Owners of the Asheville Tourists baseball team insist McCormick Field needs $30 million in renovations. If Asheville and Buncombe County leaders don’t agree to carry most of that cost, the team is threatening to leave Asheville. Our guests today say that’s an age-old play: Owners of pro sports teams leveraging cash-strapped cities for new or improved stadiums.

Today's guests have studied this issue on a local and national level: Justin McGuire is a reporter for Mountain Xpress; Jonathan Brown is an economics professor at UNC-Asheville; and John Mozena is a Michigan-based writer and president of the nonprofit Center for Economic Accountability. The Asheville Tourists didn’t respond to an emailed request to speak with someone from their ownership group for this episode. 

You’ll hear about the history of this team’s requests for stadium renovations, the economics of public funding vs. the financial return to cities and how nostalgia, politics and other factors you can’t find on a ledger play into these decisions.

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