It hasn’t been long since Nashville spent almost $500 million on pro sports venues—raising property taxes, diverting hotel-motel taxes and sales taxes, and levying a fee on water bills in the process.

Now, minor league baseball’s Nashville Sounds are on the verge of moving to Hendersonville. The Hendersonville Chamber of Commerce has developed a plan to build a $35 million stadium for the team funded by lease payments, club seating, sales tax diversions, and a stadium corporate sponsorship. The plan faces numerous political hurdles. But the blueprint is legitimate and based on financial deals in other communities that lured minor league teams to the suburbs, such as Sevierville, Tenn. (the Tennessee Smokies), Hoover, Ala. (the Birmingham Barons), and Fort Mill, S.C. (the Charlotte Knights).

If Hendersonville and Sumner County don’t make a bid for the team, political leaders in Franklin are making hints that they might also want to court the AAA ball club.

Rather than fight this, Mayor Bill Purcell and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce are holding the door. The mayor has made it clear that he will not endorse a stadium deal that includes the diversion of sales taxes collected on site to pay for construction of a new stadium to replace the aging Greer Stadium. The Nashville chamber has consulted with the team and even recommended Hendersonville as an alternative home city.

Why?

There are several reasons. The first is that Nashville’s economy and desire to build civic monuments are not what they were 10 years ago. During the first half of former Mayor Phil Bredesen’s term, for-profit health care was bustling, country music hit an all-time high in popularity, and Nashville’s tourism industry was hot. Tax revenues were so flush that it wasn’t a struggle for Nashville to find money to build an arena, a stadium, a new downtown library, and several new schools.

Today, the city’s economy (like the national one) appears to be in recession. Tourism has fizzled, as evidenced by the fact that neither sales tax nor hotel-motel tax collections have kept pace with inflation for several years. The economic reality and political perception is that Nashville’s government and business community can’t afford any new sports venues. “There was a lot of corporate money spent on the Titans and Predators,” says Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce president Mike Rollins. “The feeling that we have gotten from Nashville’s business community is that if there were another stadium deal under consideration that was in any way dependent on corporate sponsorship dollars, it would be a real challenge to make it work in Davidson County right now.”

Beyond that, Mayor Bill Purcell’s priorities and approach are starkly different from those of his predecessor. In the state Legislature, Purcell voted in favor of the Titans deal. But his decision not to sponsor the state-funding bill for the project (even though the stadium was to be located in his district) irked Gov. Don Sundquist and then-Mayor Phil Bredesen.

Then, when Purcell took office in 1999, he made it clear his focus would be efficient management of the city’s resources and assets, not shepherding new development. Since then, Metro finance director David Manning has said that Metro would be willing to allow the Sounds to use city land near the Nashville Fairgrounds for a new stadium. But he says the Purcell administration won’t allow sales taxes collected there to be used to pay for the stadium itself, as in the cases of Adelphia Coliseum and minor league ballparks in Memphis, Jackson, and Sevierville. “We have been clear from the beginning that the Metro tax base is not in a position to absorb another major sports facility,” Manning says. “Other priorities have to be met at this time.”

Such proclamations are a far cry from the rhetoric of the Bredesen administration, which claimed that sports teams actually make money for a city because of the business they generate indirectly.

Sounds officials asked Bredesen for a new stadium too when he was mayor, and he turned his nose at the idea, busying himself instead with the bigger fish of the sports world and unrelated projects such as a new downtown library. But Metro Council member John Summers says he thinks that if Bredesen were still mayor, he might change his mind. “There is no question that Purcell is handling the Sounds differently than Bredesen would have,” he says, adding that Bredesen believed pro sports “was such a benefit to the community that he was willing to commit the community to a significant financial obligation in exchange for that. Purcell clearly questions that assumption, and in my opinion, for good reason.”

A third reason for Nashville’s lack of interest in making concessions for the team involves the way the Sounds have dealt with their landlord—namely, the city. Earlier this year, Sounds officials announced that they didn’t intend to pay their $200,000 rent on Greer Stadium. Since then, Sounds chief operating officer Glenn Yaeger has been trying to renegotiate the team’s lease with Manning. “We have been spending between $750,000 and $1 million on maintenance, improvements, operating costs, and rent, and a lot of that cost is because of the fact that we are playing in a 25-year-old facility,” Yaeger says. “No minor league team can be profitable in that situation.”

The refusal to pay has upset numerous city officials, including Vice Mayor Ronnie Steine. “The management of the Sounds needs to pay what they owe,” he says. “The moment that I found out that they were not honoring their obligation, I lost interest in helping them. As a public official, it’s hard for me to negotiate a new contract with a team that isn’t honoring the one they’ve already signed.”

Perhaps the most important reason Nashville is quietly letting the Sounds leave, however, is that the city’s sports fans now have an NHL team and an NFL team. Having been to the Super Bowl, it’s hard to get excited about AAA baseball. No one knows this better than Larry Schmittou, who founded the Sounds in 1978 and sold the team in 1997. “I foresaw what the competition was going to mean, and I knew money was going to be tight because the city had done so much for the Titans and Predators,” says Schmittou, who now owns a chain of bowling alleys and amusement centers called S&S Family Entertainment.

“Back in 1978 and 1979 and 1981, we were the darlings of Nashville,” he says. “But the truth of the matter is that back then, there wasn’t the competition that there is today.”

Schmittou says he’s unsympathetic to the argument of the current Sounds owners in the rent dispute with the city, given that current owner Al Gordon renegotiated the team’s lease on Greer Stadium since buying the team from him. However, he says he would hate to see the team leave Nashville for the suburbs. “The Sounds are one of the last affordable tickets left,” he says. “And people forget that more people still come to Greer Stadium than actually come to Adelphia Coliseum to see the Titans. Adelphia’s attendance is higher, but it is pretty much the same people at all eight games. When I owned the team, we knew that it was pretty much different people every night at Greer Stadium.”