Adumbration

I am amazed and disappointed that Seattle's City Council, with support from some state legislators, is planning yet one more public subsidy to sports teams. 

"The proposed deal [is] to build a half-billion-dollar arena, with a city tax investment of up to $140 million ($145 million, including $5 million from the county) if [San Francisco hedge-fund manager Chris] Hansen only secures an NBA team. If he secures an NHL team as well, King County will kick in another $80 million."

How do we know it is a subsidy? for one thing, if the stadium enthusiasts were just in business, then all they would need is a building permit. Instead they are after public financing. If they were a business, they would have to find investors to take a stake in the enterprise.  The result if this passes is that the team owners will have gotten cheap financing and kept their ownership undiluted.

Another questionable feature of this deal is the allocation of funding to mitigate transportation issues in the SODO area that might arise due to another stadium located there - "the council’s arena deal would create a $40 million fund to pay for transportation mitigation around the Port of Seattle".  Such provisions are likely to get lost when the pushes come to shove, and these $40 millions will end up just increasing the total spending by the city; they also plan on appealing for matching funds from the State and US government, which will just lay the bills for this project at the feet of people who are completely removed from it.

City Council member Mike O'Brien is quoted saying:  "When you read through the [memoranda of understanding], there’s a whole slew of corporations and entities that are listed … but none of those entities actually exist yet, so it’s hard for us to tell who’s actually backing this up" - acknowledging ignorance about how this deal is supposed to work even as he joins the other Council members, Tim Burgess and president Sally Clark, in announcing the deal with Hansen who also owns the property where the stadium is expected to be built.

Jerry Brewer at The SeattleTimes.com points out the hypocrisy of the Seattle Mariners opposition to the new Arena - they are recipient of public largess even worse than that proposed in favor of Chris Hansen and basketball fans.

Seth Kolloen at TheSunbreak.com hails this deal, but he's mistaken to portray this as capitalism in action - this is just one more example of how private interests capitalize on their political associations to foist their private interests on the general public.

That this project is likely to go through is another consequence of how politics tends to favor the few who stand to benefit by government spending.  Those few are the ones who take the trouble to make donations and otherwise grease the palms of politicians, and stroke their egos by praising their farsightedness in creating this new monument to their vanity. 

Everyone else has better things to do than fight this, so once again politics will concentrate the gains and socialize the costs.