Many other cities reveal bidders for sports arenas

Thursday, June 28, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

In contrast to Las Vegas' move to select a company to build a sports arena without disclosing who is bidding on the project, other U.S. communities have publicly revealed the names of firms competing for the lucrative contracts before making their decision.

Las Vegas officials say a state law specifying that certain public project proposals "may not be disclosed until the bid is recommended for the award of a contract" requires them to keep the arena plans submitted by eight bidders secret.

If that closed process governs the local arena construction process, Las Vegas will be an exception to how other cities and counties have handled public disclosure on their sports facilities.

Like Las Vegas, St. Petersburg, Fla., built a facility before it had a team in the hope of luring a major-league franchise to the city - a high-stakes gamble that made the project an easy target for critics.

The St. Petersburg City Council, though, was forthright in revealing the names of the three construction manager applicants a month before awarding the 1987 contract for the Florida Suncoast Dome, which later become the home of Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The facility has been renamed Tropicana Field.

In the late 1990s, when Cincinnati decided to build new baseball and football stadiums for the Reds and Bengals, Hamilton County commissioners unveiled the half - dozen proposals submitted and held extensive public hearings on the projects before selecting design teams.

Las Vegas would not be the first city, though, to withhold information about companies bidding on a stadium or arena.

The most recent city to build a sports facility before landing a professional franchise is Kansas City, Mo., which has been courting the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association for its $276 million Sprint Center arena.

The arena, a public-private partnership set to open in October, has generated controversy on the public disclosure front. The Kansas City Star in September 2004 went to court in an effort to gain access to the city's interviews with two architectural teams competing for the downtown arena job. Although a judge rejected the newspaper's request, the Star later was able to publish the names of the two teams nearly five months before the contract was awarded.

The publicly funded Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis , home of baseball's Minnesota Twins, the NFL's Minnesota Vikings and the University of Minnesota football team, had an open bidding process conducted by the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, a seven-member panel appointed by the governor.

Dennis Alfton, the Metrodome's director of operations, said Wednesday that the names of the architects, construction managers and other contractors who competed for the project were revealed to the public before contracts were awarded.

The commission, though, did not take any public input while making its selections, Alfton said.

Even so, Alfton said making a sports facility decision-making process as open as possible makes sense because "stadiums and arenas are controversial in many communities in terms of public support."

"The public in general is sometimes leery of these issues," he said.

That would be an understatement in the case of the home of baseball's Chicago White Sox, who replaced their old Comiskey Park in 1991 with a new Comiskey Park , a stadium that has since been renamed U.S. Cellular Field.

The project had more than its share of negative story lines, including angry neighbors who opposed the new stadium, a team owner who threatened to move the White Sox to St. Petersburg and initial construction bids that exceeded estimates by at least $30 million.

But at least the Chicago media - and the public - had access to the names of interested bidders months before contracts were awarded.