Stadiums don't help

Public funding of stadiums irks many people who aren't sports fans.

What frosts me is when it is painted as economic stimulus.

Study after study of the economic impact of sports stadiums has shown them to be poor uses of public funds. Rick Eckstein, a Villanova University sociology professor who's written extensively about the phenomenon for more than a decade, has yet to find any such project that has revitalized an area.

But still stadiums are sold that way. Look at the New Jersey Devils arena in Newark, and the New Jersey Nets arena in Brooklyn.

Even if you assume that it's important to the image of a city to remain a four-sport city (football, baseball, basketball, hockey) and that somehow justifies spending what it takes to keep it so, how does that explain public funding for soccer?

Last week, Gov. Rendell went to Chester and committed the state to providing $25 million to a planned $115 million soccer stadium. The news brought applause from those attending the announcement.

But it should have brought more questions:

Why can't the investors backing the bid for a Major League Soccer expansion team finance the entire deal on their own? By all accounts, the investors, led by Swarthmore Group's James Nevels and iStar Financial Inc.'s Jay Sugarman, have raised more money than St. Louis and Miami, their rivals in this chase for an expansion team.

Is it worth $30 million to Delaware County taxpayers to oversee an 18,500-seat professional soccer stadium?

Do drivers who use the bridges that span the Delaware River mind that part of their $3 toll may pay for a stadium?

At $65 million, the Chester soccer stadium sounds like a bargain compared with the $400 million taxpayers in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania contributed to build Lincoln Financial Field and Citizens Bank Park.

But a stadium sits quietly for many more days than it is used, and it's hard to visualize an empty building propelling Chester forward. It's had plenty of those

for years.

Big donor

   A reader points out in response to yesterday's column that former Ace Ltd. CEO Brian Duperreault pledged $10 million to St. Joseph's University in early 2006. The money was donated to help fund the purchase of Episcopal Academy's Merion campus. And it was one of the largest gifts in St. Joseph's history. (The other was $10 million by James J. Maguire, another insurance-industry executive, in 2005.) Duperreault is a former St. Joe's trustee and alum, having graduated in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

Taking on debt

   Comcast Corp. boosted the size of its bank credit line to $7 billion from $5 billion, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Philadelphia cable television and Internet services provider said it had no balance on that credit line as of Jan. 30.

Is this a case of raising debt when you can, or preparing for some sort of deal? Comcast is rumored to be a player any time a big media property is up for sale. After all, it is the nation's biggest cable firm.

Quotable

   "Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?"

- David Drummond, general counsel of Google Inc., on the Internet search giant's blog about Microsoft's unsolicited bid for Yahoo.