The Knoxville City Council voted 8-1 last night to approve rezonings for Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd’s new up-to-$90-million downtown stadium, which would be funded in part by $74.5 million in public spending. (About $19 million of that would eventually be repaid via rent payments; the rest will come largely from a mess of tax kickbacks.) And what did they have to say for themselves?
“I think it’s going to bring in tourism,” [councilmember Seema] Singh said. “It gives us a city identity, something to unify around.”
“I absolutely would like for the stadium, if it were to move forward, to move forward without public funding,” [councilmember Amelia] Parker said. “There have been numerous studies produced and shared with members of city council members and county commission members that clearly outline how other cities and their investments have not resulted in the return that they had hoped.”
Three guesses who the one “no” vote was!
This was the first council vote on the stadium plan, but by no means the last: Knoxville’s brand-new sports authority that was created for the purpose of building this stadium is “still negotiating” a final development agreement with Boyd — who, as a reminder, is not just the local rich sports team owner but also the president of the University of Tennessee and a former Republican gubernatorial candidate — according to TV station WBIR, which doesn’t say much else about the state of the funding talks, because that’s not how WBIR rolls. We could turn to WVLT, but its article on the vote was only five sentences; the Knoxville News Sentinel doesn’t appear to have reported on it at all, though it is all over the vote on the state’s new license plate design. If anyone would like the job of Field of Schemes Knoxville council hearing correspondent, please apply in comments.