Chris Powell: Enough with Conn. basketball!

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MANCHESTER, Conn.

Why are Connecticut Gov, Ned Lamont and state Treasurer Erick Russell so enthusiastic about using state pension money to make state government a minority owner of the Mohegan tribe's Connecticut Sun women's basketball team and move it to Hartford from the tribe's reservation in rural eastern Connecticut?

Though questions abound, the governor and the treasurer don't seem to have conducted even a basic analysis of the team's current and likely future finances.

On the Mohegan reservation the Sun plays for free at the tribe's beautiful arena. Do the governor and treasurer suppose that the team also could play for free at the People's Bank Arena, in Hartford, which is overseen by the Capital Regional Development Authority? Has the authority been asked if it would forego revenue and incur only expenses from a major new tenant?

Playing in Hartford, the Sun would face intense competition from the University of Connecticut men's and women's basketball teams, which play most of their games at the People's Bank Arena, not on campus in rural Storrs. Such competition almost certainly would impair the profitability of all three teams. Have the governor and treasurer factored this into whatever informal calculations they have made?

For eight years Hartford has had a beautiful minor-league baseball stadium downtown. Yet the stadium is still making only financial losses for the city, and the city is heavily subsidized by state government. Does state government want to subsidize the city indefinitely for another big entertainment project?

The Hartford office-building project called Constitution Plaza was built in the early 1960s in the hope of reviving downtown and the city generally. It didn't. Today Constitution Plaza is sleepy.

The same aspiration was behind the predecessor of the People's Bank Arena, the Hartford Civic Center, which opened in 1975. The civic center came with a shopping mall. But Hartford continued its decline demographically and economically anyway, and with few customers the shopping mall went out of business.

Twenty years ago state government decided to push downtown Hartford around for the third time in 40 years with the Adriaen's Landing project -- a convention hall, hotel, museum, and restaurant district. But it too is sleepy and has yet to do much for the city.

Indeed, a decade ago the Hartford area's shopping, restaurant, and entertainment focus shifted to West Hartford because of the better demographics there and the greater amount of housing nearby.

The arena in downtown Hartford  has  served a great purpose for Connecticut, in large part because the UConn teams have played there so often, much closer to the state's center of population than Gampel Pavilion.

But does anyone really believe that the big problem of the Hartford area is the lack of a professional women's basketball team when there is already so much great basketball and some good minor-league baseball in the city?

A century ago Hartford was believed to be the richest city in the country. Today it is among the poorest. Why it changed is yet to be examined officially, but all the games played at the downtown arena and the baseball stadium haven't yet persuaded middle-class people to return to the city to  live. Most people at the games go home to the suburbs.

Only more middle-class housing and middle-class  schools  are likely to restore the city -- schools with academic tests for admission and advancement, not schools like Hartford's, which happily advance and graduate illiterates without apology. All other undertakings in the name of reviving Hartford are mere distractions.

With luck the Women's National Basketball Association will disabuse the governor, the treasurer, and state legislators out of using pension money to become a powerless minority owner -- a prisoner -- of an undertaking that risks becoming a long-term loss. The league and the Mohegans know that Connecticut is a much smaller market than Boston and Houston and a team in those cities would be much more profitable. The league and the Mohegans want only to make money, which is fine, especially since state government often seems to want only to lose it.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).