Senate leader Phil Berger on Thursday raised the possibility that the General Assembly’s budget proposal could include a provision intended to boost Raleigh’s chances at landing a Major League Baseball expansion team.
“If there’s an opportunity for North Carolina to get an expansion baseball team, I’d love to see that. I’m hopeful that we’ll have an ability to put forward something sooner rather than later that will give us that opportunity,” said Berger, R-Rockingham.
Berger’s remarks came a day after he and Speaker of the House Destin Hall met twice to discuss outstanding issues around North Carolina’s state budget.
Asked if the budget will include support for a stadium for a potential Major League Baseball franchise, Berger said, “I don’t know.”
Supporting a baseball team in the state budget doesn’t necessarily mean putting state money behind a stadium project, Berger said. It could mean giving local governments the authority to raise taxes to support such a project. And Berger added that an entity akin to the Centennial Authority, which oversees the Carolina Hurricanes’ Lenovo Center, will likely be necessary for any potential baseball stadium.
“I’d be interested in seeing what steps we would need to take in order to facilitate putting North Carolina in the best position to be successful in having an owner’s group,” Berger said.
Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, voiced his support for Raleigh’s MLB expansion case during a Charlotte trip on Wednesday, pointing to the metro area’s growth and the Triangle’s status as the country’s 22nd-largest media market.
“We’re eager for this opportunity to be considered, and we’ll do all we can to support it,” Stein said.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has long targeted adding two teams to Major League Baseball before his term ends in 2029.
Tom Dundon, the owner of the Stanley Cup champion Hurricanes and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, has expressed an interest in bringing Major League Baseball to the area. And Marc Lasry, a billionaire co-owner of the National Women’s Soccer League’s NC Courage, recently told WRAL that he’s also interested in backing the effort to bring baseball to Raleigh.
Public financing for a stadium project is likely a necessity to land an expansion team, Berger said Thursday.
“My understanding is that most of the professional leagues discourage interest in localities that basically say, ‘We’ll take it but only if the stadium is paid for by owners.’ … My understanding is that’s just not the world we currently live in,” Berger said.
A 2017 essay from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said that 83% of economists surveyed agreed that publicly funding stadiums ends up costing taxpayers more than the economic benefits from the projects. A key reason for that, the essay said, is the opportunity costs associated with spending on stadium projects, or the projects that the government funding such an effort could have done instead.
Berger noted that North Carolina is the largest state that doesn’t have a Major League Baseball team. And he pointed to the state’s rapid growth and its support for the Carolina Hurricanes as reasons why it is worth consideration from MLB.
“If someone had told you 20 years ago that a professional hockey team drew the kind of response that we’ve seen not just in Raleigh and not just in Wake County but across the state of North Carolina, you wouldn’t have believed it,” Berger said, referencing support for the Hurricanes’ run to the Stanley Cup.
