An XL Waste of Money

By State Senator Joe Markley

The Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) is one of those buried line item money pits the Democrats use to deliver pork to the cities that empower them.

Specifically, the CRDA oversees “economic development” in the area surrounding the State Capitol in Hartford. Economic development in Connecticut generally means throwing taxpayer money at big construction projects awarded to well-connected, unionized companies.

Take the XL Center. It was conceived, financed, built, bailed out, and repeatedly rehabilitated and rebooted by the state without for a moment in its forty-year history turning a profit. In 2014 alone, it operated at a $3.8 million loss.

Now CRDA has decided that the center needs a $250 million renovation and expansion, complete with massive glass windows and additional seats for the crowds that don’t come. The executive director of CRDA said, “The objective is to make this building a new building. It has to look, feel and smell new.”

They might change the appearance, the name, and even the odor, but no one can change the fact that there’s never been a need for this hulking event facility in the middle of Hartford. It was a mistake from the start, and every dollar spent on it has been wasted. The original construction cost in the early 1970s was $30 million. An additional $250 million spent on it now would be an extreme case of throwing good money after bad.

In 1978, the roof famously collapsed during a snowstorm—a tragedy narrowly avoided (thousands had been there for a hockey game earlier that evening) and an unheeded omen of future failure. Just five years ago, the taxpayers bought a new scoreboard and state of the art sound system to entertain all the empty seats. And most recently, the legislature appropriated $35 million for locker rooms, a high definition video board, and (ironically) a long term study of the viability of the center.

That study came back with three possibilities: tear down the current civic center and build a new one; expand the arena and rebuild the interior; or entirely rehabilitate the existing structure. The price tag for these options starts at $250 million.

What’s not considered is getting government out of the civic center business. Any private sector investor would have pulled the plug long ago, but since CRDA is spending state (which is to say, our) money, sustainability is no object.

It goes without saying that the $250 million expansion should be cancelled. Instead, the city of Hartford should find a private-sector buyer for the property, who will put it to a use sustainable in the marketplace. Then we should learn a lesson from this monument to government waste and ineptitude, and stop using state funds for projects which real-world investors are too savvy to back.

Public-private business partnerships demand special scrutiny, since the best projects usually go to companies, individuals, and unions that have influence thanks to campaign donations and personal relations.

The XL Center expansion project is being farmed out to Comcast Spectator. The principal there is Ed Snider, a major donor to the Connecticut Democratic Party. Is that a coincidence? Probably not—and probably not a crime either. It’s just the way things work when politicians have the power to invest money in private projects.

Even if the motives were honest, the decisions have been bad. The XL Center was one of the big public projects undertaken to revitalize Hartford in the sixties and seventies, along with Constitution Plaza and Bushnell Plaza. All three look like dismal failures now, above all in their insensitivity to urban life and human scale.

The plazas themselves, conceived as a type of town square and communal center, are inhospitable and abandoned: baked in the summer, wind-swept in the winter, never appealing. Rather than attracting people to the stores, offices, and dwelling around them, they have created dead zones that stifle the very bustle which makes city life appealing. “We shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill said, “and our buildings shape us.” The sheer inhuman ugliness of big government projects has drained vitality from our cities.

Only government has the power and resources to err on such a scale—to demolish neighborhood blocks created over decades and replace them with brutal, inhuman concrete. The next generation of urban planners easily perceives the mistakes of the past, but lacks the wisdom to be modest in its own undertakings, and plunges ahead with new misconceptions.

Rather than expand a system which puts taxpayers on the hook for entertainment venues and other ill-considered urban projects, government should focus on its protecting free enterprise and allowing the reemergence of an actual market economy. It’s the cleanest, fairest, and cheapest government activity, and it’s the only way to rebuild our suffering cities.