Hidden Link

August 18 2024

By Chris Dempsey

I am skeptical of government spending on sports stadiums and arenas. A decade ago, I co-founded and led No Boston Olympics, the grassroots group that stood up against the powerful forces pushing a 2024 Boston Olympics bid, which would have required billions of dollars of public expenditure for a three-week sporting event.

There are faint echoes of that memorable debate in the plan for the City of Boston and the Boston Public Schools to join forces with a private entity, Boston Unity Soccer Partners, to revitalize White Stadium in Franklin Park. Indeed, my friend Andrew Zimbalist, professor emeritus at Smith College and expert on sports economics, with whom I co-authored a book on the folly of the Boston Olympics bid, recently shared his view in CommonWealth Beacon that the White Stadium proposal was a bad deal for Boston. But having studied the details of the White Stadium proposal, I come to a conclusion you might not expect: this plan makes sense for Boston. Here’s why:

The Process Has Been Open and Transparent

The Boston 2024 Olympic bid was hatched behind closed doors, and the boosters refused to share bid documents with the public. In contrast, Franklin Park and White Stadium have been the subject of a significant public planning exercise and open procurement.

In 2019, the city undertook, in conjunction with the non-profit Franklin Park Coalition and in close collaboration with the local community, the Franklin Park Action Plan. The strategic vision that resulted from this award-winning planning effort provided a roadmap for investment in Franklin Park to restore Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape vision, support uses desired by park users, and keep the park accessible and welcoming to its neighbors. In the wake of that plan, in April 2023, the City of Boston released a request for proposals for a public-private partnership to reimagine and reinvest in White Stadium. That process was open to any and all bidders, and was reported on by local media, with the Dorchester Reporter stating plainly, “The RFP calls for a private sector partner to help remake the facility into a high-quality venue.”

The Boston Unity Soccer Partners proposal that resulted from that process has been reviewed by the Boston Landmarks Commission, the Boston Parks and Recreation Commission, and the Boston Planning and Development Agency. It has been the subject of more than 50 public meetings, and has earned the qualified support of the Franklin Park Coalition, the most essential grassroots organization advocating for the park. Other well-meaning citizens and park advocates have opposed the plans, and I respect them and their position. Their lawsuits and press conferences have brought more scrutiny and attention to the proposal, but have failed to make a compelling case that the plan should be thrown out, forcing the city back to the drawing board.

Repairing and Restoring White Stadium Has Eluded Multiple Prior Mayors

The existing inadequacies and future potential of White Stadium first came to my attention during the Boston 2024 debate in 2014 and 2015 (Olympic boosters proposed that Franklin Park be home to equestrian events), but the stadium’s challenges long predate that time period. The facility is in rough shape. Describing a visit to the stadium he made way back in 2013, Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker called the stadium, “a beautiful dump. Its locker rooms had been unusable for ages. A fire 15 years earlier had seriously damaged the grandstand. The field was behind a padlock, guaranteeing almost no public access to the place.” (After previously expressing reservations, Walker also voiced support for the city’s renovation plan in a recent column.)

Past mayors and city leaders have tried to update the stadium, without success. It appears the last major investment in the stadium was in the 1980s, when the Flynn administration spent $4.2 million to expand the track to six lanes, install aluminum seating, and build new locker rooms and showers.

Despite the improvements, the stadium deteriorated further because of years of neglect and a fire that hollowed out the east grandstand in the late '90s. And Mayor Flynn’s improvements predated the Americans with Disabilities Act, so the stadium is out of compliance with the ADA – it doesn’t even have basic ramps, not to mention elevators or lifts. The field and adjacent practice area are often unusable in the fall sports season as a result of flooding caused by precipitation and poor drainage.

In June, 2009, Mayor Tom Menino, himself a wise skeptic of public funding for stadiums, said he had been working for several months on a plan for Northeastern University to make multimillion-dollar improvements to White Stadium and to have Northeastern's football team play its home games there. (That plan collapsed when the university’s board of trustees voted in November of that year to end the football program.)

In the summer of 2013, John Fish, the owner of Suffolk Construction and supporter of Boston high school sports, shared plans to raise $45 million to return White Stadium to its former glory, unveiling a proposal at a meeting of the Franklin Park Coalition. But that plan never happened, either.

Early in his tenure, Mayor Marty Walsh first rejected White Stadium as a priority, saying, “Unfortunately, we don't have room under the bonding cap right now. It's something we would love to see happen, but it's just a large expense with so many other capital needs in the city.” He then pivoted to tying the future of White Stadium to his favored project, the Boston 2024 Olympic bid  -- a flame that was extinguished by summer 2015.

That sad litany ends with the actions of Mayor Michelle Wu, who is seeing through an ambitious plan that will finally bring the stadium into the 21^st century. It is notable that, since the 1980s, each plan for the stadium relied on a private partner. The plan put forward by Mayor Wu and Boston Unity Partners will accomplish what prior administrations have tried – and failed – to do.

White Stadium is a Public Asset and Will Remain a Public Asset

Residents should ask tough questions whenever a private entity seeks to use public land. But long-term leases of public space are common, and can often provide significant benefits to a community, filling a gap that public resources alone cannot fill. Examples in Greater Boston are practically endless.

Emerson College recently won the rights to use space on Boston Common to create a beer garden and outdoor performance space, transforming a forlorn corner of America’s oldest public park into a vibrant, welcoming venue for music and socializing. Paddle Boston, a for-profit business, has a long-term lease on public land along the Charles River, where it rents out kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards to those seeking to take advantage of a day on the water. In both cases, the land remains public, but the private entity offers a service and investment that enhances the public space for a public benefit.

The plan for White Stadium will be no different. The public will still own the land and the stadium, and will have greatly expanded use of the venue, though the team will have the right to host up to 20 soccer games per year (plus a practice for each game). The city estimates that BPS and the public will have about 90 percent of the hours, with 10 percent for the team. The rebuilt White Stadium will have a new competition-level 8-lane track for hosting high school meets, strength and conditioning and study spaces for student athletes, and community space and public restrooms for park users, none of which exist today.

The Transportation Plan Works

The plan for getting people to and from the stadium limits on-site parking in favor of a multi-modal mix of options that mean most fans will walk at least the last portion of their journey – just as most visitors do at Fenway Park and the TD Garden. (Shuttles will bring people with disabilities to the front door.)

The proponents expect 4 out of 10 attendees will arrive by public transportation, and when accounting for walking and biking, fewer than half of all attendees will travel to the stadium by car. Those that do will be directed to satellite parking lots. For a stadium located in an urban park this is a reasonable plan -- and one that can be improved over time as the city and team learn more about how fans are arriving and any impact game days are having on the neighborhoods that surround Franklin Park.

Boston Taxpayers Face Limited and Manageable Risk

The 2024 Olympic bid presented Boston taxpayers with billions of dollars of financial risk. By contrast, the White Stadium proposal, even in a worst case scenario, is an order of magnitude less. The City of Boston intends to spend $50 million on its portion of the project: the east grandstand, which will include Boston Public Schools athletics facilities; a new grass field; and the track. This is a significant cost, but a reasonable one when compared with White Stadium plans presented in the past, or with any reasonable alternative to the Boston Unity Soccer Partners proposal.

The city will need to carefully manage costs of this project, as it does with any project of this size and scope. Stadiums can be prone to cost overruns (a fact we shared widely in opposing Boston 2024). But even opponents of the current White Stadium plan argue the stadium should be restored, so stadium construction is a risk that the city faces regardless of whether it partners with Boston Unity Soccer Partners. The city should ensure that the lease agreement properly assigns capital and operating costs to the professional team, as outlined in the RFP, and move quickly to establish the White Stadium Neighborhood Advisory Council that was created in the process governing large development projects recently approved by the Boston Planning and Development Agency.

Franklin Park Belongs to Everyone

In 2015, then-City Councilor Wu was the first elected official in the city of Boston to ask tough questions about the Boston 2024 Olympic bid, in the form of a GBH op-ed, calling for “informed independence and true debate.” We eventually got that with the Boston 2024 bid, and that ill-conceived proposal fell apart under public scrutiny.

By contrast, the now-mayor’s plan for White Stadium has held up under intense review by neighbors, the media, the mayor’s political opponents, and even a judge of the Superior Court. This proposal makes the most out of a challenging situation -- a 10,000-seat, out-of-date and inaccessible stadium in the heart of Franklin Park that today only fills those seats a few times a year, if ever. With more than $50 million in private investment, it transforms that decaying stadium into a first-tier public facility, but also one that will host crowds that the stadium has rarely seen since the 1970s, drawing people to Franklin Park from around the city and the region.

Rather than a privatization of a public asset, the plan is an opportunity to welcome both longtime residents and new generations to the heart of the park, and to polish the crown jewel in Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace. It’s a good deal for Boston.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Dempsey was a co-founder of No Boston Olympics. He is a founding partner at the urban planning and transportation policy firm Speck Dempsey, which consults for the City of Boston but not on the Franklin Park project.

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