KIDS DON'T WEAR THE JERSEY OF THE TOWN'S BEST LAW FIRM:

Ballpark figures: Sports economists agree that cities--and taxpayers--get close to nothing from spending public money on sports teams. What they haven't figured out is why we're still doing it. (Drake Bennett, March 19, 2006, Boston Globe)

WHEN A TEAM WANTS money, and it's usually money for a new stadium, it commissions an economic impact study. The predicted economic impact tends to be dramatic. The study the accounting firm Ernst & Young did for the proposed New York Jets stadium in Manhattan predicted that it would bring in $72.5 million in additional annual tax revenue. A similar study by the consulting firm Economics Research Associates, ERA, calculated that the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas, due to open in 2009, will add between $12.48 billion and $27.65 billion to the county economy over an estimated 30-year lifespan.

Independent economists dismiss these numbers. Much of the envisioned economic impact, they argue, comes from the money spent by fans, either on tickets or concessions or in nearby restaurants, hotels, souvenir shops, and the like. The problem with this argument, economists say, is that most families, whether they keep a budget or not, spend a finite amount of money on entertainment. As Vanderbilt University economist John Siegfried puts it, ''What are people going to with their money if they don't spend it on the Red Sox, flush it down the toilet? No, they'll spend it on something else: books, maybe, or bowling, things that Boston would benefit just as much from."

As for new jobs, sports teams and their stadiums do create them, but remarkably inefficiently, according to Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford University and co-editor, with Zimbalist, of ''Sports, Jobs, and Taxes" (1997), one of the most comprehensive works on the public funding of sports. In Baltimore, he says, the cost per job created by Camden Yards was $125,000, whereas for the city's other urban redevelopment programs it was $6,000 per job. And $125,000, according to Noll, is actually pretty efficient for a sports stadium.

University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson puts it another way. ''Cities would be better off," he says, ''if the mayor were to go up in a helicopter and dump out $100,000." [...]

ACCORDING TO Siegfried, there's a remarkable agreement on these points. In economics, he says, ''with most empirical issues there's lots of debate. Does the minimum wage cause unemployment? There's lots of debate about that issue. Here there's no debate." Even the consulting firm ERA put out an issue paper, back in 1995, cautioning against ''overblown claims of the economic value of major league sports teams" and concluding that, ''Compared with more traditional public investments of scarce economic development dollars. . .sports facilities are a rather poor investment."

But if public subsidies for sports teams are such an incontrovertibly bad idea, why is a city like Washington, D.C., still willing to pay $611 million for a sports stadium? Sports economists point, with varying degrees of frustration, to a combination of politics and unfortunate economic realities.

Major league sports, they argue, are essentially monopolies: They can ensure that the number of teams always stays below the number of cities that can support one. In economic terms, this creates a scarcity of supply and thereby drives up the ''price"-in subsidies, favorable land terms, or stadium lease deals-that a team can demand. Chicago built the White Sox a new stadium to keep them from moving to St. Petersburg, Fla., in the late '80s, for example. More recently, Nashville had to agree to build a new stadium to lure the former Houston Oilers to town.

Politicians, who like the publicity that comes from being associated with a major league sports team, see sports subsidies as a particularly glamorous use of public money-and are particularly vulnerable to the allure of gaining a team or the pain of losing one. As a business sector, major league sports is fairly small, and yet, points out Clemson economics professor Raymond Sauer, ''It's the only sector with its own section in every major newspaper in the country. It's an attention getter, so it's very natural for political people to align themselves with sports projects."

Still, there are also less cynical explanations. Mark Rosentraub, dean of the college of urban affairs at Cleveland State University, has consulted on a number of stadium projects, and has been vocally skeptical of many of them. But he believes that well-thought-out projects can benefit cities. Though they don't create economic growth, he argues, stadiums like Camden Yards and San Francisco's SBC Park (which was built almost entirely without public funds) have helped guide it.

The natural pattern of development, Rosentraub asserts, tends to be sprawl, but stadiums can function as focal points around which apartment buildings, stores, restaurants, and bars cluster. And they can help bring back hollowed-out downtown areas. In San Diego, the Padres' new Petco Park turned a desolate area full of abandoned lots and storage facilities into a landscape of luxury condominiums and boutique hotels. Washington is hoping a new stadium will do the same for the city's blighted Anacostia neighborhood. Of the recent stadium deal, Washington Mayor Anthony Williams's office has said the ''exciting economic revival" the stadium would trigger, ''will benefit our whole city for generations to come."

OF COURSE, THERE'S ANOTHER, more familiar factor that can skew the models of economists and planners alike. Many people, Rosentraub points out, just really like sports, and in a way that falls outside traditional measures of cost and benefit.