NY Times
The $83 million local taxpayers still owe on the Kingdome, ten years after it was demolished, gets a mention in today’s New York Times article on the extraordinary bad deal publicly financed stadiums turn out to be, but that’s nothing compared to the most Giant boondoggle of them all:
It’s the gift that keeps on taking. The old Giants Stadium, demolished to make way for New Meadowlands Stadium, still carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident, even though it is now a parking lot.
And that’s just the debt on Giants Stadium alone. Three and a half decades after workers first broke ground, New Jersey taxpayers still owe $266 million on the entire Meadowlands project.
So I guess we got off relatively easy with the Kingdome. How many years we taxpayers will be paying off the bonds on Safeco and Qwest fields after they’ve been abandoned or demolished, now that’s another question. And what more useful or productive purposes we might have put that money to, rather than padding the pockets of billionaires, well, we can only speculate at this time when city, county and state governments are facing unprecedented deficits.
As the NY Times article concludes:
With more than four decades of evidence to back them up, economists almost uniformly agree that publicly financed stadiums rarely pay for themselves. The notable successes like Camden Yards in Baltimore often involve dedicated taxes or large infusions of private money. Even then, using one tax to finance a stadium can often steer spending away from other, perhaps worthier, projects.
“Stadiums are sold as enormous draws for events, but the economics are clear that they aren’t helping,” said Andrew Moylan, the director of government affairs at the National Taxpayers Union. “It’s another way to add insult to injury for taxpayers.”
An interesting side note, the new $1.6 billion dollar Meadowlands Stadium both the Jets and the Giants will inaugurate this fall, was built entirely with private money, so it can be done. By comparison, taxpayers picked up the cost for 71% of Paul Allen’s Qwest Field. Go figure.
Nice catch. I missed the $83M owed on the King Dome.
Yet another classic example of transfer of wealth from the working class to the elite. We should tax the athletes and owners 75% of their gross income until their stadiums are payed for.
Years ago, I used to enjoy watching my local sports teams. Now professional sport is nothing but a handful of ultra-wealthy prima donna players flitting from contract to contract. I can’t imagine why anyone cares anymore.
Wasn’t public funding for this done after an initiative failed for public funding of the stadium?
I agreed with Goldy yesterday on the wisdom of burning the Koran (or Quran or whatever the thing is anglicised as) and now on the wisdom of using public money for sports stadia.
Think I’ll go over to the Mark Levin or Glen Beck websites and soak up some rabid conservativism for a while.
“The $83 million local taxpayers still owe on the Kingdome, ten years after it was demolished,”
Meanwhile, your local branch library is closed because there’s no money.
“Wasn’t public funding for this done after an initiative failed for public funding of the stadium?”
That’s the current baseball stadium that was built across the street.
Sounds like it’s time for the sports leagues and teams to start paying their fair share, get these welfare queens off the dole…
“That’s the current baseball stadium that was built across the street.”
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
The new stadiums are a big improvement over the King Dome, it’s the financing and the subsidy given to the wealthy that bugs me.
George McGovern said it 30 years ago: “In America we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.”
This 43 year fan of the Sonics was just fine with not getting them 2 arenas in 10 years, and very happy the locals concurred. But in the teabagger-infested comment threads in the PI & Sound Times it was the fault of the evil liberal state and local officials like the Speaker & the Mayor that we lost the opportunity to be fleeced by Stern & Co. Hey, where is the Caucus of Trolls on this thread? Smells so fresh and clean here this morning.
Oh, and $67 M for the Kingdome was the original cost? It was sold as a $40M build on the Forward Thrust ballot in 68(?), which also included the measure to construct a regional BART type system, needed a super majority to pass and fell short by a hair. I love me some baseball, but the better investment lost.
Yes, the insane joke of these stadiums is the bullshit assumption that if you DON’T build it the peoples spending money will just vanish. See, IF you agree to take $500 million of tax payer money to build these, we’re told people will THEN spend money on restaurants, bars, and misc junk associated with the stadium! See!!! Look at all that money we “generated”.
Totally made up. As fake as a Fox News story (no, there are no death panels, still). See that money I was going to spend out at the Sonics, I’ve just spent it on OTHER things in the area. Maybe a Sounders game. Maybe a nice local restaurant, or some stuff at another local merchant. The idea that these stadiums “generate” money is total 100% bullshit fake. People (you and I) have THE SAME disposable income REGARDLESS of whether or not the Sonics are in Seattle and we’ll spend it on SOMETHING.
I don’t have a problem with public stadiums per se. But they should be entirely public, with the sports teams paying a reasonable rent for their use. Concessions revenue won’t automatically go to the team, that depends on the deal and the economics involved.
So if the sports teams aren’t prepared to pay the rent on a public stadium sufficient enough to make it a viable business on it’s own merits, then let ’em walk, and don’t build the stadium. They can always build their own stadium, with their own money, if they choose to do so.
The Sonics fiasco was an example of the extremes the sports teams are willing to go to to extort money from the public. They wanted Renton to use public condemnation to get the land from the owners who didn’t want to sell, then have the city & county & state pay the costs of building the stadium (but with the team having all say over construction, virtually guaranteeing overruns), and once built the team would have control over all potential revenue from the site (including adjacent “developments”, but the city/county/state would be responsible for all costs.
Nobody in their right mind would sign off on that deal.
This was another thing that blew my mind about Clint Didier. Everyone knew that he was a hypocrite for bashing government handouts after he had taken something like $600K in government subsidies for his farming. However, he was just as big of a hypocrite for bashing government handouts after being a pro football player. As this post clearly shows, pro football players incomes (and of course, the owners bottom lines) are highly subsidized by the government.
I am also pretty sure that the NFL is listed as a non-profit!
I wonder if all those NFL fans know that they are watching a ‘socialized’ sport every Sunday.
was built entirely with private money
Well, that is simply because the private wealth continues to exist in some form (see Dallas), whereas the public troughs are long gone dry.
I remember when then Gov. Lowery called the WA legislature back to take a vote on funding Safeco. Many people were furious. Of course Mariner fans weren’t furious. It was done right after their one winning season.
goldy,
you can thank the liberals that run seattle, king county, and the state of washington for this mess..
and you want them to control more shit?
are you fucking nuts?
@16
You mean the liberals like Republican Governor Daniel J. Evans (1965 – 1977)? Why don’t you do a little research before you make ignorant comments?
Dan Evans! He was the first president of The Evergreen State College as well as a Republican. (watch repubs heads explode)
@18
Actually, Evans was the Governor that got TESC up and running (as well as our completely cool community college system). He was the head of TESC from 1977 to 1983. Evergreen’s library is still named after him.
@18 and @19
After reading about Dan Evans for a while, he seems like a pretty amazing governor. Wouldn’t it be nice if today’s Republican party would put people like him on the ticket?
Funding for the Kingdome has always come from a lodging tax. So Seattleites don’t generally pay for it.
http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=19471
I’ve always thought that a lot of Seattle’s problems stem back to decisions made in the 1950’s, ’60’s, and ’70’s which were penny-wise and pound foolish. The area had such a constricted small-town view of itself, that it couldn’t imagine ever being able to afford to do it right, so it always did things half-way.
Take the old Seattle Public Safety Building. They wanted to save money, so they bought (cheap) a design from an architect which originally designed the building for use in Florida. It never did work right, and cost a fortune to heat in the winter.
And the Kingdome itself was a compromise which never satisfied anybody very well. It was too small to host championship football games, it’s indoor location made it an unpopular site during sunny summer days, and the Sonics never did want to play there, with the fans too far removed from the players to see anything.
But at the time, it saved a few bucks by combining everything together, even though it had built-in deficiencies which limited it’s lifespan to less than the life of the bonds financing the project.
Yep!
Sadly, I don’t think there are many people like Dan Evans (or Charlie Royer) around in either party anymore.
What the hell. We all know any local government with taxing powers is controlled by a small coterie of the power elite. (See, e.g., the Seattle Center Chihuly glass museum.) That’s the system and we’re all entrapped in it. If they didn’t blow our $83 million this way, they’d blow it some other way. The one thing that is absolutely certain is the rich and powerful civic “leaders” who do this to us will continue finding creative ways of shaking us down for as long as any one of us hardworking, taxpaying, powerless citizens still has a dime to his/her name.
@23 Charlie Royer wasn’t all that great. In fact, he was lousy. When he was mayor, Charlie Royer tried to shove a gigantic waste-to-energy garbage-burning plant down the throats of Seattle residents and ratepayers. It was never built, and Seattle has its highly successful recycling program today, because eight ordinary citizens sitting around a kitchen table (circa 1981 or 1982) decided to start a grass-roots campaign to stop the incinerator and force Royer’s city hall to give recycling a fair chance.
For the record, two of those eight activists were Mr. and Mrs. Roger Rabbit.
@22
A pretty fair assessment of Seattle and the region, but you have to remember that Seattle WAS in many ways a constricted small-town. We didn’t have “big city” neighbors* to look up too or compete with like people else were in the country and much of the rest of the county barely registered that we exist. Also, from the early 70’s to the mid 80’s we were dealing with national recessions and The Boeing Bust. People just didn’t have a lot of money to spare.
Spokane is still the largest city between Seattle and Minneapolis.
Which proves that rabbits are cool and that we should listen to them! Royer got some stuff wrong, we all do, but it seems to me like he got a lot more right than wrong.
Tacoma and Spokane have a pretty good crew of folks in local offices. It’s been a while since Seattle’s had anyone to write home about running the show. I was hoping The Mikes might turn that around, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Lest we forget, Seahawks Stadium/Qwest Field was approved by a majority of state voters, so we don’t have anyone else to blame for that one.
Besides, name me one elected official that has lost their seat because of any of these projects?
In any event, something tells me that if these two stadiums were not built, our schools and governments would still be in financial trouble, as schools aren’t as “neato” as a shiny new field.
@3 Just when you say something intelligent, you blow it by doing something unintelligent.
@29 Er, I thought that was a (very narrow) majority (in a low-turnout election) of local voters. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think that was a statewide vote. And as I recall, Allen and his boosters gamed it by holding a special election with only that issue on the ballot, instead of putting it on a general election ballot, to ensure that the (very low) voter turnout would be dominated by motivated stadium supporters.
Mr. Rabbit:
You’re half right. It was a single-issue statewide election in June 1997 that won with 51.15%.
Businesses which can pay a man $7,000,000 to not work need the support of those who earn under $50k a year and support a family.
There are nearly $2 trillion worth of corporate profits sitting in bank accounts because employers are scared to death. They don’t know what to invest in because they don’t know what the rules are.
If Seattle sports teams had to pay for their place of business like we pay for ours, where would their millionaire non-employees shop?
Michael touched on it but I think there’s another thing to consider. If you’re going to build stadiums, build them right. If they have character people will cling to them long past their sell by date. Think Wrigley or Fenway. Build a soulless concrete nightmare in the suburbs and you’re just begging for it to age poorly. Football stadiums are particularly tough since they’re used so rarely (with Qwest an exception housing my beloved Sounders).
FWIW the remaining debt on the Kingdome was for the roof repairs that were done a few years before it was demolished.
We are not #2. We are #1. We have’t won anything.We have no prizes. We have no trophies.
In defense of Safeco field:
The funding scheme voted down by King Co. voters (by a very small margin) was a lousy sales tax increase. The funding plan passed by the legislature at the state level was a much better mix of user fees, restaurant and hotel taxes which it was reported in 2006 was going to pay off the bonds early (by 2013).
Also, the Mariners are obligated to share profit with the public once they pay themselves back for the $200 million in losses they incurred prior to Safeco opening. We’ll believe it when we see it, but this is a rare provision for a public-private partnership. (There’s $40 million to go before profit sharing kicks in, btw).