Baseball would be much better downtown. Cleveland, Denver, San Diego, have downtown baseball stadia and I’ve found it nice to have the option 81 times a year to leave work, take mass transit or walk, to a baseball game. I enjoy the Stars for the same reason.

I disagree with the article’s position that infrastructure is inherently a bad proposal for poor economic times. WPA anyone?

I was referring to Minute Maid Park in Downtown Houston. It kicked off the revitalization there.

The mantra of a public-private contract is “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable”. The public doesn’t have the resources or objective to take advantage of this type of partnership.

Dallas won.

Send your thanks to LM…in about 5 years.

And BTW, the whole thing of publicly-financed stadiums being a mediocre investment is not a particularly new concept — there’s plenty of research from the first batch of publicly-financed sports palaces that failed to deliver on the promise of redevelopment, many of which are now seeing the wrecking ball (i.e., Miami Arena in downtown Miami).

“I’ll repeat this until people understand it: Jerry Jones NEVER intended to build that stadium in Dallas or Fair Park. We didn’t lose it. We were never really offered it. Jones made it impossible for either the city or county of Dallas to do a deal and he knew it.”

Jerry did want that stadium in Dallas. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on engineering to make sure the stadium would fit on the proposed tracts of land. He worked diligently to try and get the Mayor to pay attention to him. When she snubbed him he turned to the Dallas County government, and they snubbed him too. He didn’t even talk to other cities until it was obvious that he couldn’t get it done here.

Over $700 million in economic development is either completed or is under development in the Victory development around AAC (this number was at $1 billion before the downturn and a couple of projects were tabled). The final number when the entire area is developed will be around $3 billion. I believe the cost to the City of Dallas was around $210 million, and that included cleaning up the unusable brownfield site. If not for the AAC, we would still have a vacant factory there. This was the best pure financial investment that the City of Dallas has ever made.

When Coors field was built next to Downtown Denver, it was placed at the end of a rundown warehouse district known as lowdo (lower downtown). That area is one of the best in Denver now, and Coors field kicked it off.

In the mid-90s Downtown Houston was, and still is, the scariest place I’d ever been (and I’ve traveled to some pretty scary third world nations). Downtown Houston is now far, far better than Downtown Dallas.

It’s not just what Dallas would have gained, but look at what we’ve lost, and are going to lose. We lost the Cotton Bowl which has a $40-$70 million annual economic impact on Dallas. We are going to lose the TX/OU game, and that has a $30 million economic impact to our city. Those two event also provide massive tax revenues due to the inflated hotel taxes which most large cities have.

Dallas lost. Dallas lost big time.