The Denver city council met last night to cast a vote on moving forward with what could be $175 million in cash and tax breaks for a stadium for the Denver Summit NWSL team … and instead punted:
The council delayed voting on rezoning the Santa Fe Yards property near Interstate 25 and Broadway, but still held a public hearing. Council is now scheduled to vote next Monday on both the rezoning and whether to allocate $50 million in city funds set aside to purchase land for the project.
Councilmembers had previously said they wouldn’t move forward without a community benefits agreement with the local neighborhood, but that was resolved yesterday when the team owners agreed to chip in $300,000 a year toward things like scholarships and equipment donations. Rather, the vote was delayed “at the request of the city’s ‘executive branch’ to allow for the vote on the soccer stadium rezoning to coincide with the remaining pieces of legislation covering public funding and other steps necessary to keep the stadium in Denver,” reports the Denver Gazette — which suggests that the mayor’s office may be trying to get all its ducks in a row before holding a vote of a council that has raised questions about what exactly the city would be spending money on and why.
Stadiums built specifically for women’s pro teams are still rare, which has given rise to proponents saying that using public money on an NWSL stadium would only be fair. Team president Jen Millet insisted: “When you’re a tenant in a stadium, it’s not your true hub. Women deserve that. Just like men.” Meanwhile, the alt-weekly Denver Westword even ran an op-ed last week by a local middle schooler (with “more than ten years” of soccer experience? she must’ve started young) saying, “By debating whether or not to invest city funding to support building infrastructure around the new stadium – a discussion that rarely (if ever) happens with stadiums for men’s sports [ed. note: Ahem] – Denver City Council is sending a message to girls that we don’t matter as much as the boys.”
Public comment at last night’s council hearing was split, as it always is. This is presumably going to come down to haggling with individual councilmembers, which could go any direction — we’ll all regroup next Monday to see how things went, and whether the team owners can rely on appeals to gender equity, or if they’ll need to again threaten to move to the suburbs or somewhere, just see if they won’t.
“We won’t truly have gender equity until you waste public dollars on us like you do on them,” is, at least, logically consistent.
How about we stop doing it for everybody?
Couching all these things in the outer shells of “good for the community,” or “economic impact” or “equal opportunity” is clever and all, but at their hearts, every one of these things is about making rich people richer.
They’re not even really about sports. They have the trappings of sports. They rely heavily on the emotion engendered by sports.
But they are about money and power and furthering inequality.