Four Stadiums.
$1.9 Billion.
Whose Money?
Wisconsin has spent a generation writing checks for professional sports. Add up the four major venues that house the Brewers, Bucks and Packers — two ballparks, one arena and Lambeau Field — and the combined price tag runs to roughly $1.9 billion, according to a tally by Madison’s Isthmus.
About $1,220,800,000 of that — more than $1.2 billion — came directly from taxpayers, through state appropriations and county and multi-county sales taxes that outlived the buildings they financed. The most recent and largest single subsidy, a $500,800,000 package for American Family Field, was signed in December 2023 by Gov. Tony Evers (D).
And here is the part the ribbon-cuttings leave out: economists who study these deals — across the political spectrum — have found for decades that publicly financed stadiums do not grow local economies. They move money around inside them.
- $1.9Btotalcombined cost of four Wisconsin pro-sports venues — Isthmus
- $1.2Btaxpayerdirect public subsidy across the four deals — state and local sources
- 85%of economistssay governments should end stadium subsidies — 2005 AEA survey
Isthmus, the Madison alt-weekly, added the venues up when the last Brewers deal was moving through the Legislature: American Family Field (the 2023 renovation), the Fiserv Forum and its surrounding Deer District, the original Miller Park ballpark, and the 2003 remodel of Lambeau Field. Four venues, three franchises, roughly $1.9 billion across taxpayers, local governments, the teams, and the fans who buy the tickets. The teams and their season-ticket holders paid part of it. The public paid the larger part.
The chart below separates the two. The grey bar is each venue’s total project cost; the red bar is the slice taxpayers covered directly through state money or dedicated sales taxes. Together the red bars add up to about $1,220,800,000— roughly two dollars of every three spent on these buildings.
On Dec. 5, 2023, Gov. Tony Evers (D) signed a bipartisan bill sending more than $500 million in public funds to renovate American Family Field, the 2001 ballpark the Brewers had begun calling obsolete. The state committed $365.8 million, paid out in annual installments through 2050. The City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County — both run by Democrats, Mayor Cavalier Johnson (D) and County Executive David Crowley (D) — agreed to $67.5 million apiece. That is $500,800,000 in taxpayer money for a stadium the public already helped build once.
In return, the Brewers put in $110 million and extended their lease through 2050, keeping Major League Baseball in its smallest market for another 27 years. The renovation list is real maintenance — the retractable roof, fire-suppression systems, seats, concourses, elevators, and the signature glass outfield doors all needed work. The dispute was never whether the ballpark needed repair. It was who should pay to repair a facility owned by the public but operated for a private franchise valued in the billions.
The team did not leave the outcome to chance. According to The Badger Project, the Brewers spent nearly $1.5 million lobbying the Legislature over five years — and walked away with $366 million in state commitments. Critics, led by Urban Milwaukee columnist Bruce Murphy, called it what recurs every time a Wisconsin lease nears expiry: the implicit threat that the team could relocate if the public did not pay.
Signed the bipartisan American Family Field package today. This keeps the Brewers in Milwaukee through 2050 and protects a facility Wisconsin taxpayers own.
Murphy's Law: the Brewers won't skip town — but the 'move the team' threat works on the Legislature every time a lease comes up. Taxpayers keep paying.
The Evers deal did not invent the model — it inherited it. On Aug. 12, 2015, Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed a law directing $250 million in state and local taxpayer money toward a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. The bill cleared the Legislature on bipartisan votes — 52–34 in the Assembly, 21–10 in the Senate — and drew bipartisan opposition too. Even Americans for Prosperity, normally a Walker ally, called the financing “fuzzy on math.”
The arena that opened in 2018 as Fiserv Forum cost about $524 million. Taxpayers covered $250 million of it; the private ownership group — former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, plus new owners Marc Lasry and Wes Edens — covered the rest. Backers promised the state would recoup its money through new income-tax revenue from NBA salaries. PolitiFact rated the “tremendous payback” claim skeptically, noting the projection assumed the Bucks and their players would have left Wisconsin entirely without the subsidy — the same counterfactual every stadium pitch depends on.
Fiserv Forum, opened 2018 — total cost about $524 million.
Public: $250 million from state and local taxpayers, signed by Gov. Scott Walker (R) in 2015.
Private: roughly $274 million from the Bucks’ ownership — Herb Kohl ($100M) and the incoming Lasry-Edens group ($174M).
By 2021, when the Bucks won the NBA title in the building, the franchise was valued well north of $1.5 billion. The public’s $250 million bought no equity in that appreciation.
The two oldest deals set the template — and each was financed by a sales tax that quietly kept collecting long after the concrete was poured. In 1995, Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) and the Legislature created a Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District and authorized a 0.1% sales tax across five counties — Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington and Racine — to build the Brewers a new ballpark. Thompson’s own phrase for how the burden fell on Milwaukee was blunter than any critic’s: “Stick it to ‘em.”
Miller Park opened in 2001 at a construction cost of about $392 million, with the stadium district — the taxpayers — on the hook for roughly $310 million of it. The five-county tax was supposed to be temporary. It ran until 2020, a quarter-century after it was enacted, collecting far more than the original build. The same ballpark is the one taxpayers were asked to renovate again in 2023.
Green Bay ran the same play with a twist: it put the question to voters. On Sept. 12, 2000, Brown County residents narrowly approved — 53% to 47% — a 0.5% county sales tax to bankroll the $295 million Lambeau Field renovation. The tax financed $160 million in bonding; Packers season-ticket holders absorbed another $92.5 million through one-time seat fees. The tax was pitched as a short-term levy. It ran until 2015 and ultimately collected $310.9 million — more than the entire renovation it paid for.
Miller Park (Brewers): 0.1% tax across five counties, 1996–2020. Financed ~$310M of a $392M ballpark. Enacted under Gov. Tommy Thompson (R), 1995.
Lambeau Field (Packers): 0.5% Brown County tax, 2001–2015. Financed $160M of a $295M renovation and collected $310.9M in all. Voter-approved 53–47, Sept. 2000.
Between them, the two taxes pulled money from shoppers who never bought a ticket — the classic feature of a stadium sales tax: everyone pays, whether or not they go.
Stadium pitches always come wrapped in economic-development language: jobs, tourism, a revitalized district, tax revenue that pays the public back. The research says otherwise, and it has for a long time. As Governing summarized the literature in a piece titled “Stadiums Shift Spending Patterns, Don’t Boost Local Economies,” subsidized venues mostly redirect leisure dollars that would have been spent somewhere else in the same city or state. A dollar spent at the ballpark is a dollar not spent at a local restaurant, bar, bowling alley or movie theater. Economists call it the substitution effect.
“A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment.”
Roger Noll & Andrew Zimbalist · Sports, Jobs, & Taxes · Brookings Institution, 1997
The foundational study is Brookings’ 1997 volume by economists Roger Noll (Stanford) and Andrew Zimbalist (Smith College). Reviewing stadium after stadium, they concluded that sports facilities are not engines of local growth and that the pro-subsidy case rested on “bad economic reasoning” that overstated the benefits. Nearly three decades of subsequent work has hardened, not softened, that finding. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reached the same conclusion in 2017.
Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury, who has spent years auditing these deals, puts the mechanism plainly: the spending inside the stadium is the “seen” benefit politicians point to; the “unseen” cost is the spending that never happened elsewhere in the community because those dollars went to the game instead. His summary of the independent research is that stadium proponents “always underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits.”
This is not a fringe view. In a 2005 survey of American Economic Association members, 85% agreed that state and local governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises. A 2017 University of Chicago economics panel found more than 80% agreement that stadium subsidies likely cost taxpayers more than the local benefits they generate. When 85% of a famously argumentative profession agrees on anything, the case is effectively closed — and the checks keep getting written anyway.
There's no good reason for cities and states to build or subsidize sports stadiums. Every independent analysis finds the same thing: the subsidies don't pay for themselves.
The through-line across four venues and 28 years is not one party. It is a bipartisan habit. A Republican governor, Tommy Thompson (R), launched it with Miller Park in 1995. A Republican governor, Scott Walker (R), extended it to the Bucks in 2015. Brown County voters ratified it for the Packers in 2000. And a Democratic governor, Tony Evers (D) — with Democratic Milwaukee city and county officials — wrote the largest single check of them all in 2023. Naming names here means naming both parties.
The beneficiaries are easier to sort. The franchises are owned by some of the wealthiest people in American sports, and their valuations have climbed steeply on facilities the public subsidized. The Bucks were valued well above $1.5 billion by the time they won a championship in the arena taxpayers helped build. The Brewers locked in a below-market lease through 2050. The public’s roughly $1,220,800,000bought civic pride, retained teams, and event calendars — but no ownership stake, and, per the economists, no measurable net economic growth.
“Money spent at a subsidized stadium is money that would otherwise have been spent — and taxed — somewhere else in the community. The stadium doesn't create the dollar. It relocates it.”
Governing · Stadiums Shift Spending Patterns, Don't Boost Local Economies
None of this is an argument that Wisconsin should not have professional sports, or that the Brewers, Bucks and Packers are not woven into the state’s identity. It is an argument for honest accounting. When a deal is sold as an investment that will pay for itself, the public deserves the number the researchers actually find — not the one the team’s consultants project. On the evidence, these were subsidies, not investments. The distinction is roughly $1,220,800,000.
Four venues, three teams, roughly $1.9 billion — and about $1.2 billion of it from taxpayers, under governors of both parties. The buildings are real, the teams stayed, and the economists who study these deals still find the same thing they found in 1997: a subsidized stadium shifts spending around a community, it does not add to it. Wisconsin got its ballparks. What it did not get was the economic return it was promised.
