D.C. Council to Vote on Stadium Cost Cap

D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp said this morning that she will ask her colleagues to vote this afternoon on emergency legislation that adds a council-created spending cap to a stadium lease agreement with Major League Baseball.

By packaging the council's cost cap with the lease, Cropp said the council will take just one vote on the stadium deal today and it will require nine votes among the 13-member body for approval. After a two-hour breakfast meeting behind closed doors, council members emerged to say they expected the vote to be close.

The vote on the stadium lease, Cropp said, will come during a special session at the conclusion of the council's legislative meeting today. The council will consider a schools bill and other legislation at its regular meeting, so it is unclear when it will address baseball.

"We'll see," Cropp said when asked if she expected her colleagues to approve the stadium lease. "It's very clear it's time for a decision to be made. I have pushed as hard as I can for a fair deal for the city."

D.C. Council members said late yesterday they would seek to implement their own price cap on a new baseball stadium after consultants told them that a cap offered by Mayor Anthony A. Williams does not protect the city against cost overruns.

Today, Williams (D) struck back at the consultants, Peter C. B. Bynoe and Louis S. Cohen from the Chicago law office of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary. Cohen had previously represented the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority, which competed against the District in 2004 to win the relocation of the Montreal Expos.

"This is a shocking conflict of interest," Williams said. "How can the residents of the District of Columbia trust the advice of a lawyer when his previous work was on behalf of Northern Virginia? It's a blatant and inherent conflict -- especially now that Cohen, and others at Piper Rudnick, have encouraged the council to take actions that could jeopardize the fragile deal to keep the Nationals in D.C."

Williams added: "I assume the council was unaware of this conflict of interest. A decision this important should not be left to a firm that sought to build a ballpark in a cow pasture in Virginia."

Council members were in legislative session and unavailable for comment.

Bynoe issued a written response to the mayor, saying that his company no longer works for the Virginia Stadium Authority.

"Mayor Williams' suggestion that Mr. Cohen, myself or our firm is in a conflict of interest is completely unfounded and untrue," Bynoe wrote. "There is no legal or ethical conflict of interest in our current representation of the City Council of the District of Columbia."

The council hired the consultants Feb. 1, agreeing to pay them up to $50,000. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) had recommended them; Cropp and a majority of members agreed to bring them on board.