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EDITORIAL
Reject the mayor's deal
(Published November 1, 2004)

"You have to trust your elected officials to do what they do. We don’t rule by mob; we rule by elected official."—Councilman Jack Evans, D-Ward 2, as quoted Oct. 31 in The Washington Post

Robust debate over what the District’s chief financial officer now pegs as a $530 million plan to build a publicly financed stadium for Major League Baseball’s millionaires prompted D.C. City Council finance committee chairman Jack Evans last weekend to liken active – and seemingly overwhelming – citizen opposition to "mob" rule.

(CFO Natwar Gandhi last week told the council that the stadium price tag will be at least $90 million higher than the supposedly inflated $440 million figure the mayor first floated a month ago, and Gandhi said his estimate does not include some as-yet undetermined costs.)

Evans needs to get a grip on the role of an elected official in America’s system of representative government, as do his council colleagues who agree with his support of the mayor’s exorbitant stadium plan. The people are supposed to speak up to express their views, just as they are doing, and when they do, their elected servants are supposed to listen and respond appropriately.

"Trust me" is not an acceptable response from elected officials, who apparently do not trust the good judgment of the people who elected them. Otherwise, they would answer all of the public’s questions about this secretive deal. Or, perhaps, they haven’t adequately thought through the fast-tracked deal to answer the questions and are simply afraid to admit that they are poised to irresponsibly approve one of the largest publicly financed projects in the District’s history before they explore the consequences.

The mayor had the audacity to sign a take-it-or-leave-it stadium deal with Major League Baseball officials and says he doesn’t need to explain anything to the public or the council. He refused to testify at the council’s marathon public hearing on the plan last week and has not shown the neighborhood in which he wants to plop a 41,000-seat stadium the courtesy of publicly discussing his plan. Instead, the mayor sent his city administrator and other surrogates to face the neighborhood’s wrath.

The council now finds itself cast in a role similar to that played by the former, dictatorial financial control board four years ago when the federally appointed board sided with an intransigent mayor against the community to close the city’s only public hospital, D.C. General.

In that case, the mayor and Congress asserted that D.C. taxpayers could not afford an annual subsidy of $45 million to continue operating a public hospital to ensure health care for the poor. The consequence of that bad financial decision, which pales against the proposed $530 million ballpark subsidy for the wealthy, has been the overcrowding of the area’s other hospitals – a foreseen circumstance that now has the mayor proposing creation of a publicly financed, though privately owned and operated, hospital on the D.C. General campus.

Recent history alone shows that D.C. taxpayers have little reason to blindly trust the judgment of elected officials. If the mayor’s contract to bring professional baseball back to the nation’s capital cannot withstand public scrutiny, city council members should reject it and demand a better deal. D.C. residents appear united in their desire to bring back America’s pastime after a 30-year absence, but not at any cost.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator