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Should We Pay For Sports Arenas?Jul 03 '01 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Do cities really benefit from having a professional team? I am not sure that they do. Sports in America is huge business. There are literally millions of dollars being spent on sporting events every year, in hundreds of cities around the country. Our obsession with sports has transformed the local sports team into a symbol of community pride. The sports leagues recognize this, and have discovered that the local elected officials can be persuaded to do almost anything to keep the “hometown team”. To that end, there has been a boom of taxpayer-funded sports venues across the nation. With each new stadium, the pressure increases for other cities to keep up with the trend. Living in South Mississippi, I am very aware of the political wrangling taking place involving the New Orleans Saints. The Saints, historically one of the worst teams in the National Football League, have been trying to get a new stadium built. This stadium would replace the Louisiana Superdome, which is still a fabulous arena. The problem? There are not enough luxury suites in the Superdome…and those suites mean big money for the team. That is the key behind the new stadiums today. It is not the seats that the average fan buys to support their favorite team; it is the corporate luxury suites that go for tens of thousands of dollars that really drive the construction of the new stadium. They allow the team to bring in much more profit than they could from normal ticket sales. What do the cities get in return? The theory is that the city will experience new economic development around a stadium or arena construction. Jobs will be created in building the complex, and that money will boost the local economy. Many cities are trying to follow the example of Camden Yards in Baltimore. This baseball park was built in a depressed area, and is the cornerstone of a rebuilding project throughout the area. Cities are trying to justify spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by countering that the money is actually going to create economic development in the area. This theory held true in Baltimore, but other cities have had less success. The new fields in Chicago, Seattle and Houston have been less than successful. Turner Field in Atlanta in beautiful, but the area around the stadium is still lagging behind. One of the plans in New Orleans is to demolish two public housing projects and build the new Saints stadium on that site, to help bring the area back. Some experts counter that the money spent on arenas could be used in better ways. Why not take the $100 million and use it to give tax incentives to local minority owned businesses in the area in question? The cities could also use the money to lure industry into the area. Both of these ideas would create jobs that would most likely go to local workers, and would stay in the community for years to come. But it is hard to overcome the public outcry of losing the local team. Look at the Houston Oilers – after refusing to build the Oilers a new stadium, Houston found themselves with no professional football team. The city is now building a stadium for an NFL expansion team, the Houston Texans…at almost twice the cost the original stadium would have run. Personally, I love sports. I think that professional sports provide great entertainment, and do encourage civic pride. But we need to keep things in perspective. If the local sports team wants a new stadium, let them pay for it. If my business went to City Hall and demanded a new building, they would let us leave town in a second. This should be the same treatment given to sports teams. They pay the high salaries, and then complain that they can’t make any money. My answer to that is to let them run like any other business – without any taxpayer help.  |
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