Columnist Dean Juipe: Stadium idea remains a bad one

Dean Juipe

Monday, July 9, 2001 | 9:47 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

A bad idea repackaged remains a bad idea.

Hence, the notion of a baseball stadium as the centerpiece of a downtown Las Vegas redevelopment plan is just as absurd today as it was when the proposal surfaced without anyone saluting it earlier this year.

We're talking public money here, money from the tax rolls. Yet the public doesn't want or need a new baseball stadium, and building one on the pretense that it can someday be expanded to house a major league team is the height of naivete.

Las Vegas is not going to attract a Major League Baseball team this decade, nor, perhaps, any other.

A National Hockey League team, maybe. A National Basketball Association team, maybe. A National Football League team, we can only hope.

But baseball -- with its lengthy 81-game home schedule -- is out of the question in a city rich with diversions. The team wouldn't be supported and no one in their right mind would even consider lending a red cent to the project.

Yet it's a baseball stadium, as opposed to an all-purpose arena that could accommodate basketball or hockey, that's currently on the docket in front of the city council and mayor. And that's because the owners of the minor-league Las Vegas 51s have worked behind the scenes to position themselves in the city's redevelopment plans.

As was rather clandestinely determined last Thursday, a firm called Southwest Sports Group has the inside track in developing the 61 downtown acres that sometimes monopolize mayor Oscar Goodman's thoughts. And within the Southwest Sports Group framework is Mandalay Sports, which owns the 51s.

Goodman has said he opposes building a baseball stadium with public money, yet that stadium on the drawing board has public money written all over it.

The mayor -- who is batting 1.000 with many of his constituents -- may be facing a personal crisis of sorts as he ponders the Southwest Sports Group proposal. On the one hand, he's desperate to do something with that 61-acre parcel -- as if it affects his legacy -- and right now the only proposal in front of him features this useless baseball stadium. Does he give in on his no-public-money edict for a baseball stadium simply to get something going down there, or does he stick to his guns and toss the Southwest Sports proposal aside as a matter of principle?

Those of us who see the baseball stadium as benefitting Mandalay Sports and Mandalay Sports alone can only lean on Goodman to vote with his conscience. Doing nothing with the land is better than the deal that's presently on the table.

If anything sports related and publicly financed should go downtown, it's an arena. With Cashman Field still looking good and very much serviceable, there just isn't a need for a shiny new ball park that will do nothing but add to the holdings of the few already wealthy men who comprise Mandalay Sports.

We know you want to do something constructive downtown, mayor, and it's an honorable goal. But don't be rash, or hoodwinked or misled.

Insist that Mandalay Sports build its own stadium, on its own land, if it is so inclined.

Your batting average depends on it.