Hamilton County mayoral candidate Weston Wamp says his criticism of a proposal for public funding of a new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium is not personal even though he was invested in and later sold his holdings in the minor league team after discussions about him working for the Lookouts fell apart.
Wamp said in an interview and emails that if he is elected next month, he will work to act in the public interest in decisions related to building and financing a new stadium on the Southside.
"I am friends with all of the local owners of the Lookouts, and I love baseball," Wamp told the Chattanooga Times Free Press on Saturday. "But if elected county mayor, my loyalty won't be to friends. It will be to taxpayers."
Wamp said that in 2014, East Ridge native John Woods talked with Wamp about gaining access to funding for the Lookouts from the Lamp Post Group, where Wamp worked at the time. Although Wamp later sold his personal interest in the Lookouts, the Lamp Post Group still owns part of the team.
"In conjunction with Lamp Post's investment, Woods proposed I work part time with the Lookouts while remaining on staff at Lamp Post," Wamp said. "Ultimately, I decided against it but remained a Lookouts minority owner until 2018, when I sold my interest."
Wamp, the Republican nominee to succeed outgoing county Mayor Jim Coppinger, said he never worked for the Lookouts, and his criticism of a plan to use tax dollars to repay most of a $79.4 million bond for the stadium reflects his fiscal conservatism and review of other publicly funded stadiums that have often not worked out as promised.
"Vetting Lamp Post's investment into the Lookouts opened my eyes to the voodoo economics of publicly funded stadiums," Wamp said in an emailed statement Saturday. "At the time of my involvement, the Lookouts owners had discussed private funding for a stadium, a far cry from the 100% publicly financed project that was proposed last week."
Proponents of the bond say it would not all be publicly financed, saying that the team's $1 million-a-year lease would cover 22% of the debt payback.
In an interview last week, Wamp said he sold his interest in the Lookouts when his former business partners at Lamp Post asked him to do so.
"So the way it came to me, and this was a small transaction, my former business partners came to me to say hey, how about we buy you out of your small equity stake?" Wamp said. "From my perspective, it wasn't initiated from the Lookouts. I think the Lookouts probably said something to them, and what do I care?"
The managing owner of the team is Jason Freier, the CEO of the Atlanta-based Hardball Capital, which owns the Lookouts and other minor league baseball teams in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Columbia, South Carolina.
Hardball Capital, which Freier started in 2005, acquired the Chattanooga Lookouts along with John Woods in late 2014. Woods was charged by federal regulators last year with operating a massive Ponzi scheme and was forced to sell his interest in the Lookouts and other holdings.
Woods is an East Ridge native who grew up near former U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, who is Weston's father.
Freier said in a statement late Friday that Wamp "aggressively pursued an employment arrangement with the Chattanooga Lookouts" from August 2014 until early 2015. Although Wamp was never employed by the baseball team, Freier said Wamp did previously voice support for building a new Lookouts stadium on the former Wheland Foundry site when he was seeking a job.
"The primary initiative he wanted to help spearhead was the development of a new Lookouts ballpark on the Foundry site," Freier said of Wamp's talks with the team eight years ago. "Mr. Wamp touted the significant economic impact he believed such a project would have on the community and even went so far as to call the new stadium and the availability of Hawk Hill (where the Lookouts now play at AT&T Field) for other development a two-for-one for public officials."
Freier said the Lookouts have documents to prove Wamp's previous support for the new stadium, but he declined to release them, saying he is focusing now on working with Coppinger and Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, who are pushing plans to provide direct funding and tax increment financing to pay for the new stadium.
Wamp said he supports the Lookouts but questions using primarily taxpayer dollars for the team's stadium.
"As I've said repeatedly, we would all like to see the Wheland site developed, but not with taxpayers bearing all of the risk as politicians rush it to a vote," he said. "I get that they may want to go back with some revisionist history and try to assign some motive to what I think. But I am not the one making it personal. I am the one who is trying to do my research, asking questions and making sure we act in the public interest."
In 2018, Wamp wrote an opinion piece in the Times Free Press questioning public funding for a new Lookouts stadium. Wamp said investments in minor league baseball teams rarely pay off for the owners, and publicly funded stadiums are almost always a bad buy for the taxpayer.
"The examples of bad stadium deals are so rampant, Temple University economist Michael Leeds says, 'If you ever had a consensus in economics, this would be it. There is no impact,'" Wamp said.
Wamp went on to help start the Dynamo Fund, raising $18 million in venture capital focused on startup businesses in the logistics industry. Wamp said that proved much more successful and underscores the need for a more careful look at public funding of a new Lookouts stadium, which he said has developed in a "haphazard" way.
Matt Adams, the Democratic nominee for Hamilton County mayor on the Aug. 4 ballot, differs with Wamp and supports the current plan to use local taxes and a portion of the increased property and sales tax revenues to build a new stadium.
"His (Wamp's) opposition seems to be more personal in nature than for the benefit of the county," Adams said in a telephone interview. "A major study was done four years ago to show the advantages of developing the stadium and a mixed-use development, so to say this has been haphazard is just misguided. This site is going to bring in millions of dollars over the next several years."
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340. Follow him on Twitter @dflessner1.