King Kaufman, absolutely correct on the subject of public financing for sports stadiums. Total rip off for consumers.
King Kaufman's Sports Daily | Salon : ...talking about the cannawhoopass voters opened up on billionaire sports team owners looking for welfare to build stadiums and arenas.
Seattle voters overwhelmingly passed Initiative 91, called the anti-Sonics initiative in some circles. It requires that any city tax dollars invested in a stadium or arena yield a profit at least equal to the return on a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond, which at the moment is a little under 5 percent...
“We are not in the business [with the city's] opera or symphony or ballet or sports to make money for the city treasury,” Mayor Greg Nickels told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “What we're trying to do is have a high variety of cultural activities.”
That's rich, if you'll pardon the pun. When politicians are trying to sell stadium welfare to the voters, they're always yammering on about how the new place will be a boon to the local economy, that every tax dollar invested will yield, say, $3 in profit.
But when the voters say, “OK, let's put it in writing -- nothing spectacular, just a nice little 5 percent profit,” all of a sudden the issue becomes cultural enrichment. Sorry, voters, you looked under the wrong cup. The pea's under “cultural enrichment” this time, not “profits
...
There's nothing preventing the Sonics and Storm from staying in Seattle other than the desire to soak the taxpayers. Bennett and his partners can finance a new arena themselves, and the new law says nothing about county or state taxes, though Chris Van Dyk, who leads the group Citizens for More Important Things, which spearheaded the I-91 campaign, all but dared the teams to try that route.Meanwhile, Sacramento voters soundly rejected a quarter-cent increase in the sales tax that would have paid for a new arena for the Maloof brothers and their team, the Kings.
As in Seattle, the idea of public funding for sports stadiums lost by about 3-1.
If you can't sell Sacramento taxpayers on the idea of handing money over to the Kings, good luck elsewhere, although this time the Maloofs, the popular, handsome, dashing young owners, appeared to try to sabotage the measure because they reportedly didn't like the downtown arena deal it would have led to. A commercial for a fast-food chain showed them washing down burgers with a $6,000 bottle of bubbly -- while they had their hands out to taxpayers.
I'm not denying there is some civic pride tied up with having a group of millionaires perform their kabuki dance routines in front of a local audience that has been trained to care about the outcome, but the entire equation of public financing and private profit sucks in any milieu. Why should the entire city have to pay for the theatre too? If the billionaire owner can't afford to roof his team without public subsidy, perhaps he should sell it to the city?
Technorati Tags: Sacramento_Kings, sports, Supersonics
I agree, it needs to be a win-win. I really don't mind paying tax dollars for a new arena, but the city must see the benefits or the owners need to foot the bill.
Seems as if the mindset of the owners is: you pay for the state-of-the-art-stadium, I'll pay the salaries of the players and staff, I'll collect the ticket and television revenue, and keep it. In return for your taxpayer support, I won't move the team to another city, for a while. Of course, I may have to raise ticket prices and create more luxury boxes (while reducing the number of cheaper seats) to sell to corporations, so you, the taxpayer, may not be able to actually attend the game anymore, but hey, at least I'm not moving the team to another city, for a while.