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To: konaice
In at least two of the three cases you mentioned (Safeco and PacBell), I believe the local government bore a fairly small portion of the overall cost of the project.

The State of New Jersey has been going through various iterations of this process in recent years to rationalize spending a pile of taxpayers' cash on a new arena for the New Jersey Nets (NBA) and Devils (NHL). The numbers often show that "arena will pay itself off in X years," but when you look at them in more detail you start to get a good picture of just how easy it is to manipulate the numbers.

One of the ways they do this is by including the income tax revenue from the team's players, front office staff, etc. in the "benefit" side of the equation. That might be technically correct from a financial standpoint, but you never see that rationale used in any other context. Using this argument, I could go out tomorrow and justify spending all sorts of taxpayer money in the area where I live -- simply because this is a pretty nice area of the New York City region and most people living here pay in the highest state income tax brackets.

P.S. The "zero sum" argument may have been discredited, but it is often valid when applied to specific cases. A family that spends $250 on a night out at an NBA game is spending $250 that they would have had regardless of whether the NBA team was there or not.

49 posted on 12/16/2004 3:47:54 PM PST by Alberta's Child (If whiskey was his mistress, his true love was the West . . .)
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To: Alberta's Child
In at least two of the three cases you mentioned (Safeco and PacBell), I believe the local government bore a fairly small portion of the overall cost of the project.

Nope. The majority.

Owner: Washington-King County stadium authority.
Cost: $517.6 million (as of July 1999).
Public financing: $340 million from a one-half-cent prepared food tax in King County and rental-car tax.
Private financing: $75 million from Mariners owners. Cost overruns of over $100 million are still being settled.

Facts About Safeco Park

That page is old data (2001), and I believe the over-run issue has been settled reasonably, since the Mariners have some of the best attendance figures in baseball. (35,000 per game is NORMAL).

But I don't have the details on the exact settlement. The reason it was drawn out is the City wanted additional features in the Park and street configuration after the contract was built. Perhaps someone from Seattle could help me out here.

Safeco Insurance paid $40 Million for nameing rights - but I don't know for how long.

54 posted on 12/16/2004 5:19:52 PM PST by konaice
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