Imagine for a minute you are a renter. You live in a pretty old place, archaic by modern standards. Your place doesn’t have any of the modern amenities other people in your situation enjoy at their rentals. You don’t have cable wired into the place, there aren’t enough outlets, no garage to park in, no air conditioning. You’d like to have all of those things, but you know your landlord isn’t going to pay for it.
So you make a financially foolish decision: You are just going to spruce the place up yourself. You spend a ton of money on rewiring, adding coax cable service so you can get some internet. You put on a nice deck so you can sit outside in the early evening and enjoy a drink. You recarpet the place, maybe even add some laminate flooring that looks like hardwood. You tack on a garage to keep your car out of the snow and frost. With enough work (and spending) you’ve got the place looking pretty sharp.
Then your landlord stops by one day and sees all of the improvements you’ve made to his place and he says: “Wow. This is so nice, you should start paying a lot more in rent.” You try to argue that you sank a lot of money to make his property much nicer, and you deserve some financial credit for that–to which he replies “I never asked you to do that. You did it on your own.” No doubt, you would be pretty upset and frustrated. Now you understand why the Green Bay Packers this week went public with their displeasure in the way the city of Green Bay is handling lease extension negotiations for Lambeau Field.
If you missed all of the stories we had here on WHBY and on the Green Bay television stations, the franchise claims that Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich has told them flat out that no negotiations will take place unless the team agrees to pay more in rent. The Packers went further in throwing Genrich under the bus by claiming the Mayor also demanded that the city provide the medical services at Lambeau, that the Green Bay/Brown County Stadium District Board be disbanded so Genrich would have unadulterated control of the stadium, and that the Mayor wants the Packers to prime more economic development within the Green Bay city limits.
There is a lot to unpack there, but let’s start with another fact provided by the Packers: The city of Green Bay has provided a little more than $300,000 in financial support for Lambeau Field SINCE IT WAS BUILT IN 1957! Remember, the Packers went to the voters of Brown County to enact the half-percent sales tax to fund the first round of improvements to the stadium. Green Bay itself didn’t pay a penny. That tax also created a maintenance fund to make the routine repairs and replacements at Lambeau, again, so the city didn’t have to on a building it owns. And all of the subsequent improvements to the stadium, the atrium and the parking lot over the years have come out of the Packers’ pockets–not the city’s.
The Packers pay $1.2-million dollars a year in rent for Lambeau Field. There is a small escalator clause in that of about 2.5% a year–which the Packers want to direct to a new maintenance fund to replace the last of the sales tax dollars it got years ago. The city counters that it will “lose money” if that happens–yet it does not offer in any way to cover repair and maintenance costs, again, on a building it owns.
What likely sticks in Mayor Genrich’s craw the most is that the TitleTown District–all of the residential and commercial development that stretches from the westside of the stadium to Interstate 41 on land the Packers have bought up in the last couple of decades all sits in the village of Ashwaubenon. Many people assume that everything around Lambeau is in Green Bay–but if you check the map, you will see that the city limits actually cut out around just the property on which Lambeau sits on the southside of Lombardi Avenue. So everything else on that side of the road provides property tax benefits for Ashwaubenon and not Green Bay.
Undoubtedly, Mayor Genrich wants more of that money to flow into his City Hall and his budget. To borrow a line from The Godfather II “I just want to wet my beak”. But there is one problem, the area north of Lombardi is mostly residential neighborhood (not counting the Party Houses–which are like ghost buildings that come to life just 10-times a year). There is a developer looking to put up a high-rise residential complex at Lombardi and Ridge–but the Packers are not involved in that project. The most likely demand the Mayor is making from the team would be to buy more land north of Lombardi and west of Ridge Road and work the same magic they did on the southside–or to sink cash into developments somewhere else in the city–like downtown or Broadway District. All of that in addition to paying more to their do-nothing landlord.
And then there is the issue of the Stadium District Board. It exists to oversee the use of the remaining funds generated by the original half-percent sales tax. While he denies the Packers’ assertion, Mayor Genrich most likely sees dissolution of the board as a way to gain greater control over operations at Lambeau. Recently, the city claimed that the Packers could not sell the yellow railings that circle the bottom of the seating bowl pointing out that it is “city property”. Please refer to the above note that it was the Packers paying to replace that railing–which the city had effectively condemned due to its deteriorating condition. So in effect, the Mayor was saying “You need to get rid of that–on your own dime–and we are selling off the old stuff without sharing the money.”
Because the Packers do not have an individual owner, there options in this battle with the city and the Mayor is severely hamstrung. They cannot use the threats so many other team owners have used to get public financing for stadium improvements. Their charter prevents them from up and moving in the middle of the night like the original Baltimore Colts or the Oakland Raiders (twice). Even claiming that a suburb has offered a huge financial incentive to build a top-of-the line new stadium won’t work in Green Bay like the Minnesota Vikings did–and the Chicago Bears are trying to do. And besides, Packers fans themselves would likely rise up in opposition to anything other than sitting on their cold aluminum benches in the bitter cold of December because that is all of part of the “Lambeau Mystique”.
And that is likely why the team blinked and made another lease offer late this week that includes the requested rent increase. The do-nothing landlord will likely win again–and Government will will likely get to suckle at the teat of the cash cow that it did little to create.
