Seattle Initiative 91, which prevents the use of taxpayer money to subsidize arenas (ie a new Key Arena), passed with an overwhelming 74 percent of the vote. To which the Seattle Times says:
This initiative, no matter how hearty its public support, is lousy policy…
(Of course, if I-920 had passed by a hair, the Times would have praised the wisdom of voters, but, well, what do you expect from the Times?)
Sure, maybe I-91 is lousy policy. But then, isn’t that also true of most initiatives?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to spend a couple hundred million dollars subsidizing the Sonics, but I-91, a totally inflexible measure that could come back to bite us in the future, was the wrong way to stop it. And even initiatives based on sound policy and with good intent are usually crappily written, chock full of vague language and unforeseen consequences.
Let’s face it, some guy sitting in his bonus room churning out initiatives for an up or down vote is a just plain stupid way to legislate. The Times basically came out and said that 74 percent of Seattle voters — you know, the readers it’s tasked with informing — were wrong. Me… I think it’s the process that’s gone to hell.
TANGENTIAL ASIDE:
When the Sonics finally head off to Oklahoma City, no doubt there will be many fans throughout the region cursing us “Seattle liberals” for our obstinance. They might not want to pay for our “gold plated tunnels,” but they have no problem with Seattle taxing itself to build an arena that serves the entire region. So think of this is an important civics lesson to be learned by the region’s suburban and ex-urban isolationists: we all have a shared stake in maintaining urban Seattle as a healthy and vibrant, economic and cultural core.
I grew up in a suburb outside of Philadelphia, but I always considered myself a Philadelphian, as did all our neighbors. Even people who grew up across the river in Cherry Hill and other New Jersey suburbs tended to identify themselves as Philadelphians.
Yet ask a traveling Puget Soundian where they are from and they’re at least as likely to say Bellevue or Renton or Redmond as they are to simply reply Seattle. There are kids who grow up on the Eastside whose parents rarely allow them to venture into the big, bad city except for sporting events or other special occasions; for some of our region’s youth, their first days at the UW must seem like visiting some strange, foreign land.
I hate to break it to you folks, but Bellevue is Seattle. Renton and Redmond are both Seattle. Mercer Island? Most definitely Seattle. And the same is true in reverse.
Perhaps that’s one of the things we saw in Tuesday’s election when traditionally Republican Eastside districts were virtually swept by the Democrats: a growing regionalism in which suburban voters recognize how much in common they have with their urban neighbors, sharing both values and interests.
Or maybe not.
Another thing that’s happening is that Democrats are leaving high-priced Seattle and moving outward for less-expensive digs. However you look at it, growing sense of regionalism or Demcoratic exodus or both, the blue is spreading and the red retreating. Can you say Gold Bar?
As is always the case with things like this, our esteemed civic leaders will no doubt find a way to proceed with it anyway, because what they want seems to take precedence over the desires of the people. How the hell many times was the Monorail approved by the voters, in spite of which they found a way to kill it off anyway?
Everybody knows I-91 specifically targeted the Sonics. If the issue is somehow brought up for a vote again, the outcome might be different if the parties involved manage to do a better job of pointing out that Wally Walker’s already been given his…uh…(Forgive me!)…walking papers. On the other hand, we can’t help but wonder whether the new owners are at all sincere in their claim that their eventual goal is the Oklamahome City Sonics/Storm, sooner or later.
Commentby ArtFart— 11/13/06@ 10:37 am
Uh, the monorail project was killed off by the same force that wrought its inception, another initiative. If anything, the monorail project is a good example of well meaning but wrong headed intentions leading down a dead end.
The Seattle Times is fearful of losing readers if the Sonics leave the region. This is the real motive for their opposition to I-91. Always read the subtext of their editorials.
Granting a sales tax exemption to newspaper customers is bad public policy.
At least Seattle has an NFL team. When someone tells me they are from LA, i have to ask which part. I grew up down there in the way longtime back ago, and LA is a huge synonym for what would be the northern chunk of Southern California. It is why people from Newport Beach or Fullerton will tell you they are from Orange County; why people from LaJolla or Escondido, or San Diego will say they are from SoCal. LA is pretty much the entire region north of Orange County, south of the Grapevine, east of Ventura, and west of San Bernadino. Seattle is no different really, as you point out. Is Tacoma Seattle or just the airport? People are still a bit more provincial because the lattice work of freeways and commercial needs is relatively recent and people still affiliate with their origins.
As for arenas and economies, while most of you would love to believe that there is great hope in a booming economy that would bring in tax dollars (and yes, surcharges on hotels and restaurant bills are a form of taxes), the reality is that professional sports are pricing themselves out of existence for most of the population. Why spend money to go to an arena or stadium, when one can watch the event, up close and personal, on TV. The future of the internets (tubes) will bring theater, music, and other local live performing arts and sports to more and more homes. The rich can build their own arenas, and own their favorite teams, and develop lucrative relationships with one another, then sell us the visitation rights on our home screens.
Whoever could you be thinking of with this statement? :-)
Sez this Cherry Hill NJ-raised Philadelphian. Some might argue that we called ourselves Philadelphians to “correct” those who believed that all New Jerseyites are New York suburbanites, but it’s really true that the entire orientation of just about all of New Jersey from Princeton/Trenton on south was and is toward Philly.
Oh c’mon Goldy; you don’t really expect Republican FREELOADER in Bellevue and Renton to pay for THEIR basketball team’s* arena, do you?
* Of course it’s their basketball team. They’re the only ones who can afford to buy tickets to games. None of Seattle’s working class gets to go to these events.
Maybe one of the reasons the Sonics will be leaving is because it’s cheaper to have your photo taken with Dubya at a GOP fundraiser than it is to watch a game.
I’ve always thought circuses and sports arenas deserve votes by the plebs. Note that QWest Field was built via a STATEWIDE vote. I’ve also thought that part of Eyman’s genesis was caused by the Legislature doing an end-run after the first Safeco Field plan was shot down in King County.
Personally, I’d have King County put a package together with the Sonics using existing tax money that would expire in a few years that involves some arts funding as well, and put it up for a countywide vote. Then Chris van Dyk can’t whine about no public participation, and the Sonics can’t whine if they are turned down. If the citizens want more important things, that’s fair… but if they want sports arenas, they should get them.
You’re unusually growly this morning in your carping about initiatives, Goldy. You’ve had a busy week. You did a great show last night, but it must have been taxing of your energy. Have another cuppa joe and take a 15-minute break. I like our initiative process, and so do the rest of us Westerners. Being an Easterner, you just don’t understand our populist traditions around here. We’d rather become vegetarians than give up the initiative! … Come to think of it, I AM a vegetarian …
Couldn’t agree more with your tangential aside.
But just as Seattle residents should identify with suburban residents and vice versa, and our new crop of suburban legislators should identify with Seattle and its legislators, so too should Seattle legislators recognize that, in a defacto sense, they represent more than just their own sports hating, tax raising, stripper loving constituents.
I want to remind everyone that Sound Politics is a subversive organization that sponsors advocacy of terrorist attacks on the U.S.:
“Congratulations Speaker Pelosi, now let the bombs fall where they may. My prediction: terror attack on domestic soil passenger aircraft within the next six months. Casualties in the 2-300 range. And, unfortunately, maybe that’s just what we need. It’s obvious people don’t remember what happened 5 years ago.
Posted by FullContactPolitics at November 8, 2006 10:52 AM”
http://tinyurl.com/ydlfwu
And now, in today’s news, we have an honest-to-God Freeper busted and in jail for mailing threats and fake anthrax powder to numerous liberal figures. The wingnuts have gone crazy! It’s only a matter of time before a Sound Politics wingnut blows up a plane or something.
I’ve always disagreed with Goldy’s antipathy toward initiatives. Whatever I am, no one can accuse me of being a rubberstamp for what Goldy writes.
Never, none, under no circumstances are always bad phrases for initiatives. I 100% support public funding for sports facilities as long as a majority of revenue generated returns to city/county/state. My problem with the Sonics (and why I won’t miss them) was their demand to have a publicly financed arena that they would have full controll over revenue including non-basketball events. SCREW YOU!!!
Take Candlestick Park in S.F. as an example, granted it was built in the 1970s under totally different circumstances. It is owned and run by the S.F. department of parks. All the parking lots are owned by the city and the non-merchandise concessions are contracted to third party companies by the city. It took almost 20 years to pay off construction, but since the early 90s, every car that parks at a 49er game @ $30 a pop is profit for the city. The city is now on the hook for marginal yearly maintenance costs that don’t come close to the revenue generated.
That’s the kind of deal that everyone should support. We’ll build the arena and give the Sonics a sweatheart deal on the rent and give them 100% of Sonics merchandise sales. Everything else goes back to the city.
One of the new Sonic majority owner’s business partners gave a quarter mil to the Swift Boat Liars.
Therefore, he’s a skunk by association.
Good riddance.
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15
One of the new Sonic majority owner’s business partners gave a quarter mil to the Swift Boat Liars. Commentby Jim— 11/13/06@ 11:24 am
Antoher reason why we shouldn’t be forced to give OUR money to these bloodsucking assholes.
I’m glad it passsed. Here’s the text of a letter to the editor I sent to the dailies in the Spring:
After reading about the latest demands of the Sonics’ ownership this evening, I heard on NPR that there has been $16 Billion of public money spent on facilities for U.S. professional sports franchises in the last 10 years. Then I went to my volunteer shift answering phones at the Crisis Clinic. As usual, there weren’t enough beds at the Domestic Violence shelters, people without health insurance (some of the 46 million) were trying to figure out how to pay their medical bills, mentally ill people lacked medications and support, homeless men were told “Sorry, there’s nothing available,” circumstances cascading like dominos were causing normal human beings to contemplate killing themselves, etc., etc., etc.
The insanity has to stop. Let’s be a Real “World Class City” and tell the Sonics not just No, but Hell No! This community has screaming, bleeding, urgent needs. Subsidizing a professional basketball team is emphatically not one of them.
When the Sonics leave, just think of the improvement in the traffic downtown in Seattle on game days…
“Yet ask a traveling Puget Soundian where they are from and they’re at least as likely to say Bellevue or Renton or Redmond as they are to simply reply Seattle.”
Ask a person from New York City and they are just as likely to say they are from the Bronx or Brooklyn so Goldy, in this case, you are wrong. To prove differently, please go out and do a survey to see what people actually say rather than make assumptions.
to czechsaaz:
While most of what you say is sensible, I must correct you on a factual point. Candlestick Park was built in the late 1950s, as part of the deal to bring the Giants from New York to San Francisco. It opened for the 1960 baseball season.
The 49ers started playing there in about 1972 (the’d played previously at Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park) … perhaps that’s where your misconception about its history comes from.
If they can afford to pay $100 million salaries for playing ball, they can afford to build their own arena.
Or maybe the players should get together and build it so they can continue knocking down those megamillion salaries.
If you want to be successful under our economy system, it helps to have tall parents.
… and short guys don’t get elected president no matter how smart they are, while tall guys get elected president no matter how dumb they are.
by Goldy, 11/13/2006, 10:16 AM
“Perhaps that’s one of the things we saw in Tuesday’s election when traditionally Republican Eastside districts were virtually swept by the Democrats: a growing regionalism in which suburban voters recognize how much in common they have with their urban neighbors, sharing both values and interests.
Or maybe not. ”
Goldy can you clarify something for me? Is this a back handed agreement with Van Dyk’s assertion that other cities should shun building a new area for the Sonics just because Seattle voted against doing so?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....cs11m.html
“If Seattle speaks, should other cities around the state have to listen?
They should, argue sponsors of Seattle’s recently approved Initiative 91, which limits taxpayer subsidies for a new Sonics arena.
Backers of I-91 on Friday called on other cities, such as Bellevue, to heed the message sent by the three-fourths of Seattle voters who favored I-91.
‘This vote reflected not just the will of the people of Seattle. It reflected sentiment statewide,’ said Chris Van Dyk, organizer for Citizens for More Important Things, at a news conference.”
Van Dyk’s arrogance is starting to remind me a lot of Eyman, and that’s not a compliment.
C’mon FF, Bellevue is a Republican town; you don’t really think they plan to build an arena with their own money, do you? Wait and see, in January they’ll be panhandling the legislature.
Commentby Roger Rabbit— 11/13/06@ 5:01 pm
“C’mon FF, Bellevue is a Republican town; you don’t really think they plan to build an arena with their own money, do you? Wait and see, in January they’ll be panhandling the legislature.”
I assume you are referring to me. Should I berate you on your spelling because you typed “FF” instead of “CF”?
The Mariners stadium was built in a “Democrat town” who begged for (and got) state money, so I’m not sure what your point is here.
There is no proof that subsidizing sports teams and their facilities generates a net profit in taxes with increased business growth. There is always a net loss–for the taxpayers.
There is plenty of proof that it generates a net loss year after year (kind of like slot machines, except even then we have the luxury of intermittent reinforcement).
Second, people are sick and tired of sporto profiteers whining about how they are entitled to help from the nanny state–for ventures that should not be a priority over, say schools (funny how the Times moans about no money for students and wants a mass resignation of the school board, but pushes the repeal of the estate tax) or public transit (of any flavor) to name a few examples.
What, we’re going to have a tunnel, and a new basketball arena, and a trolley, and a new 520, and fill potholes? The people running this place must’ve had rich parents who gave them everything they wanted on Christmas, instead of getting taught the lesson that you can’t have everything.
Someone provided a means to say no to the city, county, and the sport owners–actually they provided a means to say “go to hell, and stay there”. If its bad policy, the blame is with those that have generated so much animosoty over the years with the last two goddamned stadiums that it will create the “fuck off” vote that people like Tim Eyman used to be good at.
It seems as though we would have had to vote for something extreme regardlress, because maybe it will be rolled back to something that is reasonable–rahter then gutted of substance entirely, had it been a “more reasonable” set of laws.
I’m sure they’ll find a way around it. They always do.
28 Safeco Field was financed by a classic back-room political deal, after the voters had said no. The only reason there wasn’t rioting in the streets about it was that by the time it happened, the M’s were on a winning streak that nearly took them to the World Series.
The Sonics have been another matter. There’s been a long history of bad management since before Schultz bought the team. Furthermore, this time it’s like we’re being asked to provide the addict with another fix all too soon–we ponied up for one remodel of the Coliseum into Key Arena, having been told that it would solve all the team’s problems. Well, guess what? It didn’t. So now we’re supposed to take the hammer and smash our hand again to drown out the pain from the first time?
28 To elaborate a little further, this may be a “Democrat town”, but it wasn’t the Democrats who went begging to Olympia, unless Slade Gorton secretly changed his party affiliation.
All that being said, I have to point out that Safeco Field is a wonderful ball park, perhaps one of the finest in the country, and my wife and I have enjoyed quite a few games there. So, I’m not spouting sour grapes about what was done. Now, on the other hand, if the M’s management starts making noise about how the team won’t win any more games unless we pony up another few hundred million for more glamorama luxury boxes for the bigwigs….that would be another matter.
Commentby ArtFart— 11/13/06@ 6:02 pm
“To elaborate a little further, this may be a ‘Democrat town’, but it wasn’t the Democrats who went begging to Olympia, unless Slade Gorton secretly changed his party affiliation.”
Slade Gorton wasn’t alone. The effort was bipartisan. The desire to give welfare to sports teams crosses party lines. So whether a town is a “Republican town” or “Democrat town”, it doesn’t really matter.
“Sure, maybe I-91 is lousy policy. But then, isn’t that also true of most initiatives?”
yup, that’s right goldy the people are WAAAAY TOO STUPID to decide for themselves what they want…they have to let one rep. speak for them.
ohmygod….are you really this ignorant? here in california we have a healthy iniative process. but then…we also trust citizens to have brains and to be able to speak their own mind.
34
I spent part of this morning reading a list of proposed initiatives from years past. I have to agree with Goldy. The vast majority of them were lousy policy and would have been completely unimplementable if in some alternate universe they had passed.
I like the idea of initiatives but they need to be clearly defined, properly researched and written with professional help so they don’t waste the public’s time and money when the inevitable challenges turn them over.
Perhaps that’s one of the things we saw in Tuesday’s election when traditionally Republican Eastside districts were virtually swept by the Democrats: a growing regionalism in which suburban voters recognize how much in common they have with their urban neighbors, sharing both values and interests.
Or maybe not.
Oh maybe Darcy Burner which you eastcosters put your money and time behind might disagree with that statement. Don’t get me wrong EASTCOASTERS we like your money and will put up with your politics to get your money. Thank you..
Another thing that’s happening is that Democrats are leaving high-priced Seattle and moving outward for less-expensive digs. However you look at it, growing sense of regionalism or Demcoratic exodus or both, the blue is spreading and the red retreating. Can you say Gold Bar? Commentby Daddy Love— 11/13/06@ 10:37 am
Why is this Daddy Love? Why are Moonbats! leaving “high-priced, high-taxed” Seattle? Moonbat! economic policies that don’t work/ Tax and spend policies that people are fed up with? People wanting to live well and not have the Moonbat! govmint suck them dry like leeches?
I’ll take your answer off air!
Sez this Cherry Hill NJ-raised Philadelphian. Some might argue that we called ourselves Philadelphians to “correct” those who believed that all New Jerseyites are New York suburbanites, but it’s really true that the entire orientation of just about all of New Jersey from Princeton/Trenton on south was and is toward Philly. Commentby N in Seattle— 11/13/06@ 10:57 am
Puddy was right again about you “white boys from the burbs”, claiming to be city folk!
Couldn’t agree more with your tangential aside. But just as Seattle residents should identify with suburban residents and vice versa, and our new crop of suburban legislators should identify with Seattle and its legislators, so too should Seattle legislators recognize that, in a defacto sense, they represent more than just their own sports hating, tax raising, stripper loving constituents.
Commentby Ryan— 11/13/06@ 11:15 am
How can you agree with way-out whack-job Moonbats!? How can you agree with twerps who elect Jim McDermott? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
One of the new Sonic majority owner’s business partners gave a quarter mil to the Swift Boat Liars. Commentby Jim— 11/13/06@ 11:24 am Antoher reason why we shouldn’t be forced to give OUR money to these bloodsucking assholes. Commentby Roger Rabbit— 11/13/06@ 3:14 pm
FUCK YOU FURBALL! It’s his money. You Moonbats! claim everyone is free to use their money as they please until it is used politically? Hogwash! If he isn’t taking proceeds from the Sonics, hell if he is, who the fuck are you to complain? Moonbat!
The Mariners stadium was built in a “Democrat town” who begged for (and got) state money, so I’m not sure what your point is here. Commentby ConservativeFirst— 11/13/06@ 5:17 pm
Duly noted it’s hard to argue with Furball. He doesn’t make coherent points. He always takes the anti-MTR position. He has a small rabbit brain. Not much use when thinkers start dialogs!