The Wikipedia article on AT&T Stadium says that eminent domain was used to acquire some of the property. That seems ironic, given how unpopular the Kelo vs City of New London decision was among conservatives and Republicans.
I got you beat. The Atlanta Braves are building their new stadium in the county I live in. Not only are taxpayer funds being diverted from silly things like schools and roads, but they decided on this without letting us vote on it.
The stadium is part of a complex that will include retail, restaurants, an amphitheater, etc. The Cobb County government says the money to build the complex will be paid back from property taxes paid by the retailers. Of course if no one goes there the shops and restaurants won’t last very long. Since the Braves can’t sell out playoff games, when they make it, much less a regular season game, the tax payers of Cobb County are getting boned.
The stadium opens for the 2017 season, and there are currently no plans to fix the already ridiculous amount of traffic in that area.
The theory is that the Braves don’t sell out games in part because of where Turner Field is located. (Having gone there for a game, I can believe it.)
It makes no difference; the taxpayer shouldn’t be paying for the stadium even if the games sell out. 40,000 people instead of 37,000 is nothing, and retail stores are a flat business. If the complex is economically viable, why aren’t private investors building it themselves?
The league has to put salary caps on player salary because somehow, the team owners think their players are worth multimillion dollar yearly contracts to chase balls around a field funded by taxpayer sweat. What a business model. I’m really beginning to hate the owners of pro teams.
Which begs the question. Is college football even profitable? They field teams that are every bit as good without salary caps and, in many cases, taxpayer funding.
I think some college football teams are profitable. I’ve heard, for example, that Alabama is. But most are not. And I think many college athletic programs are the benefit of taxpayer funding.
College football has a rather stringent salary cap.
Perhaps it’s time for the NFL to stop fostering its culture of dependency and pull itself up by its bootstraps.
The short answer is, they don’t have to.
They don’t need to put any of their own money at risk. It’s all reward for them, and I can’t blame them. Who wouldn’t take all that money? They own the team. As long as there is another city out there willing to pony up the money, if you want to keep that team, the taxpayers are put over a barrel.
It is a great thing to be a team owner.
I don’t know about other people, but i’m not blaming the owners for asking for the money. There’s nothing to be lost by asking for a handout. That’s the fundamental principle behind panhandling, and it applies to squeegee bums and to NFL team owners alike.
I’m blaming the elected officials, and the voters who support them, for handing over the cash.
Exactly. It was a rhetorical question.
Other businesses do this too, of course. The Big Three automakers are infamous for it.
A few years ago Chrysler demanded the province of Ontario give them $700 million or else they might close up their plants here. The province couldn’t promise them the money… so they just came up with it themselves, and publicly stated the reason they asked for it was just to see if they could get it. Those weren’t the exact words but it was along the lines of “since the government has given us a lot of money before, we felt we should approach them to see if they were interested in more handouts.”
I mean, fair enough. The governments of Canada and Ontario had already given Chrysler and GM $14 billion in handouts through stock purchases, of which $3.5 billion was pure profit to Chrysler and GM. If the government is going to hand your business free money, it would be crazy not to take it - I know small companies who have someone on staff whose entire job is to navigate government subsidy programs to get free cash. Hell, I’d argue Chrysler would have been fiscally negligent to not ask. If they can just get $3.5 billion for nothing, asking for more is just the prudent thing to do. If the government offered me free money, I’d take it.
All government stadium deals are handouts. None are economically logical. Some, like the arena in Glendale, are fiscal catastrophes and you notice those; others, like pretty much any baseball stadium - let’s say Target Field - are also ripoffs, but it’s not a giant disaster because the tax base is large enough to absorb it and the team it hosts is not perpetually in a state of getting ready to leave town.
Every bit as entertaining, maybe. As good? Not hardly.
To the contrary, the NCAA caps student-athlete salaries, and benefit packages, pretty damn tightly. Not that there aren’t ways for boosters to express appreciation to players, of course.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment, as Dan McSwain demonstrates in a recent column in the local paper. I don’t always agree with McSwain, but I think he makes a good point here:
Something to that, I think. In today’s economy about the only business people who can be assured of a windfall from a football stadium are the ones who operate parking lots.