By Jared Meyer
Before the Super Bowl this Sunday, one winner is already determined—local New England Patriots fans. NFL owners are professionals at extracting taxpayer money from local fans to fund generous subsidies for their lavish stadiums, and the NFL is tax-exempt. But Patriots owner Robert Kraft took a different, more taxpayer-friendly, approach and arranged 100 percent private funding for the construction and maintenance of Gillette Stadium, located outside Boston. In contrast, the public’s share of financing for the Seattle Seahawks’ CenturyLink Field was 64 percent ($300 million). In this competition, the Patriots won by an even larger margin than they did against the Indianapolis Colts.
Local Seahawks fans are not just paying for CenturyLink Field—they are still paying for the team’s last home field as well. The Seattle Kingdome was occupied for just 24 years before the city agreed to build the Seahawks a new stadium. Even though the Kingdome was demolished in 2000, taxpayers were still responsible for nearly $180 million to cover its outstanding debts. The last of the debt will finally be paid off this year.
As Harvard professor Judith Grant Long shows in her 2012 book Public-Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities, taxpayer costs for new stadiums have been increasing drastically. Public funding for stadiums completed in the 2000s was 70 percent higher than for those completed in the 1990s.
Most public stadium cost figures are underestimated since...
Read the rest here.
1. Tax payers shouldn't be subsidizing a business.
ReplyDelete2. Business' shouldn't be paying income tax.
No one should pay an income tax. In fact, we shouldn't have to pay a property tax to live in our own homes. Dump the inheritance tax while we're at it.
DeleteAt least this Super Bowl finally has a roman numeral that is pronounceable as a word. Sure it sounds Klingon but you can pronounce it. XLIX. I can work with that.
ReplyDeleteSo often on the news we hear about the wonderfulness of some private-public partnership that everybody seems to be behind. And of course by public we mean government.
ReplyDeleteBut as George Washington quipped, "government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force." Which begs the question: How is a private partnership with force ever a good thing?
And the moral of the story is:
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to pay the war tax if you promote the war machine.
Search out the Vikings stadium debacle. The state could raise a nickel off thier New gambling u my adventure so they raised cigarette taxes by 2 bucks to make up for it. The owners however have managed to rig it so they hardy have to put up 10% of thier own money. They get some great financing through the NFL And pay that back with a cut of the titicket sales.
ReplyDeleteOne of the biggest snow jobs ever. Some how this stuff keeps happening. They should allow us who pay for this garbage put up a giant stone momument at the stadium laying out the arguments against ever doing it again...Never forget. It's only 8 f@&#ing games a year. Plus 2 lousy preseason games. Good luck with the monster truck rallies. And we know the figures for how much the super bowl will impact the local economy are a complete farce.
How Goldman Banker Became NFL’s Go-To Stadium-Finance Guy
ReplyDelete(Bloomberg) -- The Missouri officials trying to keep the National Football League’s St. Louis Rams from leaving town would seem to have the deck stacked against them. The team plays in a relatively small media market. Attendance is below league average. The team’s owner says he’s determined to leave.
But the group has a potent player in Greg Carey, a 54-year-old Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who is known in professional sports circles as the guru of stadium financing. Under Carey, Goldman Sachs has worked on more than two dozen stadium deals, the company says, amounting to more than $11 billion in financing.
Carey’s specialty is crafting deals that are lucrative for team owners, often at the expense of taxpayers.
Taxpayer Lawsuit
A lawsuit against the city of Sacramento by three taxpayers, filed in 2013 and amended last year, includes an allegation that Goldman, which isn’t named as a defendant,
improperly served as both the city’s financial adviser and bond underwriter for the stadium deal.
“Goldman Sachs ran the numbers,” said Craig Powell, president of Eye on Sacramento, a watchdog group, who isn’t one of the suit’s plaintiffs.
“They were at the center of this all along. The city treasurer couldn’t go to the bathroom on this deal without checking with Goldman Sachs.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/how-goldman-banker-became-nfl-s-go-to-stadium-finance-guy
thanks in part to a season with more than ten periods as many activities as the stream nfl games and twice as many activities in ballparks four periods as big as what the NBA offers
ReplyDelete