May 18, 2004
Fool me twice...
The city of Miami has signed a deal to sell the 16-year-old Miami Arena for $25 million to a local parking magnate, who said he may turn the vacant structure into a shopping mall. (Both the Miami Heat and the Florida Panthers fled the arena for still-newer publicly subsidized homes in the 1990s.) The city, which still owed $34 million in unpaid bonds on the building, now hopes to divert the $6 million a year in hotel-tax money that was going to pay off the bonds to a different purpose: paying off new bonds for a proposed Florida Marlins stadium. You know, there's a term for this.
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