August 12, 2010
AZ Republic: Without Coyotes, no one would buy stuff
The Arizona Republic ran a long article on the city of Glendale's finances for its arena deal yesterday; you can read it for yourself here. I'm just going to focus on the article's first sentence:
One thing is clear: the picture today would look worse if last summer's bankruptcy had sent the Coyotes to Canada.
The evidence, if you read further down: Reporter Rebekah Sanders notes that most of Glendale's arena debt is paid by sales tax revenues, writing that "dining and shopping largely spurred by sports games around Westgate brought $12.8 million in sales-tax revenues in 11 months last fiscal year." But, of course, those people would be eating and shopping anyway even without the Coyotes — many of them still doing so in Glendale — which means you can't credit the team's presence with creating all that tax revenue.
It would have been nice for a newspaper article to try to figure out how much of the arena-district spending is actually new revenue — or at least mention this "but-for" problem — but that's apparently outside the scope of today's journalism.
I'm sure the city feels it would do "worse" if the Coyotes left (when they leave more like...) Now, how about a study showing the total impact of having the Coyotes there? IE: would they be better off if they had not built the arena to lure the team from downtown?
I think we know how that one turns out... so really, this reporter is saying that the team must be subsidised because of the idiotic decision of the council to bring them there in the first place.
Their best option was to sell the arena and the team to a prospective relocation buyer. They could have recouped enough revenue to cover their annual debt obligations relating to the facility. They will be paying tens of millions a year to subsidise the operation of this franchise every year going forward.
That's not victory, boys, no matter what you'd like to call it.
