March 31, 2007
Veni, vidi, dominari
And I'm back from D.C., none the worse for wear. Thanks to several breaks for committee members to go and vote and do other Congressy stuff, the U.S. House subcommittee hearings on stadium funding turned into a daylong affair, with community activists Joyce Hogi of New York and Frank Rashid of Detroit, Seattle city council president Nick Licata, economists Brad Humphreys, Dennis Zimmerman, and Heywood Sanders, and others all testifying on the value (or not) of spending public money on sports facilities. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, my "skeptical views dominated the hearing," and who am I to argue with that?
Video of the entire hearing is archived on C-SPAN's website for the next week or so. If you want a collector's item - or, like me, can never get Real Player to work right on your computer - for 30 bucks you can order a DVD copy from C-SPAN.
Finally, panel members' spoken remarks were limited to five minutes, so I'll be collecting full written remarks wherever possible on this page. First up: my testimony and Frank Rashid's.
—Neil deMause
how much federally controlled money has gone into stadiums into recent years? Maybe the Nationals stadium? I don't see much of a federal issue here.
Posted by Anonymous on March 31, 2007 04:32 PM
The federal government subsidizes stadiums in several ways, most prominent being the use of federally tax-exempt bonds to finance them. I don't have exact figures, but if I had to guess, I'd say probably a billion or two dollars in federal money has gone to pay for stadiums in the last decade.
Posted by Neil on March 31, 2007 05:20 PM
Rep. Issa has a funny sense of priorities. At the same time Petco Park was being built the City of San Diego was undergoing a huge fiscal crisis. Most people would argue paying the operating expenses of government were more important than moving a baseball team from one stadium (Qualcomm) to another (Petco).
Petco opened in '04. Here's the San Diego Union-Tribune in '05 on the fiscal situation: "The city's ability to borrow money in the municipal bond market also has been crippled by its money woes, which include a pension fund deficit of at least $1.4 billion. Fitch Ratings, a major Wall Street credit agency, recently decided the city's situation was so unstable that it lowered San Diego's credit rating to just above junk bond status."
Was a new ballpark more important that funding worker pensions?
Posted by joejoejoe on April 1, 2007 03:11 AM
Keep in mind that San Diego city government was making pension promises to their employees that they had no economic business making, and that was after the bonds for Petco Park were issued. Unless you think that stopping the Petco bond issue in mid-construction to pay off the pension promises is a good show of "priorities"....
Posted by Brad S on April 2, 2007 11:47 AM
Yes.
Posted by Obvious on April 2, 2007 08:31 PM
Brad S. - Rather than do the responsible thing in 1996 or 2002 and renegotiate pensions that were a fiscal strain on taxpayers the City of San Diego chose instead to underfund what they understood to be their pension obligations. Simultaneously they chose to build a new publicly funded stadium.
You conveniently choose a moment in time after construction had begun to frame your argument when a more reasonable point in time would have been 1996 - the moment the City choose to intentionally underfund pensions.
Posted by joejoejoe on April 2, 2007 09:04 PM