Dan Gillmor asks an important question in today's blog post: Fantasy Predictions of Sports Payback.
Why should a county or city or anyone but the franchise owners be buying a new stadium for a baseball or football team?
Aren't these massively for-profit enterprises that generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue? Why in the hell do they need to get a town or county to pay for their new home?
What is the benefit to the town? More traffic, more crime, more congestion. Sure, there's the name, the additional revenue that'll get to the town but it'll take a long, long time to pay off a $300 million stadium.
The more I think about this, the less sense it makes for anyone but the owners and team to pay for their own damned new stadium.
Unless I get free tickets, I don't want my taxes going to build a new stadium, I want my taxes to go to repairing our roads, improving our schools and actually going towards making my life and family life's better. That's what the tax contract is all about, not funding new homes for superrich sports franchise owners.
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