Senate Floor: STADIUM FINANCING AND FRANCHISE RELOCATION ACT

Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senator Specter today in introducing legislation that will create a fund to finance the building and renovation of stadiums and ballparks for major league baseball and professional football sports leagues across America. For too long, baseball and football teams have threatened to move if state and local governments do not ante up the money to renovate or build new, publicly financed stadiums for the home teams. The scene is, by now, a familiar one: multi-millionaire team owners demand new, taxpayer-funded state-of-the-art stadiums, so that they and their players can make even more money for themselves -- at taxpayer expense, of course. The taxpayers are impaled on the horns of a dilemma: either pony up or risk losing the team.

This bill will strike an equitable arrangement between teams and local governments to share the costs of stadium renovation and construction -- ensuring that professional sports teams put up their fair share. The way the bill would accomplish this is straightforward. Team owners owe much of their wealth to revenue from network telecasts of their games, a boon they receive courtesy of the antitrust exemption granted by us -- the Congress. The antitrust exemption contained in the Sports Broadcasting Act permits teams to pool their television rights, yielding annual revenues of $2.2 billion to the National Football League and $425 million to Major League Baseball.

This legislation would require, as a condition for retaining this lucrative antitrust exemption, that Major League Baseball and the National Football League place into a trust fund 10 percent of the revenues the Leagues receive from network telecasts. Each sport's trust fund, in turn, would be used to finance up to one half the cost of constructing a new stadium or park, or renovating an older one, for any of the teams seeking such financing -- so long as the local government has agreed to provide one dollar for every two furnished by the trust fund. In other words, if a pro team in Wilmington wanted to build a $200 million stadium, it could obtain $100 million from the trust fund, a government entity in Delaware would have to kick in $50 million, and the remaining money would have to come from the team owner or some other source. In addition to allowing the Leagues to retain their current antitrust exemption, the bill would expand the exemption to give the Leagues the authority to prevent member clubs from moving their franchises.

To my mind, this bill strikes just the right balance. Let us not saddle cities and taxpayers with the exorbitant -- sometimes mind- boggling -- costs of building new stadiums while the teams and their owners sit back and wait for the highest bidder. If the Leagues want to keep their antitrust exemption, the major source of their millions, they should be willing to do their fair share. This legislation's condition that in exchange for the exemption, the teams set aside 10 percent of their broadcast revenues, is a reasonable and much needed measure to restore some balance to a negotiating process that is out- of-whack.