Taking hostages
No it's not ISIS, "armed and dangerous" militias, organized crime, gangs, drug kingpins, or any on the long and growing list of bad guys posing a danger to our cities. It's guys in business suits and well-known organizations like the NBA, NFL, and MLB as well as the sports teams that belong to them. Worse yet, the hostage-taking they're doing is completely legal and nearly always successful.
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Cities are routinely being squeezed into providing newer and better venues for their professional teams to play in (and, more importantly, make money from). The message is always the same: build us a new arena (or stadium) or we'll pick up our skirts and run to a city that will.
That drama is playing itself out in my home town as the NBAs Milwaukee Bucks are demanding that the nearly 25 year old Bradley Center be significantly upgraded or replaced. Or, they'll leave.
And it's about to play out in Washington, as the R-skins owner is now rumbling about a new stadium even though the current one is less than 18 years old.
And the Oakland As are flexing some muscle, too. The move Bud Selig, head of MLB, made may just result in the Oakland Raiders leaving town. Of course, it all revolves around a stadium.
Bud Selig is already on top of this one and he's gotten plenty of success in the past. After all, he managed to get the Milwaukee Brewers a brand new stadium (we're still paying for it with an increased sales tax) for baseball only (the Green Bay Packers used to play a few games in the old one until they were alienated by Selig and now only play in Green Bay).
The list goes on and on of cities coughing up tax dollars to fulfill the wishes of professional sports teams.
Over the past 20 years, 101 new sports facilities have opened in the United States—a 90-percent replacement rate—and almost all of them have received direct public funding. The typical justification for a large public investment to build a stadium for an already-wealthy sports owner has to do with creating jobs or growing the local economy, which sound good to the median voter. “If I had to sum up the typical [public] perspective,” Neil deMause, co-author of Field of Schemes and editor of the blog by the same title—the go-tos on the ongoing stadium subsidy story—told me via email, “I’d guess it’d be something along the lines of ‘I don’t want my tax money going to rich fat cats, but anything that creates jobs is good, and man that Jeffrey Loria sure is a jerk, huh?’” This confused mindset has resulted in public coffers getting raided. The question is whether taxpayers have gotten anything in return.
(bolding is mine)
The "jobs" that get "created" are usually temporary, low paying, or out of state contracting (building stadiums and arenas is a specialty). The new sports venue generally has an increased ticket price, as well, discouraging many from attending events and the always promised "economic benefits" to the city are never realized.
Those sports venues are also costing cities (taxpayers) more than ever, too.
By the late ’90s, the first wave of damning economic studies conducted by Robert Baade and Richard Dye, James Quirk and Rodney Fort, and Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist came to light, but well afterwards, from 2001 to 2010, 50 new sports facilities were opened, receiving $130 million more, on average, than those opened in the preceding decade. (All figures from Long’s book adjusted for 2010 dollars.) In the 1990s, the average public cost for a new facility was estimated at $142 million, but by the end of the 2000s, that figure jumped to $241 million: an increase of 70 percent.
Economists have also been, according to Long, drastically underestimating the true cost of these projects. They fail to consider public subsidies for land and infrastructure, the ongoing costs of operations, capital improvements (we need a new scoreboard!), municipal services (all those traffic cops), and foregone property taxes (almost every major-league franchise located in the U.S. does not pay property taxes “due to a legal loophole with questionable rationale” as the normally value-neutral Long put it). Due to these oversights, Long calculates that economists have been underestimating public subsidies for sports facilities by 25 percent, raising the figure to $259 million per facility in operation during the 2010 season.
(bolding is mine)
It's not like cities have a bunch of extra coin just laying around to buy new playthings for their plutocrats. The 2008 economic crash led to a major erosion of the tax base as people lost their jobs, home prices plummeted (reducing what cities collected in property taxes), and those who found new jobs generally made less and paid less in taxes. Many cities are having trouble just filling potholes, yet the demand for new professional sports complexes has actually escalated.
The team owners get richer and the city gets poorer every time this happens, yet local and state politicians keep on paying the demanded ransom. It's as inevitable as death and taxes (unless you're filthy rich, that is). And that ransom note is largely paid for by taxpayers who are rewarded not just with higher taxes, but with reduced services as local governments cough up the money to the hostage-takers.
I keep waiting for some city to finally stand up and say Fuck You to the leagues and team owners. You're the ones making the money from ticket sales and concessions. You're the ones who see the value of your teams increase. You're the ones who receive all the financial benefits. You should be the ones who pony up the money for a new facility for your team, too.
I'm not holding my breath for any sanity from politicians. We'll continue to see crumbling 60 year old schools, but the professional sports teams will be playing in brand new arenas and stadiums. The real question is: why?
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