Of the many great, possibly apocryphal, stories told by and about Yogi Berra — the baseball Hall of Famer and long-lived font of gnomic wit and wisdom who died in September — there is one from his school days. A self-described “lousy student,” Berra was once admonished by a teacher who, in her frustration, finally asked, “Don’t you know anything?”
“Ma’am,” the young Yogi is said to have replied, in all earnestness, “I don’t even suspect anything.”
That’s the way it feels around here sometimes, if you’re trying to keep up with the machinations and deliberations and actions of the people and groups who make decisions about the expenditure of public dollars in Birmingham.
Besides elected officials, this includes members of various quasi-autonomous boards and agencies that are funded by tax dollars and charged with operating for the public benefit. The fiscal magnitude of this latter group is tremendous. The Birmingham Water Works, the Birmingham International Airport Authority, the Birmingham Housing Authority, the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority, the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex.
That’s a lot of public money. Your tax dollars and mine. And it’s being spent with as little transparency as those organizations can get away with.
That’s quite a bit these days, what with fewer people watching. The loss of a daily newspaper has had, and will continue to have, tragic consequences for our community. Weld and other independent media outlets in the region stretch resources to the maximum — including through strategic partnerships and other collaborative efforts — to provide news, analysis and commentary that promotes an informed citizenry by engaging readers on a broad variety of topics and issues. But the daily void cannot be filled completely.
One of the places that void is felt most acutely is in news coverage of our quasi-public boards and agencies. Even if you proceed from the assumption that these organizations are spending each and every one of our tax dollars in the service of the public good, there is an incalculable value in the sense of accountability that comes from the concentrated attention that only a daily newspaper can provide — and in the role of public watchdog that is — still, I believe — implicit in the journalistic enterprise.
In the absence of a daily, that’s a lot of ground to cover. Which brings me back to the feeling that I have occasionally, the feeling that, like the esteemed Mr. Berra, I don’t really know anything.
Unlike Yogi, I do have some suspicions. But that’s beside the point here, which is the sheer difficulty, even in the most salutary of circumstances, of staying up to speed on matters that routinely involve the commitment of tens of millions, and even hundreds of millions, of dollars. Again — because this absolutely cannot be stressed often or emphatically enough — those are your tax dollars and mine.
All of this is on my mind because of two conversations I had last week, roughly 48 hours apart. Independently of one another, two people I know and (generally) trust told me they had heard rumors of a major announcement about the multi-purpose facility — known colloquially as a domed stadium — that has long been planned as an expansion of the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex.
According to one, the announcement could come as soon as the end of the week of October 5, and would involve retail and possibly residential components in addition to plans for construction of the dome. The other offered fewer details, but said there had been “a good deal of movement” in discussions between Birmingham city officials and the BJCC board of directors on moving forward with the project.
Knowing nothing, I asked Elaine Witt, the BJCC’s communications and public relations manager, whether an announcement is imminent. Witt told me that the BJCC deals with rumors of an imminent announcement on a regular basis, and that she was not aware of any immediate plans. Later, she emailed the following statement from BJCC executive director and CEO Tad Snider:
“The Board of Directors of the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center Authority as a strategic planning matter periodically evaluates potential expansion options for the BJCC, but we have nothing to share at this time related to a multi-purpose facility. Potential expansion remains part of the Authority’s strategic plan and remains a topic of discussion.”
In other words, I still don’t know anything. Which of course was Mr. Snider’s intent, and bravo to him on a job well done.
Actually, it’s not entirely true to say at this point that I don’t know at all. I know at least one thing, which is this: The only thing holding up the show on construction of the dome is money. Whether you like it or agree with the project’s proponents in terms of presumed economic benefits — I, for one, do not — construction already would be well underway if a workable means of financing the facility had been agreed upon by the city, the BJCC board and key partners in the private sector.
The problem is the city can’t pay for it. The “dome tax” enacted under then-Mayor Larry Langford was collected for roughly the past eight years — but has been used to plug holes in the city’s budget.
Meanwhile, the city paid for the construction of Regions Field. The new ballpark and its location across from Railroad Park lured the Birmingham Barons “home” to downtown Birmingham after 25 years in suburban Hoover; but more than $4 million in cost overruns on the ballpark went unpaid under threat of litigation from several construction contractors.
So how does the dome get built? Even absent any confirmation on a pending announcement, one of the people I spoke with insisted that the past several weeks have been productive in “moving the conversation forward.”
“The conversation is not, Should we do it?” this person said. “They’re sold on the need for more and better event space, the economic benefits of it. So it’s really, How do we do it?
“Everybody knows there has to be a solid public-private partnership to make it happen. The city can’t afford to do it alone, so the commitment from the private side has to be substantial. Everybody knows that, so the discussion now is about how to structure the financing.”
And there you have it. And isn’t it good to learn that there is something that everybody knows?
Except that everybody doesn’t. In terms of public scrutiny and reasoned discourse about the feasibility and economic impacts of a multi-purpose facility versus other alternatives for such a major commitment of public resources, the dome project has received about as much as the Manhattan Project.
For dome proponents, the relative levels of public and private commitments, as well as the proposed means of planning for ancillary development and working with existing neighborhoods to maximize positive impacts of the project, should be critical selling points to a rightfully skeptical public. Instead, it’s going to be delivered to us like the Tablets from Mount Sinai, the way it is and the way it’s going to be whether we like it or not. And really, what could be more Birmingham than that?
Reading back over all of this as my deadline for this week’s paper looms ever larger, it strikes me as being all over the place, not unlike a batter with a penchant for swinging at pitches outside the strike zone. On the other hand, there are batters who are quite talented at connecting with “bad” pitches and depositing them to points all over the ballpark, so my hope is that all of the swinging you’ve endured if you’re still with me at this point has produced a couple of solid moments of pure engagement for you.
With that, I’ll close with another strangely relevant story of Yogi Berra, who happens to have been one of those guys who collected hits off pitches that most other guys looked bad even swinging at. On one occasion, though, facing a rookie pitcher whose stuff he’d never seen before, Berra struck out swinging on three pitches, none of which had been anywhere near the strike zone. He trudged back to the dugout, took his seat and spoke.
“That guy will never make it in the big leagues,” Yogi said with disdain. “He’s way too wild.”