SO this is what it's like to be "major league" ...

Revised-----------

Wow, this baseball thing certainly is "a mess."

Both Steven Pearlstein, the Post business columnist, and Tom Boswell, one of the many good Post sports columnists, have excellent columns today about MLB and the Lerners sending a notice of deficiency to the District of Columbia.

Last night I was in a Main Street committee meeting which was one of the worst community type meetings I've ever attended (I think it's the second worst ever), because of neighborhood in-fighting and deliberate obstructiveness on the part of some of the participants. I almost walked out at least twice.

Now, I love "Main Street," and I know a lot about it and commercial district revitalization, but I was thinking about the person who went on and on about his credentials and lifelong association with the neighborhood* iin a very argumentative way, deliberately designed to discredit and dismiss anyone who didn't have these same exact credentials, who runs a neighborhood business association, and I couldn't help but think "this is how you build partnerships?, this is how you get people who know things to help you?, you think I'm going to join your association?" I could write more but the experience is still distasteful.
__________
* 1. If you talk in meetings about DDOT streetscape improvements about the need for more police and federal funding priorities supporting the war in Iraq, you're wasting everyone's time and your own credibility. DDOT doesn't care about the war in Iraq, and they don't fund the MPD. They deal with streets, public space, transit, and other mobility issues. What member of a business association wants to be associated with this kind of "leadership" and representation?

2. Having credentials and "experience" means nothing if you don't listen and refuse to learn. This is but another example of what I call the tyranny of neighborhood parochialism. Another place where this virus runs rampant is Columbia Heights. Will the level of discourse and leadership ever improve in neighborhoods such as this? Having a couple years of experience repeated 15 times ≠ 30 years of experience. It indicates a person 28 years behind the times.

3. As Donald Shoup says, it's best to help people who are already helping themselves. Because of the "overhead" of having to deal with b.s., eventually the City Government will move on and not bother trying to develop programs to improve your neighborhood. The infighting isn't worth it. It's easier to go where you're wanted.

(cf. Anacostia and streetcars; cf. a successful grant proposal I wrote in 2001 for a public art project in the H Street neighborhood which hasn't been executed still, because of an obstreprous ANC commissioner. Now she's not even on the ANC, but the moment to execute the award seems to have passed. The neighborhood suffers...)
_____________
This is one of many examples in the city that I see of a kind of sickness, a debilitating disease, that like the problems with schools and public safety, requires a culture change, a big one.

It's why I have come to believe that where I once saw one of the main problems in our neighborhoods as being a dearth of willing volunteers (a "capacity and community building deficit"), but backward-looking "leadership" that is in need of far more than a mere "buffing up" (a "leadership deficit").

What busy person wants to deal with such b.s.?

Note to Major League Baseball and the Washington Nationals Baseball Club: It's the same principle at work here.

Why would a citizen of the District of Columbia, knowing that the city, with interest charges, is committing $1 billion for a bunch of rich people (the Lerners and the other members of their investment group, baseball players, team executives, other MLB teams) to get even more wealthy, want to go to a Washington Nationals baseball game when the owners are such a*******?

Why would someone want to walk into and/or otherwise patronize any building or shopping center that the same a******* own?

$1 billion isn't enough?

From Steven Pearlstein's column, "Less Hardball, More Humility":

This legalistic, hard-nosed approach obviously has worked well for the Lerner family in building its successful real estate empire, which mostly involves dealing with national retail chains, giant construction companies and major financial institutions.

But as the Lerners are now discovering, it is ill-suited to dealing with the public sector, where power is diffuse; lines of responsibility are unclear; and officials are required to pursue multiple, sometimes conflicting, policy goals.

At the same time, city officials are only slowly coming to the realization that they have taken on too much too fast, trying to finance and manage a difficult stadium project while at the same time launching a massive revitalization effort in the surrounding neighborhoods. ...

[T]he Lerners might also want to put a muzzle on the new team president, Stan Kasten, whose long experience with the Atlanta Braves has apparently convinced him that he knows a whole lot more about real estate, urban planning and public relations than he really does.

From Tom Boswell's column, "A Host of Problems at New-Look RFK":

Here's one version of the future which, if you put your ear to the ground, you can hear approaching like an elephant stampede.

First, developers, including the Lerners, will do what they do best: build 13-story multi-use profit centers that completely surround the new park, leaving few if any "vistas" for views of the Capitol or the Anacostia River. The next PNC Park? Forget it. The new ballpark will have all the sense-of-place of deluxe but disconnected Turner Field in Atlanta: Little or none.
Parking lots and cars surround Turner Field in Atlanta. Image from Ballparks.com.

Next, HOK will do what it does best: build a fine park that, to a degree, makes you forget that the equivalent of K Street is staring down at you from all directions outside the engulfed ballpark. Why do the new team owners always seem to emphasize the "fan experience inside the new park"? Perhaps because they already doubt that there'll be any exterior experience to sell. ...

Finally, the District government will do what it does best: minimize the chances of any best-case scenario while managing to avoid disaster with a series of narrow escapes. Instead of coordinating and compromising among various interests so that the new park is both aesthetically and economically successful, the District will muddle through and hope for the best.

We citizens of the District of Columbia deserve better.

From baseball.

From our own government.

If this is what it means to be "major league," count me out.

This is the kind of memory I have a baseball. Playing pickup games and the like.
Detroit News photo.

Maybe it makes more sense to get a "minor league" team. The stadium costs a lot less. The ticket prices are a lot lower. People with families can afford to go. It's "fun." And you don't think about how much people like The Lerners and Stan Kasten are reaching into your pocket and the coffers of the city government, every time you go to a game.

Northern Virginia gets the last laugh. Now I wish they would have "won" the team.

Some victory.

Index Keywords: stadiums-arenas