Site icon SD Rostra

Strategic Omission From Ballpark Story?

That’s what San Diego Reader biz blogger Don Bauder claims about today’s San Diego Union-Tribune article on a study about the downtown ballpark.

The study by the San Diego Economic Development Corp. said the city of San Diego was getting a far higher return on investment in the ballpark than originally estimated.

Through sales, property and hotel occupancy taxes, the city will receive a 7.6 percent return, far ahead of the 1.7 percent first projected by promoters, said the report, developed for the EDC by Conventions, Sports & Leisure International, a research and consulting firm in Texas.

But Bauder pointed out that one of the sources in the story praising the ballpark project, Mark Rosentraub, chair of sport management at the University of Michigan, was a consultant on the campaign to get the project approved. And the Union-Tribune article didn’t disclose this fact, Bauder said, charging that the paper he used to write for was “up to its old tricks.”

Moreover, Rosentraub’s consultant role was mentioned in previous Union-Tribune articles.

Bauder wrote:
Rosentraub calls the Petco project “a model of how you can use a stadium to rebuild an entire neighborhood.” The last time I talked with him, for a Reader column that ran Aug. 26 of last year, he was raving about all the buildings (condos, hotels) that have been built in the ballpark district. I told him those condos had very few residents and the hotels had very few guests. He had no response.

I’m sure Richard Rider will have more to say on this subject.

Exit mobile version