You hear people snarkily ask the question: Where are my tax dollars going? Well, if you live in Cobb County, Georgia, the answer is a baseball stadium. The Braves repurposed Atlantas Olympic Stadium after the 1996 Summer Games and took out thousands of seats to make a smaller park, Turner Field, where they would reign over the National League for the next decade. Turner is located in a very nice area downtown for a booming city right now. I was very surprised when I heard earlier this week that the Braves were moving out to the suburbs in 2017. Now we are getting word of how this new stadium will be built and its surprising. 8.7 million dollars A YEAR for the next 30 years will be tax revenue. So, nearly $1,000 of each households local county taxes will go to a stadium whether they like it or not. Oh, and there is a perfectly usable stadium 40 minutes south. Effectively, the price tag of tax dollars will be about $260 million in the end. What can $260 million buy? Maybe it can pay salaries of the 183 teachers it furloughed this year due to budget cuts. Maybe it could be used for tax credits for parents to send their kids to college. 25% of the population of the county are children between 5 and 18 years old. We just saw what Ponzi Schemer Jeff Loria did in Miami with the Marlins where he promised a winning roster of talent to get people excited in the new ballpark, only to sell off everybody halfway into the second year. Public financing of stadiums is tricky. I think if you are going to allocate a significant portion of tax dollars to a single public works project, it should be left up to the voters to decide. The Braves are paying $280 million for the project up front. They cant finance the bulk of the stadium themselves? Im not a fan of this proposal at all.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 18:18:19 +0000
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