Tag: sports stadium

Categories
crime and punishment sports subsidy

A Big Step Over the Vomit

Washington DC, crime, sports

“Two hours before the Washington Capitals play in Chinatown on a crisp November evening,” Candace Buckner wrote recently in The Washington Post, “a man stretches out on the pavement near Sixth and F streets NW, wrapped beneath a gray hoodie that he’s using as a blanket. Around the corner, a woman rolls a blunt outside the arena’s sportsbook entrance, and soon the waft of marijuana will perfume the area. There’s a spillage of vomit, green, near the tree on the sidewalk. Another man, this one cradling his arms behind his back and mumbling, doesn’t seem to notice the mess as he walks over it and bends over to pick up old cigarette butts.”

Might there be some connection between the state of downtown Washington, D.C., and the decision by the owner of both the Washington Capitals hockey team and the Washington Wizards NBA team to relocate them outside the city to Virginia?

“The District faced competition from Virginia,” explained a separate news story, “only because Leonsis had begun quietly exploring a new home for his teams in 2022, after years of complaining about crime and the noise of buskers outside his arena.”

There was not only less vomit but more room to be had in Virginia. For an even more expensive “public-​private partnership” project. 

My fellow Virginia taxpayers and I are not crowing — Washington’s loss is our loss. We will no doubt pay for the privilege of experiencing even worse traffic and pricier tickets to hockey and basketball games … with higher taxes. 

Politicians can make names for themselves with these big sports franchise grabs. That’s what happened 30 years ago in the District of Columbia’s Chinatown. 

But the names have moved on, and now so have the games.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Fields of Schemes

stadium, pork, waste, spending

Hopes, wishes and cinematic sentiment are not a business plan.

A baseball stadium in Camden, New Jersey is being shut down three years after the team for which it was built has left town.

At the groundbreaking in 2000, then-​Governor Christine Todd Whitman said she’d “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.’”

So it’s the movie’s fault?

Officials had hoped that crowds would steadily come to see the Camden Riversharks play ball, boosting the local economy and enabling repayment of the taxpayers’ “investment” of $18 million.

Didn’t work out.

The minor-​league team threw in the towel in 2015 after missing several lease payments. The Camden government bought the property. They couldn’t find a successor team, so now the stadium is going. It will cost another million in taxpayer dollars just to tear it down.

Lesson learned? Er, no. Another taxpayer-​funded development will replace the stadium.

Of course, private investors can also err when spending their own money. But they’re less likely to throw millions at projects with little prospect of profit. When their investments do fail, companies tend to cut their losses much faster than government officials who are ladling out other people’s money.

Unlike many government planners, private investors of private capital are also not eager to keep repeating their worst blunders.

Meanwhile, perhaps best of all, when private investors misjudge a project, non-​investors lose nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

PDF for printing

 

» See popular posts from Common Sense with Paul Jacob HERE.

 

Categories
ballot access free trade & free markets insider corruption too much government

King Kevin and Company

Oh, how the other half lives!

And lies.

By “other half,” I don’t mean “the wealthy.” They’re as honest as any other group. No, I’m talking about those with their hands on the levers of government power … along with their subsidy-​seeking cronies.

Mayor Kevin Johnson, an all-​star in the National Basketball Association before becoming a politician, is splurging nearly $300 million tax dollars — roughly the city’s entire yearly budget — to build the owners of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings a brand new arena.

People objected, with 23,000 citizens signing petitions to put this lavish subsidy to a vote. Yesterday, a judge ruled that the measure would be kept off the ballot: errors in the wording of the petition “disqualified” it.

In a prepared sore-​winner statement, Mayor Johnson called the petitioners “outsiders” who “have tried to undermine the right of Sacramento to control the destiny of our Kings, our downtown and our future.”

Johnson doesn’t mean the right “of the people” to control. He means his right to dictate for Sacramento even against the will of the majority.

The leader of one group working against a public vote on the arena giveaway attacked local businessman Chris Rufer, charging that “Rufer’s funding … is supporting STOP’s effort to steal 4,000 jobs, steal a once-​in-​a-​generation opportunity to transform downtown and makes him an accomplice in Seattle’s attempt to steal the Kings.”

Who’s stealing? Those spending their own money so people can vote? Or those blocking a vote so they can spend other people’s money?

“I’m against subsidy, period. It’s simply a moral argument,” Rufer explains. “If it was a subsidy for a fish pond, I’d be against it.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.