The San Antonio city council has completed its hearing on Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ proposal to put a measure on the November ballot on whether to devote $489 million in city money to a new Spurs arena, and their verdict is nope:
The San Antonio City Council batted down Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ attempt to get the city’s funding for a downtown Spurs arena onto the November ballot in a 5-6 vote Monday morning….
Opponents of another vote argued that the money is either restricted in how it can be used or relies on the project moving ahead in the first place.
The vote’s outcome was not a surprise; a majority of council members publicly voiced their opposition shortly after Jones floated her idea in a July 31 memo. Still, Jones held a series of public “listening sessions,” and pushed ahead with bringing the issue up in Monday’s special council meeting.
KSAT describes the $489 million as coming from “the Spurs’ lease of the publicly owned arena, private developers’ lease of nearby city-owned land, property tax from that development within a specific area known as the Hemisfair Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ), and hotel-related state taxes from a ‘Project Finance Zone’ (PFZ)”; the city’s term sheet helpfully doesn’t break down how much would come from each source. It’s the sort of thing that might have to be included in a ballot measure, but we’ll never know now.
As for why the six deciding councilmembers said they voted no, councilmember Misty Spears said it would be bad for business to establish a precedent that voters should have a say on major spending decisions, while councilmember Marc Whyte said prior to today’s meeting that holding a vote on whether to spend $489 million on a Spurs arena would cost too much at a time when the city is trying to reduce spending. The other four no votes can try to top that, but it’s going to be tough.
“We should be very careful about establishing a precedent that every significant revenue bond decision requires another election simply because the dollar amount is large…”
Translation: “We can’t leave the fate of our reverse Robin Hood schemes up to the plebs.”
Wait, the council doesn’t want to hold a vote on spending $489 million because they want to reduce spending? Do these politicians even hear themselves speak?
Wait, it’s going to cost $200,000 to study if it’s a good idea to light $1 billion in cash on fire? Forget that, go get the gasoline!
No matter how you slice it, if they are going to set $1Bn on fire anyway, they’ve saved $200k by not studying whether it is a bad idea to do the former or the latter.
Sounds like top notch governance to me… but then, I’m just a ghost.
The Ghost of Edwin Meese is right. We do not need no stickin’ vote. Now what are we going to do with our $200,000 windfall?