When a new stadium for a proposed St. Louis MLS team was first proposed last winter, it had no price tag or funding plan. Now it has both, and the total price is $200 million, with taxpayers expected to pony up more than $80 million:
Voters could be asked to put $80 million in public money toward a 20,000-seat stadium, not including a potential land purchase west of Union Station. That amount could be lower depending on financial assistance from the state, Kavanaugh said.
The stadium subsidy would have to go before voters on a ballot in April, thanks to that vote back in 2002 requiring any city stadium subsidies to be approved by a referendum. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on this entirely fails to say how the public money would be raised (new taxes? old taxes?) or how much the land purchase would cost, so there are still a lot of unknowns here. But suffice to say that now that St. Louis residents have dodged a $477 million bullet with the Rams moving to L.A. rather than getting a new stadium in their old home, they’re still getting asked to pay for a football tab, just the less-popular version of football. Add in the Blues owners hanging around expectantly, and, well, looks like those voters back in 2002 knew what they were doing, anyway.
When St. Louis offered $400 million to the Rams we sent out a signal to every huckster and conman in the world that we were an easy mark.
+1 (except I’m not from STL, so I’d have said “they”)