Great site for stadium ripoff stories

pilot-in-fla · **Joined:** Sat Aug 23, 2008 7:45 pm **Posts:** 388

Field of Schemes is a great website for folks curious about how billionaire professional sports team owners end up with multi hundred-million dollar taxpayer subsidies for stadia where the ticket prices are too high for the average middle class taxpayer to attend.

Even those of us in this part of Florida, with no nearby sports stadium, are being forced to absorb the costs of previous sales tax subsidies granted for most of the professional teams now playing in Florida. Just recently, the Tampa Bay Rays were discouraged in their efforts to obtain a claimed $300 million public subsidy (the actual would surely have been more) for a new stadium to replace 15 year old Tropicana field.

My personal favorite stadium subsidy is that of the Washington Nationals baseball team. Although many schools in Washington, DC are over 100 years old and obsolete in every possible fashion, city leaders managed to find over $600 million to subsdide a new stadium for the team. In return, the team agreed to provide reduced price tickets for some school age children. What a deal!

Here is a recent post from Field of Scheme to give you an idea of what it is like. They also have a Yahoo group.

Quote:

Let them eat stadiums

Gwinnett County, GA, is considering eliminating emergency medical services and slashing staffing to deal with a deficit of between $35 and $43 million - a figure, notes the Sabernomics blog, very similar to what the county is spending on a new minor-league stadium for the Atlanta Braves' AAA team. That's not entirely fair - the stadium is a one-shot deal, the other budget items are recurring expenses - but it's still a reminder that sometimes it really is a choice of "schools or stadiums."

Not helping matter is that Gwinnett was counting on getting $500,000 a year from a naming-rights sponsor for the new ballpark, and those are hard to come by these days. (I like "take-no-prisoners economy," by the way - bonus points for you, Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) And it gets worse:

The county projected selling naming rights for $800,000, but a portion of the proceeds would go to the Braves. If the county canâ€™t make a deal by September, the Braves get to sell the rights and keep more of the money.
Can somebody please tell me who started this tradition of having the dumbest guy in the office negotiate the stadium lease?

centralfla.freeforums.org

Great site for stadium ripoff stories

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