[DC Baseball] Stupid, Fat Woman single-handedly kills the Capitol's bid for Expos

Cropp Vowed to Back Deal, Mayor Believed
Chairman Admits Blindsiding Williams

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 16, 2004

On Monday night, hours before the D.C. Council was set to cast a final vote on his plan to finance a new baseball stadium, Mayor Anthony A. Williams and Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp met to work out a few last details.

"So, am I going to be happy or unhappy tomorrow?" the mayor asked Cropp when the meeting ended.

"I think you're going to be pleased," she replied.

As they parted ways, the mayor and chairman understood that exchange to mean two very different things.

Williams (D) was convinced that Cropp had promised to deliver the votes for his baseball package, officials said. But Cropp (D) said she was optimistic because she thought that Williams had agreed to go back to Major League Baseball officials and finagle a few last concessions to lower the public cost of the ballpark.

Over the next 24 hours, that gap in understanding between the city's two most powerful political leaders grew into a vast divide. On Tuesday, Williams wandered into the council chambers expecting to watch the triumphant finale of his six-year campaign to bring baseball back to the nation's capital. Instead, he sat in stunned silence as Cropp rammed through an amendment so poisonous to baseball officials that yesterday they halted ticket sales and canceled the scheduled unveiling of Washington Nationals uniforms.

Supporters and opponents of the baseball deal yesterday debated what drove Cropp to drop her bombshell and whether Williams should have known something was amiss.

In several interviews, Cropp acknowledged blindsiding the mayor, her council colleagues and even members of her staff with the amendment, which required that half of the cost of the ballpark come from private financing. She said she drafted it late in the day, "as I listened to the debate, and the concerns I've had over the past couple of months kind of percolated."

Those concerns prompted her to demand two weeks ago that Williams go back to baseball officials and renegotiate portions of the stadium agreement that the city and Major League Baseball signed in late September. Among her demands: The city should be able to use the stadium more often. The team should provide more benefits to the community. The city's liability should be limited if the ballpark is not ready for the 2008 season. And most important to Cropp, the city should be able to pursue private financing instead of being required to build the stadium with new taxes.

Cropp acknowledged that the list of concessions Williams presented to her Monday night met every one of those demands. But she said she wanted more, and that she gave Williams "language, amendments I had written" to take back to baseball officials. She described those amendments yesterday in vague terms, saying she wanted more "shared costs."

When baseball sent a final version of the list to Cropp about noon Tuesday, it did not contain any of those revisions, she said. She distributed it to her council colleagues, and many of them mocked it from the dais as petty and insubstantial.

"I told her, 'Mrs. Cropp, all they're doing is regurgitating.' I think that really made her mad," said council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large).

Cropp said the debate helped to crystallize her thinking and convinced her that drastic action was needed.

"I consistently said I will not vote for this unless I get some changes," Cropp said. "And I realized there were not substantive changes."

Furious, Williams bolted from the chamber before the council took a final vote.

Williams was still so angry yesterday that he refused to speak directly with Cropp, according to his aides. City Administrator Robert C. Bobb met with her after the vote. Bobb said the mayor thought he had been badly betrayed.

"We met with her and her staff twice [late Monday] and we felt like all of her concerns were answered," Bobb said. "If she had raised these problems the night before, we could have addressed them."

Bobb declined to say whether he still trusts Cropp, who has appeared to pull the rug out from under the stadium deal three times over the past month. "I believe in conspiracy theories," he said, smiling.

Council member Harold Brazil (D-At Large), a baseball booster, called Cropp's maneuver an "ambush" and accused her of tacking the poison-pill amendment onto the baseball bill in hopes of gaining political advantage in the 2006 race for mayor.

Polls show that a majority of city residents oppose public funding of a ballpark.

But council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), the mayor's closest ally on baseball, said he believes Cropp was worn down after a daylong barrage of criticism from two ardent opponents of the stadium deal: council members Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4) and David A. Catania (I-At Large.)

"You have Catania on one side and Fenty on the other talking at you for 13 hours. That's enough to drive anyone crazy," Evans said.

Watching the council late Tuesday, a viewer could get the impression that Cropp had been confused. When she first explained her amendment -- which voids the stadium financing package unless the mayor delivers about $150 million in private investments -- Cropp said it would take effect only if the mayor blatantly ignores a viable private-financing package.

Evans initially described the amendment as "friendly." But after Fenty, Catania and Schwartz demanded clarification, Cropp explained, to everyone's surprise, that the stadium deal would die without private funds.

 

Nationals Face an Unhappy New Year

By Thomas Boswell
Thursday, December 16, 2004

Major League Baseball has given the District a stay of execution until Dec. 31.

When the ball drops on New Year's Eve, Washington can say goodbye to the "Nationals," all the joy they might have brought and all the urban rejuvenation they might have ignited on the Anacostia waterfront, unless some sanity is restored.

Perhaps because he just learned last week that he had escaped a serious brush with cancer, Commissioner Bud Selig is infused with the holiday spirit. At any rate, he and his sport have given the District an enormous Christmas gift: a second chance.

In the coming days, Washington and its infuriating, disingenuous D.C. Council must make a simple, straightforward decision. Do they want to accept the deal for a new stadium that was struck between the sport and Mayor Anthony A. Williams? Or don't they?

That's it. Yes. Or no.

Either answer is acceptable. City councils decide such things. It's their job.

What is utterly and absolutely not acceptable is the current behavior of Council Chairman Linda Cropp and nine of her colleagues who want to bait-and-switch baseball into a radically altered deal than the one which Williams negotiated exhaustively -- as his city's official representative -- over a two-year period.

In business, a deal is a deal, something Cropp refuses to understand. For her any deals, those made by others or even ones she has agreed to herself in recent days, are not deals at all. They are just a starting point for her next demand. And if she finally hears "No" to one of her new conditions, as she did on Tuesday from baseball, she threatens to sabotage the whole deal.

Finally, yesterday, baseball became completely disgusted and drew a line in the sand.

"The legislation approved by the District of Columbia City Council last night . . . is inconsistent with our carefully negotiated agreement and is wholly unacceptable," said MLB's Bob DuPuy in a statement. "Because our stadium agreement provides for a December 31, 2004 deadline, we will not entertain offers for permanent relocation of the club until that deadline passes.

"In the meantime, the club's baseball operations will proceed, but its business and promotional activities will cease."

In other words, baseball will honor its deal, right down to the Dec. 31 deadline. After that, it will start the work of moving the team to another city. According to highly placed sources, no games will be played at RFK Stadium next season if the Washington ballpark deal dies. "It's fair to assume that's out of the question," said one source.

When you make a deal with baseball, they honor it. If you break a deal with them, you're out. Which is as it should be. But then baseball is big league, unlike the D.C. Council, which is bush league and just damaged the city's reputation coast-to-coast.

If you want to see how atrociously the District is acting, then simply put the shoe on the other foot.

Suppose that, over the last few weeks, it was baseball, not Washington, that was constantly trying to renegotiate. What if Selig had changed his demands at least a half-dozen times, always upping the ante and using brinksmanship to get his way?

What if Selig had canceled votes within baseball ownership or delayed approvals to try to muscle Washington into concessions? And what if, most outrageously, he had signed off on the deal in private, then reneged?

What on earth would we be calling Selig right now? Of course, rich, powerful sports commissioners are fair game in this society. When they act badly, we call them out. But Cropp and her cohorts, who are acting in exactly the same manner as our hypothetical Selig, get off almost unchallenged .

The Council claims to be fighting for the poor of the District when it is far more likely that it is in the process of killing a development deal, with baseball as its centerpiece, that would bring significant benefits, not costs, to those very constituents.

Council members claim they are protecting citizen tax dollars when they know that not one cent of public money is earmarked for the Anacostia waterfront project. All funds to back the bonds to build the park will come from the team's new owners (rich), the top 11 percent of local Washington businesses (prosperous) and fans who attend games (many affluent). As for the District's pot of money collected through taxes -- called "the general fund" -- not a cent would be taken out of it.

As a bonus, more than 80 percent of Nationals fans, about two million a year, would come from the suburbs and spend tens of millions of discretionary entertainment dollars in the District.

Cropp and others on the council, like Adrian Fenty and David Catania, realize all this. They just don't want the public to figure it out. They prefer to round up cheap votes for themselves by bashing baseball rather than bringing a team back to Washington, bringing urban development to a blighted area and adding millions of dollars to the city's tax base.

The Council should be reminded that baseball doesn't care how Washington funds its stadium. The sport has specifically stated that if Washington can get private funding, that's okay with them, as long as it's nailed down, not pie in the sky. All the Council needs to do to solve the current mess is pass an amendment that provides the District with time to pursue the kind of private funding that Cropp espouses but, if it cannot be found, that the city will fulfill its promise to build the new park itself.

We should also remember that Washington's own mayor, not some ogre in baseball, dreamed up the current funding plan that so infuriates the Council's pols. The whole concept, and it's a brilliantly original one, came from Williams's office. Of course, Council members, especially ones like Cropp who want to be mayor, have nothing to gain by approving the successful creations of a rival politician. It's easier to destroy them, and then claim that you saved the public money.

If Cropp had not chosen the nuclear option on Tuesday night, she might have continued to badger baseball into a few frills. But now she's forced the game to take a stand or else look like a patsy in any future negotiations with anybody.

"How can we trust Cropp now? When does it end?" said a baseball official yesterday. "She has signed off, given her word, said the deal was done, more than once. Then she just changes her mind and acts like that's a normal way to do business.

"It's disgraceful. Baseball has been accused of a lot of things in the last 100 years. But never anything like this. They just went back on their word. If Cropp thinks she's going to do that and [still] get a team, she's making a horrible mistake."

The clock is ticking. The ball drops at midnight on New Year's Eve. Will the District's final hopes for baseball fall with it?

 

Whatever happened to a deal is a deal? Silly MLB, don't they realize that a promise really isn't a promise! All they did was agree to a deal that was formulated by the mayor. From all indications, the mayor had the approval of the council only to be sabotaged in the eleventh hour. Ninety-five percent of the bashing on this should be directed at DC - not the MLB.

 

Okay, obviously you're right in this instance. However, I would expect that most "frauds" involve at least one party that should be much more pedestrian than the city council of the nation's capital. You would expect them to be somewhat more honorable than this.