Will Hagerstown build a new stadium for its minor league team to keep it from moving to Virginia? As I read the article that discusses this question, not once did anyone question whether the city (or, more accurately, the city’s taxpayers) should be paying for a sports stadium. If reporters or interested taxpayers look into this issue, however, they would find that there is virtually no good reason for taxpayers to be building sports stadiums for professional teams. These stadiums don’t create new tax revenue or economic growth. The only ones who benefit from them are team owners.

As the National Taxpayers Union notes, “Virtually every economic study of the issue has found that publicly funded stadiums are, at best, an inefficient investment of taxpayer dollars for the meager benefits produced and, at worst, massive payments to rich team owners and players at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.”

A paper by University of Maryland Baltimore County scholars Brad Humphreys and Dennis Coates is more explicit:

Despite the beliefs of local officials and their hired consultants about the economic benefits of publicly subsidized stadium construction, the consensus of academic economists has been that such policies do not raise incomes. The results that we describe in this article are even more pessimistic. Subsidies of sports facilities may actually reduce the incomes of the alleged beneficiaries.

I don’t know about the fiscal situation of Hagerstown, but if it’s like other municipalities throughout Maryland, I’m sure the recession has battered its finances. How, then, is the city going to come up with the revenue to fund this stadium? It seems a strange world where elected officials are scrambling to build a sports complex for a privately-owned team when they are cutting back on other government spending.

Backers of this new stadium no doubt contend that without it, the baseball team would leave town. They are probably right. If the only thing keeping the baseball team in Hagerstown is taxpayer subsidies, though, it’s an indication that there isn’t enough local support for the team. And if another town wants to spend its taxpayer dollars on subsidizing the team, Hagerstown is the one who wins in this deal.

There is a widespread belief that subsidies to sports teams helps the economy and increases local tax revenue. That assumption was evident in the Herald-Mail story on the Hagerstown stadium situation. For the good of Hagerstown taxpayers, this assumption needs to be thoroughly examined.