What is the need for nationalization before a city should foot the bill? This isn't to say that cities should pay for a stadium, but there are definitely dynasty franchises that are guaranteed to generate income for many years. Would I build a stadium for the Rams? Not likely. Would I build a stadium for the Patriots? Immediately.
Or you could make teams pay for their own stadiums. They take the revenue so why shouldn't they? The equivalent is Amazon requiring local government to provide them with automated warehouses for them to relocate to (or remain in) that locality.
Agreed. My thing is, if a sports stadium is gonna be built with public money, it should belong to the public and the team owner should have to pay rent and/or revenue share. Otherwise, why should a billionaire (or group of wealthy people) get a taxpayer-funded stadium for them to print money with?
Why doesn't the city buy lavish buildings for other wildly profitable businesses? Professional sports don't need our tax money, they merely want it. If sports enthusiasts want to contribute money to the football stadium fund, they are free to.
It doesn't work that way in professional sports where team owners raking in guaranteed profits hold their host cities ransom every 20 years looking for a new public subsidized stadium. One that could be paid for out of pocket by investing a portion of the profit made over those 20 years.
In the US, stadiums are often funded by the taxpayers of the city/county. City governments (although often not the populace) are frequently obsessed with having pro sports teams. It's common to plow hundreds of millions of dollars to build a stadium to either get a new team or convince an existing team to not relocate.
Supporters typically claim that the economic benefit of a sports team offsets this cost, but the benefit is in fact completely negligible or even negative.
I'm not opposed to stadiums, but I am opposed to tax payer funded or loaned stadiums. I am also opposed to use of eminent domain to take land for any non-infrastructer project.
I figure if the team doesn't want to pay for it then get a "buy a brick" drive going and see if it funds the stadium.
> No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.
This also works for the Green Bay Packers (American Football). To raise money for an upgrade / expansion of their stadium, they just issued more ownership certificates, and the fans of the team bought them. GB has a unique ownership model compared to the rest of the NFL though.
These type of non-financial factors are always ignored in this debate. People seem to forget the government doesn't have to be profit focused and there are plenty of other examples of public expenditures that benefit private industries that are still widely popular. We don't expect public parks, libraries, or bridges to turn a profit, so I'm not sure why we expect stadiums financing deals to do it.
If the citizenry of a municipality votes to spend their money to ensure that a local team stays, that is up to them. That said, they are idiots if they come away with a deal like St Louis did that doesn't even protect them from a potential team move and any politician who pushes it through without a vote isn't fit for their job.
Because the sports team needs the infrastructure in order to operate.
IE, you can't build a stadium without upgrading the roads (and rail) to allow people to get there. Don't forget about parking if the stadium is going into a densely-populated area! The stadium also needs water, sewer, electricity, and maybe gas.
That being said, I suspect that a city helping with infrastructure, and the team paying for the stadium, is probably a good compromise.
> The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports.
There's a very simple solution to this issue.
Owner wants taxpayer money for the stadium? Taxpayer gets ownership in the franchise.
I think it's more that the owners realize without this rule cities will demand some kind of civic ownership of teams before they'll be willing to shell out tax money for stadiums and such.
The fact that NFL teams get taxpayers to foot the bill for new stadium construction and then the team retains the facility as private property, now that is what I have a problem with. Those facilities are bought with public money and should be public parks.
There are not just spare parcels floating around zoned for stadiums (or hospitals, or university campuses, or whatever). Creating one of these things is always an act of government.
That’s not to say the government should also have to pay, but the idea of sports teams acting like any other consumer of commercial real estate is clearly off.
The economic impact of a stadium or other large public works project is based in calculators that are usually published by the state economic development agency. It's more of an art than a science, and like any projection made over a period of 30 years, they rarely hit their numbers.
Public financing of something like a stadium or arena does three things: eliminates a tax liability for the teams/other users, eliminates risk, as the local taxing authority ultimately owns the debt, and keeps the labor and trade unions happy, and stadium projects keep the guys on the payroll.
Ultimately, all of people in a taxing district bear the burden of these giveaways. If I could apply for a full property tax exemption in NY, the $6,000/year I pay for my modest home would be used for capital improvements like a kitchen, solar panels and siding. That would give some construction dudes jobs, and generate more value. The government easily spent $100m on Super Bowl security. That's a lot of money spent better elsewhere or not at all.
Federal Government should not be allowed to tell cities how to spend their money, but something needs to be done what devinhelton said. Look up Atlanta about their stadium deals for the Falcons and Braves. The City Council basically ignored the citizens completely and went ahead to spend millions to replace 2 stadiums that really wasn't that old to begin with.
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