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.
Blue Jackets should be playing in Portland by now.