Charlotte taxpayers now only being asked to spend $100m on a private MLS stadium, maybe

Great news, everybody! Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, is now only being asked to spend $100 million on a soccer stadium for which the nonexistent team’s owner has only offered to put up $50 million, instead of being asked to spend $113 million:

Commissioners, meeting in closed session Wednesday night, were told the county and the city would each be asked to pay $43.75 million toward a $175 million stadium. That’s down from the $50 million each that was sought in the initial proposal in early January.

The report in the Charlotte Observer leaves out $13 million in land costs that county taxpayers would cover, bringing the total to $100.5 million. It also doesn’t explain who’d pay the additional $25 million that the stadium would now be expected to build since this was first proposed, if those are real costs and not just other stuff larded in to make it look like the public portion is a smaller share of the whole nut.

Also not mentioned is what the team’s lease would be like — except that “team owners would control [the stadium] in much the way the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets do the city-owned Spectrum Center” — so it’s entirely possible that this $12.5 million cut in county spending would be offset by $12.5 million more towards future renovations, or something. The Mecklenburg county commission is expected to vote on this plan next Thursday at a private retreat, after holding just a single public forum at 3 pm next Tuesday, when surely lots of folks will be free to testify about this proposal that doesn’t appear to be even mentioned on the commission’s website.

One commissioner critical of the plan, Pat Cotham, remarked, “I’m struggling with this rushed process. Rushed deals of any sort are not good deals, because you need to have time to vet things.” Crazy talk! In America, we vote on stadium deals first, and figure out the details later, and nothing’s gone wrong yet, right?