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[Seattle Times] 15 years after moving Sonics, now it’s the Thunder asking for publicly funded arena
(www.seattletimes.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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I will never understand why public funds should pay for >50% of the funds for a privately owned sports clubs arena
This is one of the biggest taxpayer rip-offs in the country. Under the guise of the limited jobs it creates. Study after study proves what a rip-off it is. New York taxpayers are about to foot 1 billion so the Bills can keep coming up short of expectations.
Could you explain your stance a little bit more in depth? I would think building a state of the art arena that your city owns would attract more people to Oklahoma City and therefore provide great benefits to the city.
Michael Leeds professor of Economics at Temple looked at Chicago. He said a baseball stadium in Chicago (a good example because of number of games) showed the same economic impact as a department store. Football is worse because less games. Would a city fund a billion dollar department store through taxes? Probably not. They have found that most of the economic benefit goes to the owners. You can Google this and there are a lot of studies.
I am a sports fan. And I certainly don’t think public funding of stadiums will ever stop. In fact, it’s getting more expensive. I just don’t agree with it. There are plenty of other things to fund with tax dollars that will improve livability. And for instance, the owners of the Bills are worth 5 billion. Why can’t they fund it? There are owners that privately fund.
Right but have you looked more in depth into these studies? Just because someone is professor of something doesn't mean people aren't paying them money to say what other people want to hear. I mean just literally think about what you said to me you are comparing a Billion-dollar stadium to a department store. I have never taken an economics class but I'd be willing to wager a hefty bet that this stadium would have a far greater impact than a department store.
Again, I am not against stadiums or sports. The argument to build them based on them bringing an economic boom to an area is disingenuous.
But I believe it would bring an economic boom it's not about necessarily getting direct value out of a stadium. It's about getting super wealthy people to want to invest in the future of OKC. The best way to do that is to get them near the city and want to be around it, therefore nothing attracts the wealthy like a state-of-the-art arena.
There are studies that say the opposite. That’s all I can tell you.