The Spring Training Money Pit

For two years the accolades just kept on coming – “Award Winning”, “State-of –the-Art”, “Taj Mahal, “At the Forefront”, and on and on. All of these attributes were heaped on the Glendale-owned Camelback Ranch stadium complex which was recently constructed as the new home of Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers spring training. The City of Mesa regularly refers to this facility as the pattern to be followed for the proposed Chicago Cubs project. Unfortunately, another description has lately been applied to the Westside development – “Financial Train Wreck”. It seems the City of Glendale borrowed big bucks ($200 million) to build the stadium with the anticipation of attracting a very substantial tax base of commercial improvements nearby. Alas, four years after the festive announcement of the project, nothing in the way of commercial real estate is on the horizon, home values in the area have cratered with market values down over 65% and Glendale does not have any cohesive plan to repay the borrowed funds.

On the brighter side, perhaps the residents of Mesa can learn from this experience and avoid being sucked into the same sort of financial black hole.