“I don’t think in our community that will be acceptable,” Mayor Al Murray said of public subsidies after Tuesday night’s council meeting. “It could … be more of a leveraging opportunity [for Moreno] than anything else,” he said of the talks.
Voice of OC reported Thursday on the reaction of Tustin officials to the possibility that Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim owner Arte Moreno would move the team from Anaheim to Tustin. In short, it looks like if Mr. Moreno wants to move his team to Tustin, the likelihood of public subsidy of the plan is somewhere between none and slim. Without local subsidy, such a move is significantly less appealing.
From the story:
Over the long weekend, Angles owner Arte Moreno tried to ratchet up the pressure on his stadium lease negotiations with Anaheim officials by making it known that he met with Tustin leaders about the possibility of moving his baseball team there.
But Tustin officials, wary of public dollars going toward a stadium, aren’t exactly preparing a welcome wagon for Moreno.
Mark Rosentraub, an expert on stadium deals, said tat Moreno is playing a card that teams often play in such negotiations and that in his case it’s a pretty weak card.
“Traditionally the game that teams play is they try to pit metropolitan areas off against one another in order to extract concessions from the cities,” said Rosentraub, an economics professor at the University of Michigan.
“They better come up with more than just a rumor to move to a suburb that has no existing stadium, no existing plan to build a stadium and no obvious council members that are strongly backing a plan,” Rosentraub said.
Read the complete story here.
Thoughts?
i guess my comment didn’t go through but lets face it arte moreno is a greedy pig who is obviously playing games here we couldn’t have ended up with a worse owner. and btw cheminowski, a real true angels fan never refers to the angels as the “los angeles angels”