Feeling all cheery about the state of Nevada (for now, at least) rejecting the Oakland A’s owner’s demand for $500 million toward a Las Vegas stadium? Let’s turn that smile upside down by paying a visit to Wisconsin, where state legislative leader say they have a great idea for saving money on a $360 million Milwaukee Brewers stadium renovation plan: Pay for it later instead of now.
The lawmakers are considering funding the payments, in part, through income tax revenue from professional baseball players instead of from the state’s near $7 billion state surplus like Evers proposed, according to Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu.
“If we’re going to make steady payments to keep them here until 2050 or whatever the lease amount period ends up being, just paying for it over the long run when salaries continue to rise, that works as well,” LeMahieu said.
Hoo boy, where to begin? First off, that is not how money works: As anyone who has taken out a home mortgage can tell you, pushing payments into the future doesn’t actually save you money, it just lets you spread out your costs if you don’t have the cash on hand to pay the whole thing up front. (Presumably any plan to spread out stadium subsidies over 27 years, as LeMahieu et al. are proposing, would need to cover interest payments on renovation debt, just like a home mortgage would.) But Wisconsin has the cash on hand — Republican legislative leaders just don’t want to use it because they’re in a pissing match with the Democratic governor — so the entire “let’s put it on an installment plan!” plan is just a bookkeeping gimmick.
Secondly, saying that baseball player income taxes will “fund” the annual payments is extremely dodgy, for all the reasons we covered when this was used as an excuse for providing public funding for a Milwaukee Bucks arena: Professional athletes don’t actually pay all that much in income taxes since they live much of the year out of state, much of those income taxes would redirect to other local residents if the team moved and people spend their entertainment dollars on something else, if the team wasn’t really going to move you’d just end up cannibalizing tax money the state otherwise could keep and spend on other needs, etc.
It’s not clear where LeMahieu’s plan will go: Right now it’s just a “bipartisan group of Wisconsin legislative leaders” that is “considering” it, which basically makes it a press release in search of traction. That all sides in the Brewers legislative standoff seem to agree that shoveling $360 million at the local sports billionaire to renovate a 22-year-old stadium so he won’t move the team to an undisclosed location for another 13 years, during which time he can keep on demanding even more stadium upgrades thanks to his lease’s state-of-the-art clause, isn’t really very promising: All that’s left, it seems, is to identify an appropriate guy behind the tree, though I suppose stadium deals have fallen apart over smaller things.
I am reminded of a few years back when Houston had their flooding … but opted not to use the money they literally called “the rainy day fund” because they wanted to keep that money and ask the feds for other money.
The world is crazy.