay Sports Commission, which attracts large sporting events like the ACC basketball tournament earlier this year — and which would be the primary agency responsible for marketing Championship Park.
Next week, commissioners are set to vote on funding for the park itself, to the tune of $40 million from sales taxes. Norman's plan would convert part of a sprawling, county-owned ranch property in rural Hillsborough County into a world-class sports complex with dozens of playing fields for soccer, baseball, football, softball and other events, from youth leagues to sanctioned tournaments that could draw tens of thousands of participants — along with their hotel, lodging and entertainment dollars.
While few want to argue against doing something for kids and youth sports, Norman's plan has come under fire from several quarters for a variety of reasons. Environmentalists worry that a giant sports complex out in the middle of an undeveloped area will contribute to sprawl and the decreasing supply of rural lands in Tampa Bay. Some of his fellow county commissioners — including Republican colleagues — have questioned placing Championship Park's millions as a priority over other pressing needs such as drainage or transportation projects. Some question the estimated economic benefit of sports in the community.
The disagreement has even turned personal; when nude-dance club owner Joe Redner ran unsuccessfully against Norman in 2006, he accused the incumbent of vanity. Norman was simply pushing a facility that could one day bear his name, Redner said. Others deride the park as a "legacy project." Today, Norman calls those accusations and characterizations "bunk."
"You've got to love kids and have a passion to do this. I've got a passion for them," he said in an interview for this story. "I don't mind taking the hit for the kids out there. It's not a legacy project. The legacy is the thousands and thousands of kids out there playing."
The Cone Ranch is a verdant corner of Tampa Bay, untouched by development in far northeastern Hillsborough, 12,700 acres that are home to a herd of cattle. It is a precious link between the Green Swamp to the east and nearly 3 million people who live to the west and depend on the huge swamp basin as the source of their drinking water.
Life is quiet out here just north of Plant City. A few isolated homes and trailers dot the roadway on the north side of a rail line, but it's mostly a world of pine woods, cypress domes and various critters who usually — but not always — stay off the Paul Buchman Highway.
It is here, on about one-third of the ranch's space, that Championship Park would be built: 30 multi-purpose fields for such sports as soccer, football, lacrosse and field hockey, 12 baseball fields, 10 softball fields and the associated locker rooms, concession stands and other supporting amenities. Consultants believe it would host at least 123 events annually a year within five years.
The county's long-range growth plan designates the ranch land for agricultural use, and the surrounding properties share similar low-density designations for either single-family housing or industrial uses.
A study of the complex's feasibility, however, concluded that in order to turn a profit, as Norman insists it will, Championship Park would need a little help from Old Man Development. "In order to attract and host events such as regional and national tournaments, substantial development must occur in the vicinity of the Championship Park in the form of hotels, restaurants, retail and other services that are complementary and necessary to the support of a sports complex intending to host a significant number of tourists on a regular basis," concluded The Leib Group, a Wisconsin-based sports consulting firm. Leib's study assumed that "the necessary development and related ingress and egress [roads and road widenings] are in place at the time Championship Park is completed."
The county has no budget or plans for any of that. Even if it did, local environmental leaders say, opening up an untouched area of the county to development would not be a good idea.
"In general, we all feel it is going to contribute to sprawl," said Bev Griffiths, chairwoman of Tampa Bay Sierra Club, which has not taken an official position on the project. "I think we could make better use of our tax dollars. They are cutting back some important programs that benefit people who don't have as much and using it for something that is kind of a pet project of Jim Norman's."
Some neighborhood activists agree.
"Growth doesn't always mean good things. I'm not antigrowth by any means," said Terry Flott, head of the countywide civic group United Citizens Action Network. "But you know in the business world, growing too fast can put a company under."
Norman counters that the park can only be built in an undeveloped area, since the 425 acres it needs can only be found in such a rural site and not in urban or suburban neighborhoods. The problem with existing parks in the county is that they are surrounded by neighborhoods and can't be expanded.
The park proposal has also drawn criticism from some nonprofit groups who saw their county grants cut this year, while the private, nonprofit agency that will market Championship Park will receive $450,000 more in county funding than it did last year. Republican County Commissioner Rose Ferlita agrees with those groups that the county's priorities seem out of whack, saying at a commission meeting earlier this year: "These are the kinds of increases we should be looking at in healthy seasons, not now."
Norman, sports commission officials and the county's contract with the private agency say there is no link between the money for the Tampa Bay Sport Commission and the park proposal, that the increase is earned and designed to support large-scale events — including NCAA tournaments such as the hockey "Frozen Four" finals and the women's volleyball championship — that are already booked for the next few years. The Sports Commission says each of those large events pumps $20 million to $30 million into the local economy. That is an estimate that some elected officials and economists dispute on the theory that at least part of the money spent on sporting events is actually "substitution" spending that would have occurred in a community anyway on other entertainment or retail options.
"Economists widely believe that league and even event-sponsored studies exaggerate the economic impact of professional franchises and large sporting events on local communities," Ferlita said at the August meeting.
Some of the nonprofit groups who saw the county slash their funding insist they are taking the hit so that sports spending can thrive.
"If money is so tight, why spend it on sports and government TV at the expense of the public's free speech rights?" asked Louise Thompson, the executive director of the public-access cable television producer Tampa Bay Community Network, which saw its $355,000 county grant eliminated this year. (Full disclosure: Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason is a board member of the network.)
"In addition to the priority this administration has placed, er, misplaced, on its own government channel and on sports — which raids taxpayer money four different ways," Thompson continued in an e-mail interview, "the proposed budget is a clear indication that our government is unable to tolerate the criticism inherent on the public's channel and necessary for a democracy to thrive."
The Sports Commission's executive director said it is a matter of economics.
"We're stewards of the county's funding, and we put a genuine emphasis that [tax] money is spent getting a tremendous return on investment," Rob Higgins said.
In January, Higgins sent county commissioners a two-page memo detailing how the events the Sports Commission booked directly resulted in more than 127,000 room nights in local hotels by people visiting Tampa Bay to attend everything from big-ticket tournaments to high school football scouting combines. Upcoming events that the Sports Commission lured here include first and second round games in the 2008 NCAA men's basketball March Madness and the 2009 SEC men's basketball tourney.
As a private nonprofit, the commission must provide documentation of its contracted projects and spending to county finance employees, but it is not subject to the state's open-records laws or audits of its entire budget and books. In addition to public dollars, it receives private donations and sponsorships from groups such as the Glazer Family Foundation and the controversial Academic Financial Services. (The company was rejected as the "name sponsor" of the USF Sun Dome after its founder's felony criminal record became the subject of news reports; Higgins said the marketing relationship with AFS has been very good, and the company has delivered on its end of the bargain, including providing sports scholarships for local youths.)
In 2000, the Sports Commission received $100,000 from the taxes that tourists pay when they rent hotel rooms. This year's county budget pushes that to $900,000 — $500,000 from the hotel bed tax and $400,000 from property taxes. Norman, as the chairman of the county's Tourist Development Council, signed a letter that asked for even more than that — $1.2 million.
"Youth and amateur sports are a huge business and represent an opportunity," Higgins said, adding that it would be a tremendous embarrassment for the region if it could not successfully host the large college tournaments it has already attracted. "We could not be more appreciative of the proposed additional funding."
At the center of it all, unabashed and unbowed, is Norman, the longest-serving Hillsborough county commissioner whose 15 years in office have made him arguably the most powerful county politician. Four times, his colleagues have made the Republican the commission chairman, a ceremonial position whose power flows from the ability to control meetings and guide their agendas.
This is the same Jim Norman who pushed successfully for the county to spend $1 million to complete a wall to keep Suncoast Expressway traffic noise out of the Cheval neighborhood, an enclave of expensive homes where (as his opponent Redner pointed out in 2006) some of his campaign supporters live. The same Norman who wanted to get rid of the county's wetlands rules and the staff that enforced them and who has drawn some heat for supporting the notion of a four-county bypass expressway.
Norman's biggest brush with controversy, however, came in 1999, after a St. Petersburg Times reporter surreptitiously followed him to Las Vegas, where Norman received a cut-rate hotel room from a business owner and spent the weekend betting in a casino sports-book room with a lobbyist who appeared frequently in front of the County Commission. The business owner friend was David Bekhor, whose medical supply company was trying to secure a contract with the then-publicly run Tampa General Hospital. Norman's telephone calls to the hospital's CEO on Bekhor's behalf, along with Bekhor's campaign contributions to Norman, raised eyebrows, drew a complaint from the CEO and attracted the attention of federal prosecutors. A grand jury that reviewed Norman's actions ended its term without issuing an opinion or indictment.
Even that controversy had a sports angle: Bekhor got himself appointed to the Tampa Bay Sports Commission, where Norman then also served. And in news stories at that time, Bekhor claimed to have ties to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a lobbyist seeking to influence County Commission decisions. The football team disputed ever paying him to try to get it favorable treatment.
It is ironic, or perhaps fitting and predictable, that the money for Championship Park would come from the proceeds of the 1996 Community Investment Tax, a 1-cent sales tax increase approved by voters — largely to build a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Yes, it is a small world in Tampa Bay politics and an even more insular world when it comes to the intersection of sports and politics. Norman is almost always at that crossroads. The former high-school track and football coach is a longtime member of the public Tampa Sports Authority, which operates Raymond James Stadium for its chief tenant, the Bucs, and makes decisions about how to spend tax dollars that benefit the team. The Bucs are owned by the Glazer family, whose foundation has committed to contribute $2 million over the course of three decades to the Sports Commission, which Norman helped create. Like some other public officials, he also receives free game tickets as an authority member.
Norman makes no apologies for being a sports booster, at the professional, amateur and youth levels. His passion for sports has been a centerpiece of every campaign he has ever run; he's made no secret of it.
He does seem genuinely dismayed by the response to the park. "You would think if it were in any other community, people would be cheering this," Norman said. He and Higgins point to other Florida communities that spend even more than Hillsborough on their sports commissions: Fort Lauderdale, $1.2 million, Miami-Dade, $1 million, and Palm Beach County, $1.8 million. Neither, however, spends near what Tampa Bay does on professional sports arenas. (Joe Robbie Stadium near Miami was built with private dollars by the Dolphins' owner at the time.)
Norman justifies local government spending on sports, pro to youth, as a way of generating even more tax dollars for programs such as the indigent health care plan. Norman reasons that as more people visit Tampa Bay and spend money on sports, the more taxes they pay. "Look at the return on investment," he said.
So is that what makes Tampa Bay so sports-happy and its elected officials so willing to approve money for stadiums, hockey rinks and baseball diamonds? After all, between the operating costs and debt for the major professional facilities for which the public pays the tab — from Tropicana Field to Raymond James Stadium to the St. Pete Times Forum — Tampa Bay taxpayers are on the hook for more than $700 million over three decades.
You could trace the Cone Ranch/Championship Park controversy back to one man: Ronald Reagan. It's not as much of a stretch as it might seem. It was Reagan's willingness to trade arms for the American hostages in Iran that started the chain of events that ended with the Iran-Contra scandal. Adnan Kashoggi, a billionaire Saudi Arabian arms dealer, was a middleman in that deal, which came to light in the mid-1980s. Press accounts at that time blamed Kashoggi's exposure for the bankruptcy court filing of his A.K. Florida Properties Inc., which owned Cone Ranch.
The West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority, now called Tampa Bay Water, bought the ranch property out of bankruptcy for nearly $12 million in 1988. It gave the deed to the land to Hillsborough County for $100 three days later, keeping the rights to the water underneath the property for itself.
Cone Ranch has plagued public policy since then. Tampa Bay Water fought with Hillsborough County and local politicians, including then-Speaker of the House Johnnie Byrd, over the water supplier's desire to create a large wellfield that would pump 12 million gallons a day from Cone Ranch to quench the growing thirst of a quickly growing region. Tampa Bay Water eventually abandoned its plans and instead relied on an ill-fated desalination plant that has cost hundreds of millions of dollars and still doesn't produce drinking water.
In 1995, a controversial proposal to allow fox hunting on the land was blasted by animal-rights activists. That came on the heels of another controversial plan to swap some of the Cone Ranch land with a neighboring phosphate plant so that it could use the property to create a radioactive mountain of phosphate-mining byproduct called a gypsum stack.
Today, it's the Norman proposal. That brings us back to Reagan. It was his ascendancy that brought conservative, smaller-government politics such as Norman's to the fore in Tampa Bay. It is that conservative philosophy coupled with the property-tax revolt that is driving the Championship Park issue.
As Norman sees it, creating profitable publicly owned facilities such as the sports complex is the only way that government is going to be able to afford to maintain its parks and recreation systems without raising taxes.
"We're either going to do something like this, or you're going to see the state of our parks system spiral down quickly," Norman explained. "I saw this coming years ago, and I'm trying to make us have one of the best parks systems in America, and it has to have a funding source. That's what this will be."
Under that kind of political philosophy and the current fiscal situation, those government services or benefits that don't — or can't — turn a profit, possibly outside of police and fire protection, are going to be out of luck.
The public may question spending $40 million for Championship Park, but most of Norman's colleagues haven't. Maybe it's the fact that some were themselves high-school athletes or youth coaches. After Norman introduced the concept at a June 2005 meeting by taking the highly unusual step of passing the gavel to a colleague and speaking from the public's podium, only then-County Commissioner Kathy Castor voted against putting Champtionship Park on track. That meeting ended like this (according to a closed-captioning transcript):
Castor: I just don't think it's appropriate to add it to the [Community Investment Tax project] list today and then get all the information. I'd rather have all the information. But I do like the concept.
Commissioner Mark Sharpe: We have a motion and a second. Please record your vote.
Recording secretary: Motion carried 6-1. Commissioner Castor voted no.
Norman: Thank you all so much.
Commissioner Ken Hagan: Good job, Jim.
Then-Commissioner Thomas Scott: Let's go to lunch.
The Hillsborough County Commission is scheduled to vote on its Community Investment Tax spending plan, including Championship Park, on Wed., Oct. 3, in a meeting that starts at 9 a.m. in the second-floor board room of the County Center, 601 E. Kennedy Blvd., Tampa.
This article appears in Sep 26 – Oct 2, 2007.