Thanks to the courage of El Paso politicians, voters on Nov. 2 will get to decide to stick at least part of a $50 million bill for a downtown baseball stadium with the city’s hotel industry.

The proposed stadium will be home to a Triple A minor league baseball team the city doesn’t have and will not get unless the park is built, the El Paso Times reports. El Paso is currently making do with the Double A Diablos, just now sitting in last place in the league’s South Division.

Maybe the city’s hotel managers, concierges and maids should get together this week and have a showing of Field of Dreams to get pumped up, rather than grousing about why their industry should be singled out to pay for the enjoyment of baseball fans.

Should a majority of voters approve - and why not, most of those people spend few nights in their own city’s hotels - a 2 percent increase in the hotel occupancy tax will leave El Paso with a 17.5 percent hotel tax rate, the highest in the state.

Surely, $1.40 more per night isn’t too much to pay to say you stayed in a Triple A town. At least the local investors, who are decidedly not interested in investing in a ballpark, think so.

A ballpark is good for everybody in El Paso, the investors say, a carnival pitch repeated endlessly over the past 30 years in wanna-be Zeniths all over the country. Which is probably how that Field of Dreams quote got changed to, “If we build it, they will come.”

The quote, “If we build it, he will come,” is closer to the truth. For three decades, one sports economist after another has demolished the myth that a baseball, football, lacrosse or lawn bowling stadium is a net benefit to a local economy.

An oft-quoted 2000 study by the libertarian Cato Institute found no economic benefit in any of the 37 metropolitan areas reviewed. In several places, the impact was negative.

“If you want to inject money into the local economy,” University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson once said, “it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.”

However apt, we at Texas Watchdog take no responsibility for the use of the previous quote if it results in a helicopter being added to the El Paso hotel industry’s tax burden.

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Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

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Photo from 'Field of Dreams,' the 1989 movie staring Kevin Costner.