David Hoppe

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:: Jim Irsay is right

Reality bites

By David Hoppe

You know you’re in trouble when Jim Irsay looks like the only adult in the room.

That’s the way it seems at this point in the city’s continuing battle with reality also known as the CIB debacle. The CIB, or Capital Improvement Board, is the politically appointed board of insiders who use tax dollars to run projects that Indianapolis’ Business Party deems too important to put up for a public vote.

Did you vote to make Indianapolis a Sports Capital? To blow up Market Square Arena? Can you remember seeing a ballot with a box on it where you were asked to check whether or not you thought building a new football stadium (with retractable dome) was a good idea?

I didn’t think so.

Voting can be a messy, unpredictable business. Bart Peterson will vouch for that. When the Business Party decides it wants something, it knows better than to leave the process up to mugs like you and me. It relies on the CIB.

This is called efficiency.

You might think of the CIB as the Business Party’s enabler. The problem with enablers is that they sometimes help perpetuate bad habits. They don’t know how to say “no.”

And so today the CIB finds itself in charge of a basketball arena and a football stadium that seemed like good ideas at the time, but that it doesn’t know how to pay for.

The CIB needs $47.5 million.

The process of trying to come up with a formula for this amount heated up in January, with the beginning of the state legislative session. The hope in Indianapolis was that legislators would allow the city to keep certain types of revenue that would ordinarily go to the state, while permitting the city to jigger its tax rates on things like alcohol.

Oh, and politicians at both state and local levels got the bright idea that the teams using those stadiums – the Colts and Pacers – should kick in $5 million each.

The Pacers, after all, pay chronic bad boy Jamaal Tinsley close to $7 million a year just to stay away. The Colts reportedly saved another $7 million when they let Marvin Harrison go. $5 million in civic tribute must have seemed like spare change.

At the Statehouse, Sen. Luke Kenley drafted a potential funding package to bail out the CIB. It relied on both sports teams contributing $5 million each. Not to be outdone, Mayor Ballard came forth with a plan; it also included contributions from “our” Colts and Pacers.

A chorus of editorials and commentaries appeared in local media calling on the Colts and Pacers to be good corporate citizens.

The only problem was that no one, apparently, talked to the team owners -- Jim Irsay of the Colts, or the Pacers’ Simon brothers.

Jim Irsay finally pulled the plug on these schemes. He told the Associated Press his team had already contributed $100 million to the stadium project and that a deal was a deal: His team signed a 30-year contract with the city and he had no intention of renegotiating it.

Such candor was bracing, if very unHoosier.

Typically PR-obsessed moguls don’t generally court unpopularity this way, but Irsay did it. And what was the public response? Not outrage, but a kind of collective, tail-tucking gulp.

By calling the $5 million request tantamount to a renegotiation, Irsay pointed to a couple of things. First, that this could be a slippery slope. So we bail out the CIB this year; what’s to keep them from going back in the hole? There still appears to be no viable plan for keeping up with the cost of maintaining the Luc.

But Irsay’s calling the request for cash a renegotiation also implied a kind of Pandora’s Box effect. What if Los Angeles came calling? The Colts got a great deal from Indianapolis, but the new stadium’s been open less than a year and here we are, asking for another $5 million. Where does this end?

Renegotiating contracts – or just breaking them – is standard NFL operating procedure. Marvin Harrison was signed through 2010. But he lost a step. Adios, Marvin.

The business relationship between the Colts and Indianapolis is more complicated and more binding but, whether he intended it or not, Irsay put the city on notice. You want to renegotiate our deal? Be careful what you wish for.

Suddenly, the city’s vaunted sports strategy was face-to-face with a new reality. The Colts represent the National Football League, one of corporate America’s most powerful combines. Proximity to this corporate power is why we’ve wanted an NFL presence here. But this is also a power that dwarfs our resources and, when necessary, is prepared to bluntly remind us how lucky (and small) we really are.

This was the grown-up message that Jim Irsay delivered to the ditherers that insist that Indianapolis can live beyond its means. I think we should thank him.