At George Mason University, the whiners won.
I’ve written and podcasted about why subsidies for stadiums don’t make sense. Voters in the Kansas City area wisely rejected a proposal to raise their county sales tax to subsidize stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs.
It doesn’t make sense to give taxpayer money to rich people to build or renovate stadiums that won’t create economic growth. But if the rich people are going to pay the entire cost of construction and let you use it for your own sports too, don’t let whiners kill the project.
That’s unfortunately what George Mason University appears to have done in regards to a proposed cricket/baseball stadium on its campus.
This is personal for me because I graduated from George Mason, still live in Fairfax, Va., where the university is located, and am a baseball and cricket fan. I was excited about this stadium because they were going about it the right way.
Major League Cricket (MLC) played its first season last year. (You can read my account of the championship game for NR here.) It’s a league of six franchises that play a season of less than three weeks. They play T20 cricket, a shortened form of cricket that lasts about three hours.
One of the top investors in the league is Sanjay Govil, an Indian-American businessman. He started Infinite Computer Solutions in 2001 in Washington, D.C., with his life savings of $1,000 and turned it into a billion-dollar company. He’s now the owner of the Washington Freedom, one of the six MLC franchises.
MLC played its whole inaugural season in Texas and North Carolina, since there aren’t enough facilities in the U.S. capable of hosting top-level cricket. MLC wants to build more stadiums so its franchises can play in their home cities. But obviously there are some challenges that come with building a new stadium for a very short season in a sport most Americans don’t follow.
GMU presented a unique opportunity because it is located in the Washington metropolitan area and is looking to redevelop its athletic facilities. In November 2022, the university announced it was partnering with Govil to build a new cricket/baseball stadium.
The GMU baseball team has become more successful in recent years, winning the Atlantic 10 conference title in 2023 under new head coach and former Toronto Blue Jay Shawn Camp. But it plays on a glorified high-school baseball field (again, I say this as a fan).
Aside from providing a better fan experience, a newer facility would also help the school when recruiting athletes. This has been a concern of the GMU athletic department in several sports in recent years, and competitor schools often have better facilities. Raising money from donors is often difficult because GMU has been a full university since only 1972, so the alumni network doesn’t have generations of wealth.
Govil wanted a cricket stadium, and GMU wanted a baseball stadium. Govil has a ton of money, and GMU has land. There’s an obvious opportunity to collaborate here.
Govil was going to pay the entire cost of construction for the new facility, which is the decent thing for someone of his wealth to do, rather than shaking down taxpayers. The new stadium would be the home field of the Washington Freedom (for the brief MLC season) and the GMU baseball team (for the longer NCAA season).
The stadium was going to occupy an area of campus that is currently occupied by fields and parking lots, separate from the main part of campus where academic and residential buildings are located. GMU would still own the land, and the university was negotiating a lease agreement with the Washington Freedom.
But then earlier this year, a group of people started putting up signs on the other side of the road from the proposed site opposing the “mega stadium” the university wanted to build. (Proposed seating capacity was 10,000 — that is not a “mega stadium.”) They made a website to list their complaints. They started showing up at public meetings and whining. They contacted their local politicians to whine some more.
They whined about traffic and light pollution. Fairfax County has over 1 million residents, and GMU has the largest student body of any public university in Virginia. If you’re not a fan of the consequences of living in a highly populated area, Fairfax might not be for you.
They whined about the need for more process, as though announcing a project in 2022 for scheduled completion in 2025 isn’t enough of a heads-up. It’s not like the project has been a secret until recently. I know because I mentioned the project in a Corner post in December 2022. Tyler Cowen also noted it at Marginal Revolution. You could read about it in Virginia’s paper of record, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that same month. Northern Virginia local news covered it too. There was even a story about it on the Indian website Cricbuzz in January 2023. See this presentation from the university in April 2023 explaining how the project fulfils the university’s strategic goals and long-term plan for that portion of campus.
The group of whiners was well-versed in the progressive jargon with which universities communicate, writing in a February 7 letter to GMU, “The creation of a commercial zone that benefits some and punishes others on state supported property is an egregious abuse of positional power.” Never mind that Fairfax County has the fifth-highest median household income of any county in the country — these people are being repressed.
One person who said he lives near the proposed site basically said he just doesn’t like cricket. “We would love a baseball field,” said Geoff Keller, quoted by Washington’s NBC affiliate. “We would lead the effort to get a baseball field. This is a cricket stadium with 10,000 fans that have no ties to the school and no ties to the state of Virginia, even.” The thousands of South Asian GMU students and residents of Fairfax County, many of whom are cricket fans, definitely have ties to the school and to the state of Virginia.
The university tried to placate the whiners with a virtual town hall in January and an open letter in February. A statement on March 1 said, “We hear and respect your questions and concerns about the timing of the project and whether neighbors will have the opportunity to be heard up front.”
Then, on March 28, GMU announced it was canceling the project. The statement said, “We have concluded that this opportunity does not meet the strategic objectives and interests of our campus and community and the Washington Freedom,” even though, as previously explained, it clearly would be beneficial for both sides.
This episode is an illustration of the worst aspects of local government and “activism,” where a small group of people with sympathetic-sounding but hardly sensible concerns has an outsized voice. A professional sports team was going to pay for its own stadium for once, and it was going to upgrade a university’s athletic facilities in the process. But the whiners won.