By Steven Greenhut
Columnist, The Orange County Register

Many disputes in life can be reduced to simple contractual matters, something that the city of Anaheim grasps in its lawsuit against Arte Moreno, the billionaire billboard executive from Arizona who owns the baseball team formerly known as the Anaheim Angels.

Since he floated the trial balloon last summer, Moreno has argued that changing the team's name to the Los Angeles Angels would widen the appeal of the team beyond Orange County. Los Angeles is the No. 2 television market in the nation, whereas the 340,000-population city of Anaheim is relatively small potatoes.

One National Public Radio commentator last week agreed with Moreno, arguing that his move is savvy and will generate more TV income as contracts are renegotiated.

That may be true, but it's completely irrelevant. All that matters is what the contract between the team and the city over use of the stadium says, and the intent of the parties who negotiated the contract. It's the contract at issue, and everything else is just smoke and mirrors to deflect attention from that main point.

The city of Anaheim, thanks to the foolishness of then-Mayor Tom Daly and then-council members Lou Lopez and Frank Feldhaus, gave then-owner Disney $30 million in benefits in 1996 to keep the team in Anaheim. Residents got little in return, but the one thing they did get was the supposed pride of having the city's name in the national spotlight.

It looks like a sucker's deal in hindsight. Who really cares if one's city is associated with a baseball team or any other sports franchise? One of the great things about Southern California is that residents here are not quite so dependent on pro sports for their entertainment pleasure.

Notice the rough time the National Football League has been having in locating a team in the Los Angeles basin. There's so much else to do around here, and residents have none of that inferiority complex shared by residents of second-tier cities. That means that local residents and even city officials have been reluctant to give away the store for the dubious benefits of having a sports franchise named after their city.

The Anaheim deal was a bad one, although it pales in comparison to some of the other whoppers nationwide. But a deal is a deal. Messrs. Daly, Lopez and Feldhaus decided to set aside development rights on one of the prime parcels in the county and to hand over taxpayer dollars for little more than a name.

Now, Moreno, who inherited the lease when he bought the team from Disney in 2003, wants to change the terms because it suits his bottom line. It appears that he intended to do so all along, as he first removed Anaheim from uniforms and marketing materials, and now has formally changed the team name to the Los Angeles of Anaheim (we'll leave the jokes for another time). Expect the "of Anaheim" to fade away if his decision isn't overturned in court.

Bring on the lawsuit.

"The fact that it's better off for his bottom line is irrelevant," said Tom Tait, the former Anaheim council member who was one of two dissenting votes on the stadium lease giveaway. "If someone didn't pay their mortgage, that would be better for their bottom line also, but they have a contractual obligation to pay it," he said.

It's a reasonable analogy. We'd all like to renegotiate contracts to improve our bottom line, but we are legally bound to stick to the original deal.

Moreno is going to play semantic games, arguing that the clause in the lease requiring the team's name "to include Anaheim therein" is met because Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim includes Anaheim. The courts will decide, of course, but the clear intent of the parties at the time was to have Anaheim a prominent part of the team name. Just read the press coverage at the time, in which Daly and other city officials proclaimed their great victory in having an Anaheim team.

It's doubtful even they would have agreed to the terms of the deal if Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was going to be the team name.

The lesson for residents across the country is not to give taxpayer dollars to the corporate welfare queens who run professional sports franchises. You can't trust 'em. They are, as H.L. Mencken once wrote about government bureaucrats, "seldom if ever moved by anything rationally describable as public spirit ... . Their purpose, first, last and all the time is to promote their private advantage."

I snicker when sports fans complain about outrageous salaries paid to certain athletes yet support tax funding of stadiums and arenas. Money is fungible. If taxpayers hand over their hard-earned cash to team owners for stadiums, then the owners will have more money to pay the salaries. There's only one way to stop the madness: Stop feeding the beast. Stop giving them tax dollars in return for bupkis.

Fortunately, Anaheim's current council majority, under the leadership of Mayor Curt Pringle, is adamantly opposed to corporate subsidies. The current City Council seems to understand that Anaheim's revival has more to do with creating a good business climate through lower taxes, fewer regulations and fair treatment of all business, great and small, than through the illusory benefits of kissing up to team owners. The current council majority is rare on this score.

Even small cities lavish subsidies to lure minor-league teams. (Remember the minor-league baseball debacle in Mission Viejo a few years back?) The argument is always the same: The team will not only bring community pride, but it will provide "untold millions of dollars," as former Mayor Daly put it in 1996. The key word is "untold." You can't count the amount, because the millions rarely materialize.

The evidence is strong, in fact, that publicly funded stadiums do not provide any boon to the local economy. "Sports spending is primarily substitutional," argues Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow in a recent column. "Stanford University economist Roger Noll figured that only 5 percent to 10 percent of those attending games live elsewhere. Local fans divert their outlays from other leisure activities and other areas within the region." Other researchers, Bandow wrote, found "no net employment hike" from government-funded stadiums in cities that have them.

Nevertheless, sports-team owners will leverage one community after another to receive the best possible deal from craven politicians and fans who somehow think that enriching an owner will bring pride into their lives. Get a life. You want community pride? Get off your duff and do something to improve your community. Do it with your own money, and leave me alone.

Taxpayer-funded stadium deals - not to mention the way cities sometimes abuse eminent domain on behalf of team owners, to clear away private property to make way for the stadiums - have become increasingly divisive. In Washington, D.C., the city last year approved $500 million in taxpayer-backed bonds to finance a 41,000-seat baseball stadium to house the Washington Nationals, the team formerly known as the Montreal Expos.

Controversy over thatboondoggle led to the election of three new anti-stadium council members, who argue that the money should go to schools and hospitals instead. I hope these newcomers (including former Mayor Marion Barry, who was sentenced to six months in jail after being busted for buying crack cocaine) can throw a wrench in the wheels of the Major League Baseball gravy train.

When I lived in Ohio in 1997, Columbus residents rebuked a plan to build a publicly funded arena for a new professional hockey team. Opponents argued that city residents shouldn't have to pay for the entertainment pleasures of suburbanites. Good thinking. Hockey boosters argued that there was no Plan B. Reject the stadium and say goodbye to hockey. Well, four weeks after the rejection, supporters came up with Plan B: a privately funded stadium to house the Blue Jackets.

That's the best lesson: Just say no to greedy team owners. Make them pay their own way. You can be sure that there are many Plan Bs when taxpayers hold firm. Other private companies have to pay their own way. Why are sports franchises so special?

By the way, I like sports and have nothing against billionaires or moneymaking. But taxes should be used to fund a few limited, governmental functions - not to enrich a few particularly aggressive pitchmen who sell fame to foolish fans.

Not every region has 75-degree days in mid-December, nice beaches and ski resorts within a two-hour drive. In some places - think Green Bay, Columbus, Buffalo, Pittsburgh - a football or baseball team is a bigger draw. So it might take a while for sports-hungry residents of other places to recognize that subsidizing sports teams is a waste of limited resources.

In the meantime, taxpayers should at least hold team owners up to the terms of their own contracts. A name change may seem meaningless, but living up to a contract is important. I wish the city of Anaheim the best as it tries to preserve its good name.