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Thread: The Never-Ending Stadium Boondoggle

  1. #31
    A few searches later I see the NFL is dropping their non profit status. It appears it's a cover to hide their filings that show the payroll. While 44 million for the chairman that can organize a multi billion dollar industry doesn't seem that out of place it's probably bad for PR.
    “…let us teach them that all who draw breath are of equal worth, and that those who seek to press heel upon the throat of liberty, will fall to the cry of FREEDOM!!!” – Spartacus, War of the Damned

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  3. #32



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  5. #33
    Roberts: Sell Chase Field for 25 cents on the dollar?

    A group of private investors has offered to buy Chase Field for $60 million.

    Put another way, a group of private investors has offered to pay us $178 million less than we kicked in to build the joint 18 years ago.

    One in which county leaders apparently negotiated a pretty good deal, given the Arizona Diamondbacks' grumbling of late.

    The investors apparently have big plans for Chase and downtown Phoenix.

    “The buyer is interested in creating a sports and entertainment district surrounding the facility which would make the facility a destination place that would further complement and enhance the downtown area and increase tax revenues within such sports and entertainment district,” according to a letter from Wisconsin attorney Martin Greenberg, who is representing the investors, Stadium Real Estate Partners II LLC.

    “We believe that the sale to a private party with capital capabilities as the Buyer will preserve the legacy of the Seller in originally creating a state-of-the-art home for the Team by putting the future of baseball and the facilities in which it plays in private ownership.”

    Translation: Along with acquiring the ballpark at a fire sale price, we want a tax break. (The letter doesn’t say that, but come on…)

    The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is poised to discuss the offer on Wednesday.

    While they’re at it, I hope they’ll explain why it’s in our interest to sell the ballpark and the prime downtown land beneath it for 25 cents on the dollar.
    http://www.azcentral.com/story/opini...sale/88876470/
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  6. #34
    Roberts: 3 questions about the Chase Field fire sale

    ...

    Question No. 1:

    Who, exactly, is proposing to take Chase Field off our hands?

    Supervisor Denny Barney on Wednesday said the offer was unsolicited. In other words, the county had no plan to sell the ballpark until suddenly a group of East Coast investors offered $60 million for the joint.

    Wisconsin attorney Martin Greenberg, in his letter of intent, assures us that nobody associated with the Arizona Diamondbacks or its investors are part of the investor group.

    But there’s no way to verify that. There are at least four LLCs wrapped around this deal making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify who, precisely, is proposing to take Chase Field off our hands for $60 million.

    The investor group making the offer is Stadium Real Estate Partners II, LLC. It was incorporated in Delaware on June 20, specifically to do this deal.

    MONTINI: Would you rent your ballpark to the D-Backs?

    Stadium Real Estate Partners II, LLC is owned by Legacy Investment Partners LLC, which was registered in Delaware on June 8, according to that state's records.

    Legacy Investment Partners LLC is owned by New York-based Park South Capital, LLC, which was registered on Feb. 19 – a month before the Diamondbacks-county feud hit public view.

    The managing partner of these various LLCs is Sorina Givelichian, a New York and Toronto investment banker.

    Meanwhile, Stadium Real Estate Partners II, LLC is working “in conjunction with” Integral Group LLC, an Atlanta-based real-estate firm run by Egbert Perry, board chairman of Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association.

    Somebody stands to make a lot of money on this deal at the expense of Maricopa County taxpayers. Why else would these unidentified investors be making this unsolicited offer?

    Shouldn’t we know who those somebodys are?

    Question No. 2:

    How could a ballpark we spent $250 million to build not even 20 years ago on prime land in downtown Phoenix be worth only $60 million?

    I built my house around that same time. It’s now worth more than twice what I paid for it. Why is Chase Field worth only a quarter of what we paid for it?

    Why would we sell it for $60 million when the county's own assessor puts the value at $351 million?

    Maricopa County Supervisor Denny Barney, in selling the deal to his colleagues, laid it out: “This allows us to honor the public trust by not only returning public dollars to the public coffers … and at same time finding a way to help Diamondbacks play and maintain their agreement to play in Chase Field.”

    In other words, we’re holding this fire sale because team owner Ken Kendrick has threatened to go elsewhere if we don’t give him better terms than called for in his team’s contract with the county. Read: $187 million in ballpark upgrades.

    Put another way: we’re contemplating selling a public asset for 25 cents on the dollar so that Diamondbacks can get what they want: Fewer seats, fancier suites and more doodads that the county says our contract doesn’t require us to provide.

    Great deal … for the Diamondbacks.

    So what’s in it for us? Oh I know. They’ll stay in downtown Phoenix and we’ll reap the benefits of that via taxes collected and future economic development as a result of the team staying put.

    Which brings me to Question No. 3:

    How can you sell a $250 million ballpark for $60 million and not run afoul of the gift clause in the Arizona Constitution – the one that says you can’t give away our stuff?

    The Arizona Supreme Court has said you can’t consider “indirect public purposes” – things like future tax revenues or economic development – in determining whether something’s a giveaway.

    The public, the court ruled, must get a fair return on the public’s investment.

    Which, by my count, means a $250 million stadium ought to be worth far more than $60 million. And if it's not, why on earth did we build the thing to begin with?

    The county assures us that it plans on hiring an appraiser -- one who apparently specializes in old sports stadiums -- to make sure we aren't getting hosed on this deal.

    What do you want to just bet that the value of Chase Field and the prime downtown land underneath it comes in at $60 million?
    http://www.azcentral.com/story/opini...sale/88921098/
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  7. #35
    We will have two competing "new stadium" ballot issues to vote on this fall in San Diego- different costs, different locations- one proposed by the team and one proposed by an "alternative" group. According to the election commission, the full text of the bills are huge (as are their costs). If printed in full in the voter pamphlets, those two issues alone will occupy 500 pages (yes, 500!)- 300 for the team proposal and 200 for the alternative. Just printing the booklet will add over $1 million to the cost of the election so they are considering only printing the "summary" data in the booklet and letting (forcing) those interested in the details to go online to read them. There is a long list of other ballot proposals this fall too.

  8. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by Voluntarist View Post
    [Missouri Governor Jay] Nixon said he has no plans to seek Legislative approval. This is an economic development project, he repeated Thursday. He doesn’t seek Legislative or voter approval for business expansion, he said, or factory construction.

    “If we don’t do this, there is no other project that’s going to knock out 50 dilapidated buildings and build a world-class facility there,” he said. “There’s nothing else in the queue.”

    Besides, he said, the Legislature had all session this year to do something, and couldn’t get anything done, he said.
    No doubt there were perfectly good reasons that "nothing else [was] in the queue" and "no other project [was] going to knock out 50 dilapidated buildings and build a world-class facility there" - but the essence of government "economic development projects" consists in ignoring all such reasons and doing it anyway ...
    The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER
    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
    • "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
      -- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)
    • "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
      -- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)

    · tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·

  9. #37
    Taxpayers Will Pay $1 Million to Tear Down $18 Million Baseball Stadium That Predictably Failed to Rejuvenate Camden



    ....

    The state's economic development authorities, she said, had "heard the message from the movie, Field of Dreams: 'If you build it, they will come.'"

    "Well, soon we will see a field of dreams right here in Camden, and my prediction is 'they will come,'" Whitman said.

    Taxpayers spent more than $18 million to build the stadium that would eventually be named Campbell's Field, as part of a minor league ballpark-building frenzy across New Jersey that saw similar stadiums erected in Newark, Atlantic City, and Somerset—all part of redevelopment schemes that attracted independent minor league teams (that is, minor league teams not affiliated with the Major League Baseball farm system).

    Less than two decades later, taxpayers in New Jersey will pay another $1 million to tear down Campbell's Field.

    The sad saga of the Camden Riversharks—the Atlantic League team for whom the stadium was built prior to the 2001 season—will come to an official end more than three years after the team picked up and moved to New Britain, Connecticut, leaving Campbell's Field vacant. The city tried to attract a new team, but after those efforts failed, the Camden County Improvement Authority signed off on a plan to demolish the stadium, according to NJ.com. The Riversharks and Campbell's Field were supposed to revitalize the impoverished city by being the centerpiece of an economic development plan along the edge of the Delaware River. Now, the demolition of the stadium is the first step in a new $15 million economic development scheme that will turn the site into a complex of athletic fields for Rutgers University's Camden campus, NJ.com reports.

    The stadium was a mistake from the start, though it did offer sweeping views of the Ben Franklin Bridge and the Philadelphia skyline across the river. The great view wasn't enough to convince fans to go to Camden, a deeply improverished city best known for its high crime rate. In the team's final two seasons, the Riversharks averaged about 3,000 fans per game—which is actually not bad by the standards of independent minor league baseball—but the team never turned a profit and abruptly skipped town in 2015 when negotiations on a new lease stalled.

    By then, the ballpark was so deep in debt that it faced foreclosure because the team had missed several lease payments. To bail it out, Camden paid off $3.5 million in outstanding debt and purchased the property. The city planned to impose a new ticket surcharge to cover those costs, but the city only received one payment from the team before it moved away, NJ.com reported last year.

    Camden's not the only city to dump a ton of money into a minor (or major) league ballpark under the guise of economic development, only to see the project become a fiscal black hole. The minor league teams that moved into Newark and Atlantic City around the same time as the Riversharks started playing in Camden have met similar fates. The Atlantic City Surf survived for 11 years before going bankrupt and the Newark Bears folded in 2014. Their riverfront stadium in downtown Newark is also set to be demolished less than 20 years after it was built.

    ...


    https://reason.com/blog/2018/12/05/t...on-to-tear-dow
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  10. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Suzanimal View Post
    Taxpayers Will Pay $1 Million to Tear Down $18 Million Baseball Stadium That Predictably Failed to Rejuvenate Camden
    https://reason.com/blog/2018/12/05/t...on-to-tear-dow
    One of our members that no longer posts here, had a kid that played there on that team.

  11. #39
    Bills' new stadium deal resurfaces puzzling question: Why do owners get taxpayer money to build venues?

    The state's taxpayers are picking up most of the $1.4 billion-dollar tab.

    And as far as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is concerned, it's really just a hell of a deal.


    In a Monday announcement, Hochul didn't focus so much on the $850 million in taxpayer funds that will be funneled to the Bills – which is believed to be the largest public contribution ever made to build an NFL football facility. Nor on the additional $280 million for maintenance and improvements, which will drive the public's total contribution north of $1 billion.

    Instead, Hochul stressed the 10,000 temporary construction jobs that will be created, and claimed that the team's economic impact will cover "more than 100 percent" of taxpayers' investment.

    "I’m really proud to negotiate such a good deal for the state and our many, many fans," Hochul told reporters.

    The deal left some state lawmakers asking why Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, who have an estimated net worth of $5.8 billion, couldn't just foot the bill themselves.

    Why, many have wondered, do stadiums get any taxpayer money at all?

    "Economists have had really a tough time explaining this," said Kennesaw State economics professor J.C. Bradbury, a critic of public stadium financing.


    ...
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mor...cid=uxbndlbing
    Quote Originally Posted by Ron Paul View Post
    The intellectual battle for liberty can appear to be a lonely one at times. However, the numbers are not as important as the principles that we hold. Leonard Read always taught that "it's not a numbers game, but an ideological game." That's why it's important to continue to provide a principled philosophy as to what the role of government ought to be, despite the numbers that stare us in the face.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    This intellectually stimulating conversation is the reason I keep coming here.

  12. #40
    Considering the money the states extort in the form of sales tax and other taxes, maybe they see that using tax money to build a stadium is a good investment for future tax revenue. Besides who are you or any tax payer to question where the state or city spends its money. It is not your job to question how taxes are spent. It is your job to pay taxes!



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