In February, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) unveiled plans to devote $220 million in state bonds to a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, the state’s NBA franchise, even as his budget proposal aimed to cut $300 million from the state’s university system. Another plan from state Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R), meanwhile, proposes borrowing $150 million to help cover the cost of the $500 million arena that would replace the Bradley Center, which was built in 1988 (the team would pay part of the cost, as would former owner and U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, who sold the team last year).
Earlier this month, a poll from Marquette University showed that the plans were overwhelmingly unpopular: 79 percent of Wisconsin voters oppose the plan, while just 17 percent support it. But according to a new poll from backers of the project, that isn’t the case. That poll, released this week, showed that 67 percent of those voters supported the project when presented with a so-called “full proposal.”
But as Field of Schemes’ Neil deMause noticed, the discrepancy is quite easy to explain: the second poll, conducted by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (which one article described as the “biggest backer of a new Milwaukee arena — besides the Milwaukee Bucks”), asked about the support only after loading the poll with leading information, including the fact that the Bucks would leave without the new arena, that the plan would require no new taxes, and that the arena would more than pay for itself.
The MMAC justifies this by saying that they are giving residents a clearer picture of what might happen without a new arena than the Marquette poll, which led its questions by asking first about borrowing money and the cuts to university budgets.
“When voters are given the facts surrounding the arena issue and descriptions of options and consequences facing the state, they get it,” MMAC president Tim Sheehy said after the poll was released. “The stakes for our region and our state are high and people across the state understand that there are serious consequences to inaction and significant opportunities associated with a new arena development.”
That the Bucks might leave without a new arena is perhaps true, though they could of course prevent that by staying in their current arena or building a new one themselves. The rest of the information provided to poll-takers before asking the ultimate question, however, is less than honest. While the plan might not require new taxes — Walker’s proposal is to repay the bonds with revenue from taxes on athletes — it does divert them out of the state’s general revenue and away from other projects, especially because Wisconsin’s “jock tax” revenue typically flows to universities, other education budgets, and to other basic needs.
Similarly, most academic studies, as well as plenty of real-world experiences, show that banking on an arena to pay for itself or spur growth around it is a foolhardy gamble. In that sense, while the Marquette poll might have provided information less conducive to drawing support for such a proposal, it certainly painted a much more realistic picture of what can happen when cities go all-in on stadiums and arena projects without thinking about the consequences.
Even beyond Wisconsin, though, this is indicative of the way these projects typically work. The debates are almost always skewed with bad information from stadium and arena boosters who don’t provide a full picture of what taxpayers are paying for, how much they’ll ultimately have to spend, or what it might cost them to do so. Arena boosters keep selling the snake oil that these are free lunches with economic benefits for everyone, while taxpayers eventually have to suffer the consequences and deal with the messes the projects can create, like the sale of a public hospital (in Cincinnati), or the loss of public jobs and services (in Glendale, and elsewhere).
If Wisconsinites want to pay for a new arena instead of playing chicken with owners and possibly losing their team, that’s fine. But they, and everyone else in these situations, deserve a truthful and honest debate about what that means, and that requires treating most of the information — including polls — that comes from groups that are “the biggest backers” of arena projects should be treated with skepticism, if not ignored outright.