Because you may not have already had your share of bizarre news coming out of Oregon the last few days, here’s this:
The University of Oregon favors doubling Oregon’s statewide lodging tax to help pay for the 2021 world track and field championships at Hayward Field, according to a draft proposal a UO lobbyist sent to Gov. Kate Brown in September.
Boosting the statewide room tax to 2 percent from its current 1 percent would yield at least $25 million to subsidize the Eugene event, according to the lobbyist’s memo.
There would also be an additional $15 million in state money for upgrading UO’s track stadium (rendering here), plus a few million for other things, including $7.2 million for prizes.
The University of Oregon is a public university, so its budget all ultimately comes from the state, but still, really, this is the best reason to raise hotel taxes by 1%, to fund a track championship? Will the track championship generate any significant revenue? (Not that that’s the only reason to hold one, but it’d at least help justify the insane cost.) Would having a revamped track stadium do anything for actual UO student-athletes? Do people in Oregon care more about a track meet than, say, ensuring that Oregon adjunct professors don’t have a higher poverty rate than the state overall?
I often wish I had the bandwidth to dig into the college sports business as deeply as pro sports, because it’s a whole other world of oblique subsidies and tangled priorities. In fact, if anyone reading this has time and interest in becoming an occasional FoS college sports correspondent, let’s talk — that’d be a nice goal for 2016.
Thanks for covering this. I’ve posted a lot more info about Eugene and the 2021 IAAF WAC here – including links to some of the documents describing the amazing perks the IAAF officials expect Oregon taxpayers to provide for them, and the $800K that the organizer is getting paid – mostly from University of Oregon funds.
http://uomatters.com/tag/track-and-field-championships
I think Oregon is the school that pays $45,000 state tax dollars per month for a former football coach’s retirement pension. I think that was in a USA Today editorial a few years ago about government pensions. I wish you had the time and bandwidth to report on high school and college sports spending as well as spending by local and state governments. The Dayton (Ohio) paper today has another article on increasing hotel tax in Warren County between Dayton and Cincinnati to build an athletics facility. At least one commissioner thinks it is not the proper role of government to build a field of dreams. As far as reporting on the corruption of big time college, K-12, and youth sports, there are books, organizations and websites, but none quite like yours that I have found -the book Beer and Circus, the bookThe Game of Life, the Drake Group, the Knight Commission, and every now and then leagueoffans.org dabbles in the college and high school issues.
Phil Knight finally stopped answering his phone.
Phil Knight was a track and cross country athlete at U of O. That would be chump change for him.