The Rhinos have
entertained Rochester for nearly 10 years. I’d say the actual on-field product
is like a Mercedes-Benz. But at the end of the day, I have visions of
management parking the Benz outside a broken-down mobile home, not inside the
heated garage of an Ambassador Drive mansion. I just don’t think the team makes
much money, and Dun & Bradstreet says the Rhinos’ credit rating stinks.
Rhinos President
Frank DuRoss once told me that his team’s financial challenges are the result
of playing at Frontier Field, where the Rhinos reap about five percent of the
concession money when they play games. That would seem to greatly hamper their
profitability.
Red Wings officials
— whose team is Frontier’s primary tenant — dispute DuRoss’s claim, and
they feel it casts their team as the bad guy responsible for keeping the Rhinos
down. They say the Rhinos’ charges are unfounded: The soccer team gets five percent
of the concessions because it doesn’t pay much to lease the stadium for games.
Yet DuRoss keeps
perpetuating the story that his team’s lease is awful and that it’s the main
reason the Rhinos are slow to pay their bills. And we’ve fallen for it.
Still, for some reason, state officials just want to keep giving the Rhinos more money. They seem to
want to spare the team any possibility of embarrassingly defaulting on a loan.
In March, DuRoss
requested $9 million more in state aid for the construction of his team’s new
Oak Street stadium, PaeTec Park. This came after DuRoss said a while ago that
he didn’t foresee any more need for public funds. The additional cash would be
used to pay for Phase II of the construction, which would include more seats, a
press box, and a video replay system.
So if you’re keeping
track of this: What originally was a $44 million soccer stadium morphed into a
$22 million soccer stadium a couple of years ago (because Monroe County
declined making a $7 million gift and no one wanted to sell publicly-backed
bonds for the project). It then became a $25 million soccer stadium, and is now
looking like a $34 million soccer stadium. DuRoss is already receiving a $15
million state grant, plus $3 million from the city. With an extra $9 million,
the Rhinos could be proud owners of a multi-million dollar stadium they
acquired for just $6 million of their own money. That’s freakin’ sweet.
If someone wanted to
pay for a new roof and new siding to my house — or better yet, tear it down
and rebuild it in a manner fitting a Great American Writer — I certainly
wouldn’t turn him down either.
Here’s how we must think about this whole stadium project and the approximately $28 million in taxpayer
money that likely will be used to build it: This public money has probably been
allocated for public-entertainment construction projects across the state, so
if that money is already going for entertainment facilities somewhere in New
York, it might as well go to Rochester.
In Manhattan,
officials are talking about building a $2 billion Jets football stadium-Olympic
stadium-convention center facility. I imagine that in order to get legislative
approval for what would obviously be a major publicly funded project downstate,
state lawmakers here are trying to get some money for upstate projects in
exchange for their votes. And PaeTec might be considered by those lawmakers to
provide the biggest bang for the increased state bucks.
Is it sick that we
use public money to build facilities for privately owned sports organizations?
Of course. You can cry about the decaying neighborhood around Oak Street and
discover other more appropriate uses for public money, but politicians get elected
for bringing new stadiums to communities, not beautifying inner-city
neighborhoods.
DuRoss is hoping the Rhinos will someday be a Major League Soccer franchise, and that Major
League Soccer will take off in the US. If those two things happen, a financial
windfall could be in store for DuRoss. It might not reach the level of what
Bills owner Ralph C. Wilson’s $25,000 investment in 1959 eventually became, but
it would be substantial.
So we all have a
stake in DuRoss’s dream. Decry the sickness of it all, but really, when it
comes down to it, Mercedes don’t belong in trailer parks. That’s, like, totally
gauche.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2005.
