Andrew Snyder POSC 211 11/12/07 Decentralization and Public Infrastructure: The New Twins Ballpark Political scientists

and government administrators alike have long recommended decentralization an approach to reducing characteristic problems of over-centralized governments, such as high levels of corruption, overinvestment in large-scale projects, and lack of focus on constituents outside the capital city. Decentralization in this capacity has often meant the devolution of authority within the bureaucratic system to lower-level officials, which has created enhanced opportunities for citizen participation throughout the legislative process.1 One of the most important issues pertaining directly to citizens on a decentralized level in todays world is the governmental creation and maintenance of public infrastructure. The local existence and quality of roads, water and sewage systems, transit, power, telecommunications networks, education systems, and other public infrastructure greatly influence a given citizens quality of life, as well as their decision to inhabit a certain town or area. Overall, it seems decentralized governments enhance citizens direct participation in developing and maintaining public infrastructure, because such designs enable responsible authorities to identify local preferences for infrastructure technology and service quality, and increase the ability of citizens to hold authorities accountable through the local decision making process. However, it is important to remember that decentralized provision and financing of infrastructure is not any guarantee of improvements in local infrastructure quality or distribution. A local governments performance instead depends on the incentives facing decision makers,
1

Ostrom, pg. 268

which in turn depend on the financial, institutional, and political environments in which decentralization occurs.2 In this paper, I will examine the relationship between decentralization of government and the development and maintenance of public infrastructure in the case of the new Minnesota Twins baseball stadium; an important new piece of Hennepin County infrastructure that has just begun construction and previously faced a long, complicated, and extremely decentralized planning process over the past few years. In her chapter on decentralized institutional arrangements in Institutional Incentives, Elinor Ostrom lays out the five classic principles of decentralization, originally proposed by Philip Mawhood and Ken Davey in 1980. They are as follows

1. Local authorities should be institutionally separated from central government and assume responsibility for a significant range of local services (primarily education, clinics and preventative health services, community development and secondary roads being the most common). 2. These authorities should have their own funds and budgets and should raise a substantial part of their revenue through local direct taxation 3. Local authorities should employ their own staff, although in the initial stage the regular civil service staff could be employed temporarily. 4. Councils, predominantly composed of popularly elected representatives, would govern the authorities internally 5. Government administrators would withdraw from an executive to an advisory and supervisory roll in relation to local government.

Lets examine these principles as they pertain to the Hennepin County Government, which has partnered with the Minnesota Twins to wholly provide the public sector funding for their new Minneapolis ballpark. The Hennepin County Government provides its citizens with a significant range of local services, from health care and social services
2

Seddon pg. 1

to infrastructure and transit. The county government is overseen by a council of seven county commissioners; elected officials who collectively vote on executive decisions. Through the Hennepin County property and sales taxes, as well as other local taxation measures, the county government is able to raise some of their own funds to spend on local infrastructure development and maintenance, as well as funds to pay the salaries of the county commissioners, sheriff, attorney, and their respective staff and aides. 3 While the Hennepin County government has similar responsibilities to any other county government around the state, all of which meet the above decentralization principles and criteria, it operates on a comparatively grand scale due to Hennepin Countys population density. Hennepin County is by far the most populous county in Minnesota, containing over one fifth of Minnesotas citizens,4 which gives the county government an extensive tax base to work with financially, as well as a substantial amount of clout compared to other local authorities when dealing with all sorts of political and public policy issues; especially in the case of the new Twins Ballpark. In April of 2005, the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners and the Twins announced that a deal had been reached concerning the financial package to fund the new Twins Ballpark. As private investors, the Twins would foot roughly a third of the stadiums cost ($125 million), while the rest of the money for the $390 million dollar project would come from a 0.15% increase in the Hennepin County sales tax.5 After this deal had been approved in by a 4-3 vote by the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners, it moved to a House committee of the Minnesota state legislature, where it was eventually allowed to bypass a Hennepin County referendum, and was eventually
3 4

http://www.co.hennepin.mn.us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hennepin_County 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twins_Ballpark

approved during the following year by the full State House of Representatives and Senate. Ground was broken on the new ballparks construction site on August 30, 2007, and construction is currently just getting underway. The ballpark is still on track to be completed in time for the 2010 Major League Baseball season, although there were several complications during the stadium planning, funding, land acquisition, and legislative process due to the inordinate amount of different public and private agencies and organizations involved in the entire operation an ominous indication that widespread governmental decentralization may have complicated and hindered the stadium building process, as well as the planning and implementation of additional planned infrastructure and improvements in the surrounding area of the ballpark. Many of the snags, obstacles, and unforeseen complications in the ballpark planning process stemmed from the fact that five different Minnesota governmental agencies, each with different levels of authority and concern for the project, were working on the stadium infrastructure simultaneously. The government entities of the Metropolitan Council (the seven county regional-planning group), the Minneapolis City Council, the Minnesota Dept. of Transportation, the Hennepin County Government, and the Minnesota Ballpark Authority (representing the state legislature) were all focused on different matters throughout the process, ranging from transit issues to zoning concerns and railroad diversion from the proposed ballpark site. Rarely any of them were on the same page, and in some cases, even communicating with each other.6 In this instance, the stadium building process was truly decentralized, with so many different organizations involved in the development on so many different levels. Ultimately, it seems possible that if there had been more centralization and/or leadership taken by the
6

Anderson pg. 2 4

state government and governor Tim Pawlenty, the ballpark building process might have been more efficiently run and equitably funded. After all, since the new ballpark is certainly a regional amenity at the least, if not a state-wide one, it still seems unjust to place the public funding burden solely on the citizens of Hennepin County. Another problem with decentralized governments decision making, as Elinor Ostrom observes, is that huge monetary sums are often invested in infrastructure facilities under the guidance of potentially unqualified low-level public officials, and the infrastructure produced is later determined to be poorly suited to the needs of the community and/or poorly maintained.7 Historically, this has been especially true in the case of public funding invested in professional sports stadiums. There has never been any evidence that the benefits produced by constructing new sports stadiums come anywhere close to making up for the amount of hard-earned tax dollars spent subsidizing their creation. Even so, cities in todays world continue to rely on sports facilities for redevelopment strategies and plans to revitalize lackluster downtown districts, even though numerous independent analyses indicate that these shiny new structures and teams are not correlated with regional economic development.8 There is also a chance that the new Twins Ballpark could become poorly suited to the needs of the community in several years, becoming obsolete in the manner of the Metrodome. The ballparks relatively small proposed size of only 40,000 seats, a problem nobody seems to want to discuss, already makes it one of the smallest parks in Major League Baseball, and severely limits potential ticket revenue. After examining the case of the new Twins Ballpark and its developmental process that was rife with complications due to a massive case
7 8

Ostrom. Ch. 8 Austrian and Rosentraub pg. 1

government decentralization, we can draw some interesting conclusions that have important implications for future local projects, including as the inevitable construction of a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings football team. Jay Weiner, a former columnist for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune and an expert on local stadium issues, believes that recently, new stadium construction has created a sort of stadium redundancy within the Twin Cities area. The Target Center in Minneapolis and the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul are both multi-purpose 18,000 seat arenas, just ten miles apart, and both incurring operating losses due to the fact that they are forced to compete against each other for concert and event revenue. The consolidation of these two arenas would save both cities a bundle of money, as would a proposed new joint football stadium for the University of Minnesota Gophers and the Minnesota Vikings, who both want to follow the Twins out of the outdated Metrodome as soon as possible. To make these consolidations feasible, Weiner sees the need for centralization and consolidation of stadium control under a hypothetical umbrella agency he calls the Minnesota Sports and Public Assembly Facilities Agency, or MSPAFA for short. Weiner believes that the MSPAFA [could] be a regionalor even statewideoversight board charged with implementing a unified plan to oversee the future construction, funding, maintenance, and capital improvements of all metro sports facilities, from a new NFL stadium in Minneapolis to youth hockey rinks in Farmington.9 While Weiners proposed umbrella centralization agency may not be feasible to implement in the Minnesota government, it certainly seems like a viable idea for legislators to entertain. Overall, after examining the specific case of the new Twins Ballpark, it seems evident that decentralizations potential impact on infrastructure performance depends
9

Weiner pg. 2

largely on the degree of local political and financial autonomy, accountability, and whether local leaders are offered the correct incentives for a long-term view of infrastructure investment, maintenance, and use. Because decentralization increases the number of actors involved in infrastructure provision, the institutional settings and range of incentives for local and regional governments increase and more attention must be paid to the signals implicit in financing arrangements, regulatory structures, and other interactions between levels of government and citizens.10 This increase in the number of actors proved detrimental in the case we examined, as different decentralized governmental agencies had trouble working cohesively to accomplish their common goal of constructing the new Twins Ballpark as efficiently and speedily as possible. Ultimately, successful decentralization of government is difficult to achieve, because it requires major structural changes to assure considerable joint autonomy between local, regional, and national governments, and also places a majority of the burden of government accountability on generally less skilled lower-level officials and the citizens they are directly serving. These major structural changes are difficult to implement in an already established governmental system like that of Hennepin County, Minnesota. Additionally, with the sheer number of governmental institutions already existing in the Twin Cities metro region, from city councils, to the Metropolitan Council, to County and State governments, there is ultimately no need for further decentralization, because the current local governmental systems already account for most if not all of the benefits that decentralized governmental institutions typically provide.

10

Seddon pg. 4 7

Bibliography Anderson Jr, G.R. The New Twins Park: A Big Roadblock at Home Plate. City Pages; Vol. 28, Issue 1366. www.citypages.com/databank/28/1366/article15 117.asp. 11/11/07.

Austrian, Ziona and Rosentraub, Mark. Cities, Sports, and Economic Change: A Retrospective Assessement. Journal of Urban Affairs, Volume 24: Issue 5. Pg. 549-563. Hennepin County. http://co.hennepin.us.mn 11/11/07 Hennepin County. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hennepin_County. 11/11/07. Ostrom, Elinor et. al. Institutional Incentives. Ch. 8. Decentralized Institutional Arrangements, 163-176. Seddon, Jessica. Financing Infrastructure: Decentralization of Infrastructure. http://www1.worldbank.org/wbiep/decentralization/Module9/Topic09_BN.htm 11/11/07. Twins Ballpark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twins_Ballpark. 11/11/07 Weiner, Jay. Getting our Fix: How the Twin Cities can cure its stadium-building Addiction. Minnesota Monthly Magazine. November, 2007.