(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today named Mayor Anthony Williams Porker of the Month for April 2004 for seeking $340 million in public funds to build a new baseball stadium in the District of Columbia.  Williams will submit the plan to Major League Baseball (MLB) in the next few weeks in an attempt to lure the Montreal Expos to the nation’s capitol.  Unlike last year’s proposal, which required the future owners of the franchise to chip in $125 million for a new stadium, Williams would shift the entire burden onto to the backs of taxpayers, giving the owners an intentional walk.

This plan combines two long-standing American past times: baseball and government waste.  Supporters of tax-financed stadiums typically argue that the economic benefits will far outweigh the public costs.  But a recent study by public finance experts Roger Noll of Stanford University and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College found that "no recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment and no recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues."  Furthermore, team owners often threaten to leave cities down the road in an attempt to extort more tax dollars for maintenance and improvements.

The Expos are currently owned by MLB, an arrangement that was intended to last only for the 2002 season but now is in its third year.  The club has accumulated more than $60 million in operating losses in that time.  The decision to move is pending until a city steps forward with full public financing of a new stadium – an audacious request by MLB.  The mayor’s plan calls for a tax on DC businesses.  But taxes on businesses are ultimately paid by everyday people – in the form of higher prices, lower wages, and lost jobs.  Punishing some businesses so that others can thrive is a policy that makes zero economic sense, and it will also force companies to relocate outside of D.C.

The District of Columbia is already a tax parasite on the rest of the nation.  It gets back nearly $6.44 in federal outlays for every dollar it pays in federal taxes, according to the Tax Foundation.  The annual federal spending bill for the District in fiscal 2004 is $545 million.  The money wasted on a baseball stadium will worsen the city’s dependence on the federal government, meaning the entire country will indirectly pay for this boondoggle.  Mayor Williams is pitching taxpayers everywhere a high inside fastball.

Many politicians and sports commentators extol the symbolic glory of having “America’s past time” represented in the nation’s capital.  If Mayor Williams wants to pitch for more prestige for Washington, perhaps he should clean the lead out of the city’s water system, or reduce the city’s crime rate and poverty level instead of financing a new baseball stadium.

Like the little boy who took his ball and went home, Mayor Williams recently said he would not attend Baltimore Orioles games to protest the lack of a team in D.C.  That puts him in the running for crybaby of the year.

Major League Baseball should act like any other business in a free market.  Taxpayer-financed stadium-building is corporate welfare, plain and simple.  For taking a called third strike by bowing to the demands of corporate hucksters and ripping off taxpayers in DC and around the nation, CAGW names Mayor Anthony Williams April Porker of the Month.

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.