I called out the Columbus Dispatch last week for a misleading headline implying that the publicly owned Blue Jackets‘ arena was turning a small profit, so credit where credit is due for a Dispatch editorial today pointing out exactly how and why that was oh so wrong:

Nationwide Arena reports it will end its fiscal-year budget on June 30 with a profit of $316,000. That’s a paper profit, courtesy of a public bailout and the kind of creative accounting that would land an ordinary property owner in foreclosure…

Most people would see their financial situations vastly improved if they, too, could dispense with property taxes and mortgage payments.

The editorial also notes that Columbus residents voted five times against using public money for a sports arena between 1978 and 1997, only to have the Blue Jackets pursue a privately funded arena in 2000 — and then demand a public bailout eleven years later because they claimed they were losing money. Fighting against sports subsidies is really hard when teams owners only have to bat .167 to get everything that they asked for.

Writing about stadium and arena economics in a way that’s easily digestible by a general-interest newspaper audience is hard — and doubly hard on newspaper deadlines. I get that. But the result is way too often stories that are only likely to confuse readers, and leave them with a false impression about how sports finance works and what’s important for economic success, and — you know, let me just skip to the Columbus Dispatch story itself:

Nationwide Arena reports small profit

That’s a great headline: Simple, direct, easy to understand. There’s some question about why the Dispatch replaced its more downbeat headline on an earlier version of the story (“Nationwide Arena to end fiscal year barely in black, with tax bill, debt looming”), but it’s two different ways of saying the same thing, really.

Except that neither way of saying it is really accurate, or at least doesn’t paint a full picture of what’s going on with the Columbus Blue Jackets arena following their $60 million(ish) public bailout in 2011. Here’s how the arena “turns a profit”:

• The city and county send the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority, which took over the arena in 2011, about $4 million a year in casino taxes.
• The state provides the arena with a $4 million a year property tax exemption, though that expires this year.
• The state, which is owed $10 million on an arena loan, and former arena owners Nationwide Realty Investors, who are owed $44 million on their own loan, have never received any payments on these debts, though the casino taxes were supposed to cover loan payments.
• The county is deferring about $2 million a year in maintenance costs, which will have to be paid somehow eventually, but there’s no money for it now.
• After receiving all these breaks — figure about $14 million a year total in various tax subsidies and unpaid obligations — the arena is projected to end the year with about a $47,000 surplus in its bank account. Profit!

Much like the Sprint Center in Kansas City, in other words, Nationwide Arena is a financial success on its books, but only because its books are propped up by massive subsidies from other people (mostly taxpayers, but by Nationwide as well via that unpaid loan). So the entire premise of the news story is dumb — whether the arena is “profitable” is entirely about how much cash the state, county, and city has decided to send it this year, not about whether the arena can actually bring in more revenue from operations than it spends on expenses, which is the usual definition of “profit.”

This is especially important because the next battle is likely going to be over that $4 million a year property tax break, which is already being framed as a way to keep the arena from losing money, though really it’s just about who’ll be $4 million a year in the red, the arena or the Columbus school district. Economic literacy in journalism matters, not just for being technically factually accurate, but because big policy decisions end up being based on how the public perceives the issues — and even if it’s too late to undo the costly public bailout of the arena, there are still plenty of future mistakes that can be avoided by actually understanding how money works.

Hey, how are things going for Nationwide Arena, home of the Columbus Blue Jackets, since Franklin County bailed out its private builders almost five years ago? Let’s see:

A modest uptick in casino-tax revenue will allow Nationwide Arena to go forward with one major maintenance project — replacing part of the heating and cooling system — but officials continue to search for ways to fund a goal of $2 million in updates and repairs each year…

The arena, which was taken over by the facilities authority in 2012, made a net operating profit of just under $250,000 in the first half of its fiscal year, from July through December; event revenue was $10.8 million.

Beyond an annual $2.1 contribution from the facilities authority, virtually all of the arena’s revenue comes from rental income.

So, same as last time we checked in: The arena is turning a small operating profit, but only because the county is shoveling tax dollars at it every year. So while it’s good news that casino taxes have rebounded from their dip a couple of years ago that left the county in danger of defaulting on its bonds, all this means is that the county hasn’t yet run out of money to shovel, at least not until something else at the arena breaks and needs repairs.

This is a reminder of two things: One, most new arenas don’t bring in enough money to come close to paying off their construction debt, if the reports out of Kansas City hadn’t already convinced you of this. And two, it’s a really bad idea to take over responsibility to repairing an arena that your local sports team built, while letting the sports team keep all the revenues that are needed to make the actual repairs.

In fact, if you’re a local elected official reading this, maybe you should print out that last paragraph and glue it to your computer monitor. It won’t guarantee you of being saved from Columbus’s fate, but it’ll at least give you a better shot.

If you’ve been waiting eagerly to hear whether the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority or the Columbus school system will be on the hook when the Blue Jackets arena’s property-tax exemption expires in 2017, the winner is: both! Or the loser is both. Both the county and the school system will soon have less money, is the point:

The public owner of Nationwide Arena has offered to pay Columbus City Schools $586,000 a year, instead of almost $3 million that it would owe the district if the payment were based on the $143 million value that the Franklin County auditor puts on the structure.

If you’re going to say, “Hey, at least $586,000 a year is better than no property taxes at all!” keep in mind that the Blue Jackets owners have been paying $1 million a year in lieu of property taxes until now. So under the new deal the schools will get less money, and the county will have to cover that $586,000 annual tab. Everybody loses! Except the Blue Jackets owners, of course, who really managed to pull off quite the heist when they negotiated their arena bailout deal.

The Columbus Blue Jackets arena saga is one of the weirder ones, with the team building an arena mostly with private money, then complaining it was losing money and getting the county to bail them out by taking the arena off their hands, then a local group trying to force the county to let residents vote on whether to default on the arena bonds (and failing). Now there’s a new twist: As part of the bailout deal, the Blue Jackets owners agreed to make an annual $1 million a year payment to the Columbus school system in lieu of property taxes. Starting in 2017, that deal expires — meaning the arena will be looking at a $4 million tax bill, and the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority will have to pay it itself.

This sounds bad, and it sort of is if you’re the arena authority, which is why the people who run that body is asking the state legislature to extend the tax exemption. But when you think about it, this is just a squabble between two public agencies over who’ll pay whom: Either the arena board gets more money to run its building, or the school system gets more money to run its schools. Or, you know, the state could just throw some more money everybody’s way and everyone could go home happy, except the recipients of whichever services got cut to make sure that the arena and the Columbus schools were both made whole.

The main lesson here, really, is this one:

“I don’t know what they knew or didn’t know” about the looming tax bill, said Don Brown, the facilities authority’s executive director since February and previously Franklin County’s administrator. “I’m not aware that there was a public discussion.”

That? Don’t do that. If you’re going to bail out your local hockey team, at least have a public discussion about what all the costs are going to be, including those a few years out. That is all.