The San Diego Chargers owners yesterday launched their “Vote Yes on C” campaign to try to get two-thirds of San Diego voters to approve spending $1.15 billion on a football stadium/convention center expansion, which, good luck with that. They also unveiled what’s likely to be their main arguments for the plan:
“A yes vote on C will allow for the creation of a new facility that could host world-class events and conventions such as Super Bowls, NCAA Final Fours, NCAA title games, professional soccer, concerts, the X Games and a host of other high-profile events. And no general funds will be used to build this new venue as it will be paid for by the Chargers and the NFL as well as tourists and business travelers staying in San Diego hotels.”
That’s all technically true — the money would all come from a whopping four percentage-point hike in hotel tax rates — but it’s also extremely misleading to make it sound like raising hotel taxes and giving the money to the Chargers doesn’t cost San Diegans anything. First off, as NBC Sports’ Mike Florio notes, “plenty of hotel and motel rooms are surely bought and paid for by San Diego residents.” More to the point, though, raising hotel taxes comes with both an opportunity cost — once you give the money to the Chargers, you can’t then raise hotel taxes for other spending purposes — and an economic cost — tourists may love San Diego, but some could learn to love other cities once they see how expensive their hotel bills are after all the taxes are added in. Think about it: If this weren’t the case, every city on earth should be raising hotel taxes as much as possible, and giving the cash to its citizens, because hey, free money!
The other interesting bit here is that by the happy coincidence of the Chargers stadium vote being Ballot Measure C, team execs get to use the same slogan the Padres owners successfully used back in 1998 to get their own stadium, which maybe will bring back happy memories of Tony Gwynn or something? Again, good luck with that.
Meanwhile, one of the first actions of the Yes on C campaign appears, weirdly, to be trying to get voters not to pull the lever for their ballot measure, but to oppose a city councilmember who’s been critical of the stadium plan but who isn’t even up for re-election for another two years:
The team … has come out swinging against a local political opponent, City Councilman Chris Cate, who says the team’s proposal to build a new stadium is a bad deal for taxpayers.
The team’s campaign committee recently has circulated paid advertisements on Facebook that sic the dogs on him.
“Why does Chris Cate want the Chargers to leave San Diego?” the ad says. “Please call and ask him.”
It then publishes his office phone number.
This is kind of a weird strategy, needless to say. San Diego State political science professor Brian Adams (don’t start) tells USA Today that this could be a warning shot to other elected officials not to oppose the stadium campaign, which is entirely possible. It’s also a way to tell voters “The Chargers will leave San Diego if you don’t vote for this” without actually coming out and saying it, in the hopes that no voters will realize that it’s Chargers owner Dean Spanos himself ultimately making this threat, getting mad at him, and thinking, “Go to West Virginia already.” Good luck with that.
I look forward to the people of San Diego showing Dean Spanos exactly how we feel about him.
How about we just do this? We just hold the entire NCAA Tournament on 4 aircraft carriers.
Big picture is that as long as Spanos is the owner the Chargers are doomed to never be very good so keeping the team there is of limited appeal. San Diego would be better off having the Chargers leave and then trying too lure some other team or hope for an expansion team.
They can’t even sign their first round pick despite the fact the NFL took basically all negotiations out of rookie contracts. There’s only about two fairly minor things to work out these days and the Chargers handle those two things the opposite of every other team in the league, hence them not being able to sign their guy.
And one of the funniest arguments for the stadium I have seen is the pitch that the San Diego State Azteks would also get to use the stadium. The Azteks drew under 30K per game on average last season. Playing in front of tons of empty seats doesn’t sound that appealing. Though, the Chargers have done it for years so maybe that is just accepted out there.
Why do the San Diego Chargers hate freedom?
To be precise the tax is a 32% hike in taxes. The tax rate will go from 12.5% to 16.5%, a change in 4 percentage points.
Thanks, just changed this to clarify that. (The world really needs different symbols for percentages and percentage points.)
The sad thing about the convadium nonsense is that a real solution exists but you have to consider the proper context:
1. There is no way in California for the NFL to be asking for public money in this day and age. Those days are gone for CA and others states are beginning to wake up to this fact as well.
2. Follow the Miami Dolphin model where a very smart owner, Steven Ross, paid for the entire renovation of $400 MIl. out of his own pocket and for a stadium almost identical to Qualcomm. Given that Spanos and the NFL have committed $600 Mil. already, a 100% private solution exists for San Diego under its nose.
It does, Dean.
One question that I think has never been properly answered is why upgrades to the existing facility won’t do the job.
There are some things that you can’t change on an existing building, but you can do a lot with $200m, lets say… including development around the stadium (if that is a significant part of the problem the Chargers see).
How is the Dolphins Stadium almost identical to Qualcomm? Qualcomm is one of the generic cookie cutter circular stadiums of the 60s along the lines of Riverfront/Veterans/3 Rivers/the previous Busch Stadium/whatever-Oakland-is-called-now. The Dolphins Stadium was built in 1987 as a football stadium with a field wide enough that you could plop a baseball field into it.