I begin every morning by scanning the sports pages to see how my favorite teams and players made out. Some of my most cherished memories are of watching ball games with my dad. Competing in my Monday night basketball game has been a joy for over three decades. I love sports, but over the years I've seen a radical change in the business of sports. Across the country, professional teams are asking municipalities to build and refurbish stadiums. Even though a Brookings Institute study clearly shows that the economic impact of pro sports teams and new facilities is negligible, the mythology of pro sports as an economic engine lives on.
» Click here to quickly scroll down this page and send your message

The Portland City Council is considering spending $75 million to refurbish PGE Park into a major league soccer stadium and build the Beavers a baseball park in Lents. The major rationale behind Commissioner Randy Leonard’s plan is that the new stadium would be an economic stimulus to the Lents community.

According to the Brookings study, “a new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues.”
» Click here to quickly scroll down to the action form on this page

Right now there are two vacant eateries across from PGE Park. Rather than imagining what a few hot dog vendors might do for Lents, the City Council should revisit its own Resolution 36488, which sets a goal of a 50% reduction in oil and gas use by 2030. The Council could then decide to invest $75 million to rehab 2,000 Lents homes with state-of–the-art energy efficiency. Imagine the high-quality, sustainable jobs that such a pilot project would develop. It would improve the value of Lents homes, and keep money in Lents pockets instead of going to ever-rising utility bills. As Resolution 36488 points out, “a large majority of money spent on fossil fuel leaves Oregon and provides no local economic benefit.” We need a 21st-century economic model that recognizes, as Resolution 36488 does, “that global reserves of oil and natural gas are finite and substitutes are unlikely to be available in the immediate future.”

It’s imperative that we focus our resources on building a localized economy that is a model for our state and nation. A Lents green energy project could be the start of a city-wide initiative. The stadium decision isn’t trivial, but rather will tell us whether the City Council truly understands what rising demand and decreasing supplies of energy really mean for our community. Investing $75 million in pro sports stadiums will not benefit our economy. The City Council’s priority should be to invest in projects that make our homes as energy efficient as possible.

We need our City Council to have right now, and for the foreseeable future, a laser focus on green jobs and green energy.

TAKE ACTION
To send your letter, follow the instructions below.