jfish26 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 6:55 am
TDub wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 8:34 pm
jfish26 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 8:07 pm
It is ridiculous. But there are more cities willing to pay for it than there are teams. I would love to see a city say no…but I wouldn’t want that to be my city.
I just don't understand the logic in making people with sub 100k family incomes pay for a stadium owned by billionaires and used exclusively by multimillionaire athletes.
Then, on top of that, charging those same people $100s to watch millionaires play and $10 for beer.
They've modified the bread and circus logic and somehow made it worse.
I think that leaves out a lot of what the public gets out of a city/region having a team.
I don’t have a problem at all with cities/regions putting these things (to be clear: billionaire subsidies) to votes and letting people decide.
Take the recent ballot measure that failed in Kansas City, where county taxpayers were asked to shoulder a 3/8 cent sales (not income) tax for an additional few decades.
One can derive how much that means their family would be spending on the subsidies, and decide whether the “soft” benefits are worth it to them.
We’re absolutely in agreement on the bigger picture, but that’s a take-it-to-the-Pols-bored discussion about the concentration of wealth at the extreme right end of the curve.
So stadiums have a shelf life that is around thirty years and both the KC's are around 50 years old. You either play at and operate the glorified museum stadium, which is a tourist attraction, or you need the new one complete with an assortment of new amenities. The funny thing is our most celebrated venues are the old ones; L.A..’s Rose Bowl (1922), Chicago’s Wrigley Field (1914), Boston’s Fenway Park (1912). Those are ancient ruins compared to our others, such as Dodgers Stadium (1955), Lambeau Field (1957), Allen Fieldhouse (1955). Hope these last forever.
There are economic benefits to having pro arenas. The recent trend is going against taxpayer money. San Diego said no to Chargers, Oakland no to A's. The Wizards got a no. Kc said no. The LA RAMS just built a stadium with no taxpayer money. The KC deal was crafted decades ago and was just trying to reup the old deal. The failure was the old deal had the locals paying the tax.
These deals can be beneficial to all parties. The Dallas Mav's and Star's are in a stadium that has worked out really really well. Now it has less than 10 years to expiration. The original deal was like a third of the money paid by taxpayers and was financed by raising taxes on hotels and car rental. It was paid off early. The locals benefited by billions of private money pumped into that area that was a industrial hazard site before construction all paid for by tourist coming to town. That was the flaw in the KC deal trying to get the locals to pay for it.
I bring this up because recently Mark Cuban sold a majority stake of the Mav's to the Adelson's Las Vegas Sands. The Sands own the site of the old cowboys stadium. They want to build a casino/stadium on the site but Texas would have to approve gambling. On the other side is Vegas just got a NBA team.
Now we could get in to how Illinois and Chicago fund their stadiums but having lived there a couple years and my belief that it is the most corrupt land in the US I will leave it to Gutter to handle.