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November 08, 2008
Taxpayer subsidies of sports stadiums questioned
 In today's New York Times, metro columnist Jim Dwyer questions the wisdom of the over $1 billion dollars of taxpayer funds and subsidies that New York City has dumped into the new Yankee and Met stadiums. From his column For Sports Teams, Mayors Play Ball at the City’s Expense:
But these are appetizers before the true banquet: The subsidies for the construction of new stadiums and garages that come in hard cash, in the loss of public parkland and in forgone taxes. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the state and the city would cover at least $659 million in costs related to new stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets. The teams will receive an additional $480 million in tax breaks of one kind or another. In 2000, MASSPIRG issued a report Major League Steal: The Economic Folly of Public Subsidies for a New Red Sox Stadium, which explained the economic issues involved in public stadium subsidies. The report was part of a successful coalition effort to defeat the Red Sox then-owners' plan to seize a neighborhood and build a new Fenway Park (inset graphic) with taxpayer funds. Instead, the Red Sox were forced to get creative -- building now-classic seating onto the top of the left field Green Monster and making other improvements to one of baseball's few remaining "cathedrals." Both Red Sox Nation and Massachusetts taxpayers profited by that alternate plan. More from Dwyer:
The premise of these sports stadium investments, public officials say, is that economic development benefits will roll into the city over the decades — $40 million over 40 years in the Bronx, for instance. Perhaps this will happen. Or maybe it is a hallucination that is even flimsier than the assumptions that drove Wall Street to sink trillions into financial instruments that no one actually understood but all the right people agreed were worth tons of money. Boston Globe story from 2000.
Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at November 8, 2008 05:58 AM
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