The bill to funnel about $400 million worth of future taxes to Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick for stadium renovations took another step forward yesterday, passing the state senate finance committee by a 4-3 vote. (It’s already been approved by the state house.) The senate version, however, is what KJZZ-FM called, in a language almost but not exactly like English, “a paired down version” of the bill; what’s changed?
- Removed: A provision to redirect Diamondbacks player state income taxes to pay for renovation costs. That was set to provide about 12.7% of the tax money, meaning the projected public cost would now be around $350 million.
- Added: A provision that Maricopa County put in as much as the city of Phoenix does — something it wasn’t previously going to, because the county has no general sales tax. If the city cost remains $6.4 million a year, that would mean the county contribution would have to quadruple to keep pace, meaning we’d be back up to around $420 million in taxpayer costs.
- Unchanged: Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego’s request for a $15 million a year cap on public expenditures — which would keep the total subsidy value at around $220 million — was rejected, though the new bill does include an overall cap of $500 million “plus inflation,” which is to say not actually a cap of $500 million.
The bill still needs to get through the appropriations committee, then on to a full vote of the senate, then back to the house for a re-vote on the amended version. Then it would be up to Gov. Katie Hobbs, who has said she’ll sign the bill if it is “acceptable to all the parties,” which right now it is not if Mayor Gallego and Maricopa County leaders count. This one could go down to the wire — not that stadium deals don’t usually get hashed out at the wire, if necessary by a few concessions to key opponents, but “usually” isn’t “always,” so we’ll have to wait and see.
Does money not have the same meaning it used to? Like, I used to think of $400M or something like that as being an extraordinary sum of money. But now it’s just thrown around as if it’s pocket change, no big deal, spending $400M or $600M or $1.2B of taxpayer money on something relatively few taxpayers will ever use and the intangible benefits of which are dubious just…passes through our elected bodies with apparent ease.
Why is that?
KT,
You mean to tell us that you don’t have a couple hundred million dollars stuffed in sofas around your mansions and beach houses?
Construction costs (and everything) have inflated like crazy. One lane in each direction is being added to a 4.5 mile stretch on Loop 101 in Scottsdale. This will cost $108 million. Wow!
I get it, but, like, money is finite, right?
Costs have gone up some exponent. Has the money supply also gone up? Have your wages gone up that much?
It’s just…like, where is all this money?
My son’s old youth baseball league is holding a GoFundMe to buy infield dirt for the ballfields in the public park where they play, because the NYC Parks Department is out of maintenance budget. That’s one place this kind of money is coming from.
The Diamondbacks can move to Nashville and beg for a stadium there if Chase Field is so terrible. Arizona, Maricopa County and Phoenix need to spend the money fixing the fuded up police departments. The Arizona Highway Patrol is MIA on the Phoenix Insane Asylum, aka the freeways. Police shootings, gun violence and crime are out of control. Oh, then there’s the homeless situation with 6 months of 100 degree weather on the way. If Kendrick doesn’t like paying for his own stadium renovations, he can hire that lawyer from Arcadia.
They can call the stadium in Nashville Chase Field if they want. No one will care.