Move over, Chris Hansen! Your plans to build an arena for a nonexistent NBA team now have a competitor: Former oil trader (no, I’m not exactly sure what that is, or how you become rich doing it, or what he was doing for his first six years after getting his MBA, though it all seems to have something to do with profiting off third-world corruption) Ray Bartoszek has filed a zoning code interpretation request in the suburb of Tukwila, which would be the first step toward building an NHL arena there.
Bartoszek doesn’t have an NHL team, mind you, but he did reportedly offer to buy the Phoenix Coyotes in 2013 if they hadn’t gotten a new lease approved, and he owns some shares in the New York Yankees and, um, rich guy, okay? Rich guys must be taken seriously! Because rich!
Here’s how rich guy Ray Bartoszek says he will pay for building an arena in a Seattle suburb out near Sea-Tac airport for an NHL team that he doesn’t have yet:
RLB Holdings, which is Ray Bartoszek's company, says arena would be built entirely with private funds. #TukwilaArena
— Chris Daniels (@ChrisDaniels_TV) April 27, 2015
The Seattle Times reports that the arena would be built on less than five acres of land, which is probably impossible, while Seattlepi.com says that “the proposed arena would house about 230 events per year,” which bwahahaha!
Anyway, rich guy filed a zoning application, so this now gives an NHL team in Seattle “momentum,” according to Yahoo! Sports. It must be nice to be rich. Remind me in my next life to get involved with buying commodities from outlaw states.
I would have thought the private funding aspect of Tukwila would have at least garnered some kind of positive response from you.
I’m guessing that being built “entirely” from private funds still require property and sales taxes to be waived, or some other similar non direct funding mechanism to get the public to foot part of the bill.
Yeah, almost everybody says they’re going to fund their project privately at the start. If he actually puts his money where his press release is, there’s plenty of time to praise him later.
To me, “entirely with private funds” means just that. From the first shovel full of dirt. No public investment at all. No TIF, no infrastructure, no waiving of property taxes, nothing. I’m 54 years old, so I’ve only got 30 more years or so to actually see that happen as so many building proponents like to claim.
The issue is not what “built entirely with private funds” means to us as taxpayers, it’s what billionaires can pass off as being ‘what they meant’ later.
One example of ‘BEWPF’ is what Diceshooter claims above.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the prospective franchisee could claim that “built entirely…” means that the labour cost of the construction of the building alone (IE: no subsurface utilities, no access infrastructure, etc) will be paid privately. So the owner isn’t paying for anything that isn’t directly covered within the scope of “labour to build” the facility, including materials, land, taxes and permits, engineering costs etc.
One means “Owner pays for everything”, the other, emphatically, does not.
The further our civilization descends, the thinner the line between truth and lie.
It seems like your just attacking this man because of his wealth.
Shady oil trader indeed. Dealing with countries like Kazakhstan notorious for back door oil deals, the guy is a fraud, no one gets rich quickly like that and stays honest about it. I know he’s scummy.