List of advantages for new ballpark is long, persuasive

Longtime friends tell me I'm committing political suicide. Folks I've never met are saying that green grass will never grow on my grave, such are my offenses against good government and good sense. The time has therefore arrived to lay out the reasons why I believe we must pass my economic development measure that includes the St. Louis Cardinals ballpark proposal. Herewith, the St. Louis-specific features of Senate Bill 1279.

We're talking about a ballpark deal characterized by these features:

A publicly owned ballpark.

The lucrative naming rights will be publicly owned, as well.

The team enters into a minimum 35-year lease with three five-year options.

The team signs an agreement not to relocate outside the city.

The team is responsible for any construction cost overruns.

The team is responsible for all maintenance of and capital improvements to the publicly owned park.

The team is responsible for building the Ballpark Village and is liable for aggregate penalties of up to $100 million for failing to build it per the terms of the project agreement.

If the team is sold, the team shall pay to the city, state and county a portion of the sale price attributable to the lease and stadium pursuant to the formula in the project agreement.

The team shall sell at least 6,000 tickets per game at no more than $12 (using year 2000 dollars).

The team shall donate at least 100,000 tickets per season to youth charities.

The team shall contribute at least $100,000 per year to developing neighborhood recreation facilities for disadvantaged youths.

A luxury suite available to public at no charge shall be made available through a lottery or other fan selection process.

Major League Baseball agrees to hold the 2006 All Star game in St. Louis, with estimated economic impact of $100 million.

Further, in Busch Stadium, the cheap seats are way up in the upper deck, making them tough to sell, except on the most attractive dates, or when they're giving away alabaster figurines of Mark McGwire. In the marvelous new park, cheap seats will be moved, by the thousands, down to field level. In one of the most important features, the left-field wall will be at grade level, permitting folks outside the park to look right into the game in progress. There won't be a baseball experience like it anywhere in North America.

Busch Stadium is the last of the one-size-fits-all, joint-use baseball-football stadiums that seemed the way to go in the 1960s. All the others -- Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. -- have either been replaced or are in the process of being replaced. A rather isolated and isolating hulk, Busch doesn't fit well into the neighborhood, the way this new one will. The team has made clear that they can't continue making the St. Louis Cardinals competitive in what remains one of the small big-league markets. The question isn't whether Busch will be replaced, but rather when, where, how and under what circumstances.

Cardinals fans already pay the highest ticket taxes in all of major league sport -- 12.5 percent -- or twice what most teams face. The public portion will come from ticket taxes. In other words: Don't like the deal? Don't go to a game. With this contribution, Cardinal owners will foot two-thirds of the cost.

This writer is shoving an enormous stack of chips to the center of the table on one large bet: that the conventional wisdom can be defied, that the bill can and will pass both the Senate and House by May 17th, that it is certain of the bill's opponents and not this writer who are taking the larger and more dangerous risk, that this is emphatically the right thing to do, and all this and more besides, not for "corporate welfare" for my "rich Republican friends in St. Louis," but to keep the St. Louis Cardinals where they must be: in downtown St. Louis, in "a city on the verge of becoming great again" (Redbird owner Bill Dewitt's phrase) for the balance of the 21st century.

Risky? Sure. But as someone once asked, "When was it ever but a treason, to go with the drift of things?"

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.