Sometime in the next month, Major League Baseball plans to finally announce the winner of its Montreal Expos relocation sweepstakes. The winning city gets the Expos while the losers will leave their plans behind and with any luck, the owners of the Minnesota Twins or the Oakland Athletics or the Florida Marlins will study those proposals and might take them up on the offers if local leaders don't supply new baseball parks in those towns.

The only way the Expos franchise will not be moved is if the former minority partners of the Expos win their July 2002 lawsuit, which accused Commissioner Bud Selig and former Expos and now Florida Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria with mail fraud and wire fraud along with conspiring for more than two years to eliminate Montreal. That case has not been settled. There is no local support to save the Expos from leaving Montreal nor does baseball want to continue playing 59 games annually in Montreal with the other 22 "home" games held in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Selig and his fellow owners are choosing the new city first and then selling the franchise for as much money as the market can bring.

Those "losing’ cities can take some hope from what happened in the National Football League following that league's expansion into Jacksonville, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina in 1993. The NFL decided to expand to 30 franchises in the early 1990s and considered Charlotte, Jacksonville, Baltimore, St. Louis and Memphis. The league ended up in every area but Memphis. The league does have a team in nearby Nashville though. All 28 NFL owners knew the proposals and two, Los Angeles Rams owner Owner/Chairman Georgia Frontiere in 1994 and Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell in 1995 took up the losing offers and relocated with Frontiere ending up in St. Louis and Modell in Baltimore.

While relocation worked well for Frontiere and Modell, the cost to St. Louis and Baltimore taxpayers was staggering. Major League Baseball wants a taxpayer funded stadium as the payoff for the Expos, whether it is in Washington, DC, Northern Virginia, Norfolk, Virginia, Portland, Oregon or Monterey, Mexico. The owners want a multi-million payoff in a stadium, but is it good for local municipalities? On close examination, the answer seems to be no.

Stadiums have a limited lifespan, don't really build up areas and are vacant about 260 to 270 days a year. The jobs created within a stadium are generally per diem, low wage positions with little potential growth. Stadiums are not economic engines and do not stoke the local economy.

The battle for the Expos seems to have come down to Washington, DC or the Dulles County area of Northern Virginia, about a 30-minute drive from downtown Washington. Both areas are promising to build stadiums that will be funded by various taxes. Washington has a few sites in mind for the stadium while the Northern Virginia probably the least desirable in the mix. Washington is also less than an hour south of Baltimore and a good portion of the Baltimore-Washington market overlap and that could eventually hurt both teams in search of corporate dollars. A new Washington or Northern Virginia team would compete for entertainment dollars with the Orioles, Baltimore Ravens, Washington Redskins, Wizards, Capitals, DC United, Georgetown basketball and the University of Maryland football and basketball squads.

Las Vegas, Portland and Norfolk seem to have some vague stadium plans while Monterrey will present baseball with a number of problems starting with the value of the Mexican peso and the lack of a suitable stadium.

The Washington-Northern Virginia market offers the strongest cable TV market, but part of the cable TV coverage area includes the Baltimore Orioles territory and that could be a problem for both the potential relocated team and the Orioles. The other cities are small markets and would not generate the cable TV dollars that the Washington area could.

The National Basketball Association's Charlotte Hornets ownership relocated to New Orleans after the 2001-02 season because the then 14-year-old Charlotte Coliseum was not generating enough revenue. Louisiana is paying for the privilege of hosting an NBA team and Charlotte city leaders are scrambling for money because of a budget shortfall after paying for a new arena that will be home to the expansion Charlotte Bobcats starting in the fall.

Last autumn, Pittsburgh city officials were breathing a sigh of relief when less snow fell than originally predicted in a late November forecast. The cash strapped city saved millions of dollars in plowing fees. The city is cash strapped partially because of spending millions upon millions of dollars on a new football stadium and a new baseball park. In Maryland,officials estimated that the state has paid well over one hundred thousand dollars per job created at the new football stadium. Across the country, municipalities have cut back social services and education yet are obligated to pay off stadium costs.

Baseball fans in the Washington-Northern Virginia area, Las Vegas. Norfolk, Portland, and Monterrey are anxiously awaiting the announcement from Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, his deputy Bob DuPuy and the 29 owners that their town is getting Major League Baseball. And one of those cities will get the Expos, but those baseball fans should also consider this. Is it worth the hundreds of millions of dollars that it will cost to become a  Major League Baseball city?

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