Playing Ball at Dental Dam Park
Portland City Hall sells Portlanders out yet again
Must our city government destroy everything that makes Portland special?
This is no longer a rhetorical question. I’m honestly wondering what’s left.
At its meeting this past Monday, the Portland City Council voted to allow a minor-league soccer team to take over Fitzpatrick Stadium, home of the Portland Bulldogs for generations, and erase the public high school’s mascot from the city-owned facility. The popular running track there will also likely be gone in a couple years to accommodate the paid players, and the scheduling and frequent re-striping of the field will henceforth be done on the soccer team’s timeline, with student athletes grudgingly accommodated (or not), as has been the case at other city-owned sports facilities leased for much of the year to for-profit companies, like the Expo.
In typical fashion, Monday’s meeting was a shit show, with councilors and members of the public confounded by the details of the deal — details revealed shortly before the amended agreement was scheduled for a vote, then approved without further delay for clarification, over vociferous public objection, in order to accommodate the sports franchise’s preferred plan.
“We haven’t been really included or represented in any of these conversations,” Spencer Allen, the high school’s athletic director, told councilors at the meeting. “When the proposed amendment [to the deal] came out Friday, there was nothing in it that we talked about.”
Parents, students and alumni, who showed up en masse to oppose their city’s contract with the Hearts of Pine soccer club, got a hard lesson in Portland-style democracy. “This is a joke!” a frustrated attendee shouted from the gallery at one point. “I feel like I’m watching real-time destruction of trust in our democracy tonight,” said Frank Gallagher, an opponent of the deal who performs on the city’s streets and stages as the musician Plague Dad.
City Councilor Roberto Rodriguez, who joined three other councilors to rush approval of the amended agreement, said “even though the public would likely leave the meeting feeling unheard, he felt satisfied with the night’s discussion,” the Portland Press Herald reported. Of course he did. Having failed to discernibly improve this city one iota after nearly a decade on our school board and council, Rodriguez quit “public service” last winter and is just riding out his lame-duck term as an at-large councilor, so he doesn’t need any of these livid voters’ votes anymore.
This latest insult arrived the same day Portlanders took another bruising ball to the crotch with the corporate rebranding of Hadlock Field. Named in honor of legendary Portland High baseball coach and physics teacher Edson Hadlock Jr., the city-owned stadium is leased to the Portland Sea Dogs, the minor-league baseball team recently acquired by the private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners through its subsidiary, Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH).
As explained here last April, DBH begged, disingenuously threatened to leave, and was then duly handed a multi-million-dollar tax break from state lawmakers to upgrade the ballpark to new league standards — much the same way the soccer franchise is remaking “Fitzy,” as the old-timers call it, to satisfy the demands of its league administrators.
Hadlock’s new name, DBH announced Monday, is Dental Dam Park, a friendly reminder to fans to always practice safe oral sex.
Wait … damn AI autocorrect! Make that Delta Dental Park, which, as Bangor Daily News photojournalist Troy Bennett noted in a personal blog post, is also the name of the home field leased by the Sea Dogs’ closest rival, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats — a team also owned by DBH, which has snapped up over 30 minor-league baseball teams, over a quarter of the entire league, in a monopolistic, speculative-capital spending spree destined to destroy the pastime in our lifetimes.
Technically, the beautiful ballpark Portlanders collectively built, own and manage is now “Delta Dental Park at Hadlock Field,” the kind of crass corporate insertion that gave Kansas City unpronounceable GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium and turned our Cumberland County Civic Center into Cross Insurance Center — wait, that’s in Bangor; the Portland one is Cross Insurance Arena, which has the benefit of being both infuriating and confusing as hell. (I wonder if Cross offers affordable dental coverage that Delta will accept, or whether the receptionist will just tell me to eat ass with my cavity-riddled chompers…)
Why must Portlanders keep bending over for corporate interests? Because corporations have money (our money, of course) and we, the people, are broke.
Hearts of Pine President Kevin Schohl said this right out loud two nights ago. “We’re trying to pay $800,000 for upgrades that the city can’t afford,” he told our city’s leaders in Council Chambers, according to the daily paper. If anyone in city government rose to dispute Schohl’s claim that we can’t afford to take care of own most cherished public properties, it wasn’t reported — probably because everyone in City Hall believes this stubborn old lie and has been making terrible policy decisions based on it for decades.
Portland’s government, like every other city and state government in the richest nation on Earth, can raise as much money as its people need through taxes, fees and bonds to fund every public service we want. Austerity budgeting is a political choice made by spineless politicians fearful of angering the rich, not an economic law of nature. Never forget this.
And never forget this, too:
Twenty years ago, when the city needed to make costly repairs to our Maine State Pier, councilors decided to try to lease it for the foreseeable future to politically connected hotel developers who’d turn the public’s most valuable piece of waterfront property into a high-end tourist trap for cruise-ship passengers. Following a nasty and greedy fight among the developers and city officials, nothing came of this odious scheme and our sagging pier still looks like shit.
A few years later, folks noticed Congress Square Park was really going downhill and needed upgrades. City Hall’s response: we can’t afford to fix it up, so let’s sell a big chunk to the adjacent hotel chain for its guests’ exclusive enjoyment. Portland voters’ response: Fuck you! (The sale was defeated at the polls and an arts nonprofit now organizes free public events there.)
Even the cops get dissed by Portland City Scrooge. Five years ago, then-City Manager Jon Jennings proposed to sell police headquarters downtown and instead lease commercial office space in Libbytown from a private developer/landlord for all our police and fire department administration. Due to decades of official neglect, the PPD’s Middle Street headquarters needed costly upgrades to be handicap-accessible, replace windows (at an estimated cost of $600,000, about double the bill when the problem was identified in 2013), and stop the water leaking into the basement evidence room. That scheme, and the cops, also went nowhere.
The treacherous condition of the crooked cobblestones all along Wharf Street, the most photographed byway in Maine, are also the embarrassing result of decades of near-total neglect by City Hall, whose road- and sidewalk-maintenance practices pale in comparison to those of ancient city-states. Seriously, it’s like we’re intentionally creating Roman ruins for the whole world to gawk at and wonder what went so horribly wrong.
I could go on … and hell, I think I will! How about the cancellation of the massively popular Old Port Festival (too much public expense)? Maine’s largest city can’t afford to pay its symphony orchestra to saw away for a couple hours on the Fourth of July, so that’s gone, too, along with most other city-supported, free or low-cost arts and cultural events (Alive at Five is long dead, New Year’s Portland was last rung in last century, etc.). So many millions of wonderful memories about special times spent in Portland, never even made.
To save public money while simultaneously bilking the poor out of their last 40 bucks, Portland’s outsourced most of its parking enforcement to Passport, a fintech start-up that shouldn’t be trusted to valet a car, let alone collect all our bank card data and put our drivers’ licenses and livelihoods at risk.
Did I leave anything out? Oh yeah, housing. For many decades now, the city has shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks into real estate investors’ and developers’ personal bank accounts to build affordable shelter, and in return we’ve received a housing crisis so severe that the jail can’t hold all the homeless and the low-wage workers needed to keep our hospitality economy humming cannot rent a roof within 50 miles. Public health? Quite possibly an oxymoron these days. Public transportation that meets anyone’s daily needs? Stop trippin’…
I remember a year or so ago when then-Mayor Kate Snyder was reduced to tears atop the dais by frustrated and angry members of the public calling councilors nasty names on Zoom and such. City leaders are big proponents of decorum and propriety while they blithely ignore their constituents’ demands again and again and again. Growing antagonism among the populace toward elected and unelected officials (lawmakers, department heads, cops, meter readers, tax collectors and their ilk) is getting so bad that few people want to become public servants anymore even with the insufficient health and retirement benefits.
To an anarchist like me, this is fantastic news! The Portland police and county deputies and jail guards are basically abolishing themselves! But I also understand how people with, say, a home of their own, or children, or a retirement to look forward to someday may disagree. I wish you folks continued good luck, and I agree with you about this: it sucks when your city is sold out from under you by politicians who don’t give a damn what you want or say.
At least we can still safely perform oral in peace — that is, until the neo-fascist Christian nationalist Republican Party takes power again early next year. See ya at the barricades…
Good context! Thanks for expanding on my tiny rant. Good stuff.