The Dome at America’s Center is a Waste of Money and Space
By: Karlie DeVore
Downtown St. Louis, Missouri a football stadium now known as The Dome at America’s Center, used to be the home to the St. Louis Rams. Since the Rams left for Los Angeles, California after the 2015 season, the Dome mostly sits empty waiting for the rare concert, convention, or conference large enough to use the space. The Dome, as its called locally, is basically 1,710,430 square feet of abandoned multi-purpose recreational space. The city keeps making gambles on sports teams and continuously loses money in the process.
The Dome has gone through many name changes over the 24 years it has been standing, the first being the Trans World Dome from 1995 to 2001, and then for the next fourteen years it was called the Edward Jones Dome, after the financial service firm that’s based in St. Louis, and now called the Dome at America’s Center. Construction of the stadium broke ground in July of 1992 two years before St. Louis knew a football team would relocate to the area. Considering this, the Dome was a gamble, what if a football team never came? The city would be stuck with an unused stadium; however, the gamble paid off (at least it did for twenty-one years).
Also St. Louis’ buying income was much more than what the average team grossed in 1993. This shows that the city spent an absurd amount of money on the construction of the football stadium.
Why the City Wanted Another Football Team
The area of St. Louis had already been the home of a different NFL team, the Cardinals, for twenty-eight years. After not advancing in the playoffs more than three times during their tenure in St. Louis, the owner decided to relocate them to Arizona after the 1987 season. In the journal article titled, “What Are the Benefits of Hosting a Major League Sports Team?” by Jordan Rappaport and Chad Wilkerson, they discuss the benefits of potentially having a professional sports team. Section two of the article starts with, “To measure the benefits associated with hosting a professional sports team, both stadium proponents and their critics focus on the increased economic activity and additional tax revenue that may be generated by a team’s presence.” A way to measure economic activity is to measure the amount of job creation, but more importantly the specific benefits of the jobs to the metro area. For instance, the residents may not actually benefit from the net job creation, and may actually be hurt from the new jobs. According to Rappaport and Wilkerson, statistical techniques are used to look at the correlations across metro areas amidst population, employment, wages, and house values. Those techniques have estimated benefits from zero dollars to fifteen-hundred dollars per net job created (Rappaport and Wilkerson 64).
It makes sense as to why St. Louis would want to have another sports team besides the hockey team, the Blues, and the baseball team, the Cardinals, so the economic activity in the area would increase. Jobs would be created and there would possibly be additional tax revenue generated by a team’s presence (Rappaport and Wilkerson).
While it makes sense for the area to want another football team after all the reasons discussed above, Philip Miller, a University of Missouri Economic and Policy Analysis Research Center researcher, wrote a study called “The Economic Impact of Sports Stadium Construction: the Case of the Construction Industry in St. Louis, MO” that failed to find new economic activity in the region created by stadium construction. His study actually found that the existing economic activity was dispersed around various different uses. This proves that the construction of the stadium and the actual stadium have done nothing to help the economic activity of the area.
Once the Rams relocated to St. Louis from Los Angeles in 1995, the Dome made sense to have; however, the team had a contract that required the stadium to maintained at a first-tier standard, which means that the stadium must be among the top quarter of all NFL football facilities. This contract was basically set up to be broken because newer and nicer stadiums were being built, and renovations for the Dome were expensive so they were often turned down by the taxpayers of the area. The contract/lease was for only 10 years at a time so after the contract was up, the Rams decided to move to a yearly contract. Since the Dome consistently had not been part of the top quarter facilities, it was easier for them to get the league’s approval to move back to Los Angeles.
The Rams Wanted to Leave St. Louis
The Rams listed many reasons (they went as far as to write a twenty-nine page statement of reasons) as to why they wanted to leave St. Louis. Stan Kroenke, the full owner of the Rams since 2010 and partial owner since 1995, did not want to keep the NFL team in St. Louis. He had repeatedly made sure the team was subpar in the seasons leading up to the relocation. Kroenke had been wanting to build a sports stadium complex in Inglewood, California, a suburb outside of Los Angeles, for years as he believed the stadium would have better revenue opportunities. Then with the new stadium proposals in St. Louis, he criticized how they would have shifted some financial responsibilities to the Rams and increase their rent (Rosenbaum). Kroenke basically contradicts himself by saying that it made no sense for them to stay in St. Louis with the new stadium proposal because financial responsibility would be shifted to the NFL and the Rams, even though he is pouring millions of dollars into a sports complex in California.
The Rams leaving has affected the area greatly. The Dome at America’s Center often sits as an empty eyesore, whereas when the team was there, it was an eyesore with a purpose. The Rams gave jobs to many, whether they were the people that walk around the seats selling beer and snacks, the vendors at the food stands, the people who check the bags of the attendees, the ones that direct guests to their seats or to the nearest bathroom, or the janitors that would clean up the mess after each game. The bars and restaurants around the stadium suffered from the loss of the Rams as well since there is not as much foot traffic as there was before. Some businesses even shuttered, causing even more job loss in the area.
How the Dome Affects the Area
The Dome affected, and continues to affect the area economically with the loss of jobs and that St. Louis taxpayers are still paying for the Dome. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon wanted to cut 816 jobs to help lessen the amount of debt the Dome has caused. And in 2010 he cut 250 additional government jobs on top of the 1000 jobs legislators already cut.
Even though the Dome is sitting empty unless someone books it for a concert, convention, or conference (at least until the Battlehawks start playing), the stadium continues to be one of the largest expenses for St. Louis taxpayers, and they continue to lose money. At the moment, the taxpayers of the city and county of St. Louis as well as the state of Missouri, still owe more than one hundred million dollars on the Dome. Compare this to the Californian taxpayers that are basically paying nothing for the complex because Stan Kroenke, and the private lender Social Finance, also known as SoFi, are pouring millions of dollars into the new football complex that is being built for the Rams in Inglewood. This just furthers the fact that Stan Kroenke never wanted to keep St. Louis’ beloved football team in the area because he was depending on the money from taxpayers in St. Louis to renovate or potentially build a new stadium to fit his needs, while he is actively choosing to pour millions of his own dollars into a stadium in California proves that he never wanted to keep or even entertained the thought of keeping the Rams in St. Louis. If he actually wanted to keep the Rams in St. Louis, he would have paid for the renovations and/or new stadium (and would have been paying for the stadium) himself.
The Wasted Stadium Proposal
Additionally, the city and county of St. Louis, and the state of Missouri should have realized that Stan Kroenke never intended on keeping the team in St. Louis long before they poured millions of taxpayer dollars into stadium proposals. According to the David Hunn at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the “top billers, so far, are the stadium’s design and construction manager, John Loyd, at more than $190,000; Dome attorneys Blitz, Bardgett and Deutsch, at nearly $260,000; and architectural firm HOK, at more than $2.2 million.” Just to make the proposals for the stadium that Kroenke most likely never considered as an option was a waste of time and money. The millions of dollars used for the stadium proposals could have been used for bettering the area instead of it going to waste as a potential way to better the area.
Some have noted that the money spent on the new stadium will have to be backfilled in Dome authority accounts — to pay the debt and upkeep on the Dome itself.“At some point, we’re going to have to get some of this money back from the state,” said authority board Chairman Jim Shrewsbury.Still, the board has been careful in its spending, he said, and the expenses are necessary to keep the NFL in St. Louis. They thought that they would actually get money from the state to cover the cost of the proposal and that what was spent would be enough to keep the Rams/NFL in St. Louis. Realizing that Kroenke never wanted to keep the team in St. Louis would have saved the city millions of dollars.
What’s Next for the Dome?
The Dome has been empty for three years following the departure of the Rams. There were many questions of what would happen to the stadium since there was no team to satisfy the Dome’s main purpose. There have been concerts, such as Beyonce’s Formation Tour in 2016, Guns N’ Roses in 2017, Taylor Swift’s Reputation Tour in 2018, and the Garth Brooks concert in 2019, but they are not anywhere close to the amount of money that the Rams brought in (even though they were consistently 1.2 million dollars under the amount they were supposed to bring in).
In 2018 news broke that an XFL team, the Battlehawks, would be located in St. Louis. The Battlehawks are one of the eight XFL teams in the league. The team is going to start playing the stadium in the 2020 season since they could not play at the stadium in the 2019 season due to dates not being available to use the stadium. The Battlehawks most likely will not be bringing in nearly as much money to the area as the Rams were able to, but some money is better than no money.
All of these points have lead to answering the question of why the Rams leaving St. Louis matters, and how the Dome at America’s Center has caused financial disparity for the area since it broke ground downtown in 1992.
Sources
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Miller, Phillip A. “The Economic Impact of Sports Stadium Construction: The Case of the Construction Industry in St. Louis, MO.” Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 24, no. 2, Apr. 2002, p. 159. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/1467–9906.00120.
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