Any idea on the 49ers going to Seattle?
I wish they would. Then we wouldn’t have them in the Bay Area!
They will be on
flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL8874
tomorrow out of SJC like usual.
49ers need a QB.
Seattle needs an O-line.
Send ‘em both (49ers and Raiders) to Seattle! Let their politicians waste their taxpayers’ money on these idiots.
Heck send them to Portland (even thought I don’t live there anymore) David do you have ANY clue home much a pro team brings in revenue to the tax payers in the cities they play in, as well as jobs, advertisement money, not to mention the state tax for the salaries of the players (Oregon). You might think the money in taxes spent to build a stadium are steep but as a whole, it is good for your city. Now if the team starts winning. The money get HUGE, TV contracts, out of market merchandise etc.
Hate the team if you want, but they bring money to your city, might just not be in your pocket.
I have to disagree with that. Please read the following excerpt from Case Study of Professional Sports (The **emphasis **are mine)
Fear on the part of public officials that they will be held responsible for losing a team is not the only motivation for stadium deals. Subsidies to sports franchises are also justified in terms of economic development. As with other forms of government-assisted investment, proponents of publicly funded stadiums have tried to make the case that these sports palaces are job generators.
This is a difficult case to make. A professional sports team does not operate on a continuous, year-round basis. Each sport is limited to its season, and half the games are played out of town. The most egregious example is football, with games played only once a week for five months. A stadium devoted exclusively to professional football will be in use only about ten days a year.
Then there’s the question of the quality of the jobs created. Aside from the small number of athletes with astronomical salaries,** the jobs directly associated with stadiums tend to be part-time, intermittent positions with low wages and few benefits. **Hawking hot dogs and beer or cleaning up after the fans go home is not a sure-fire route to prosperity. The construction of stadiums does generate better-paid work for masons, carpenters, electricians and the like, but this is of limited duration. The construction jobs evaporate once the stadium is built.
For these reasons, subsidy supporters tend to focus on the indirect job-creation impact of stadiums. Team owners pay consulting companies to write reports–or get government agencies to do it for free–estimating how much new economic activity will be generated at bars, restaurants and other establishments catering to the stadium crowds as well as the impact of their expanded payroll and purchasing on other businesses.
These reports usually involve some dubious assumptions. For example, in a 1999 report on the expected economic impact of a new stadium in Boston to replace Fenway Park, C.H. Johnson Consulting Inc. assumed that visitors coming to the new facility would spend 20 percent more outside the ballpark than those who visited Fenway. The report’s rosy scenario, which included an increase of more than 3,000 jobs, may have had something to do with the fact that the analysis was commissioned by the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
Economic projections also tend to overlook jobs that might be eliminated as the result of a new stadium. For example, construction of the much celebrated Camden Yards baseball stadium in Baltimore required the dislocation of a group of manufacturing businesses that together employed about 1,000 people. In sum, the projections made by team owners and their paid consultants in support of stadium subsidies are little more than vague or arbitrary promises about job creation and economic stimulus.
If we go beyond anecdotal information to more formal academic analyses, the results are no different. The conclusion of the overwhelming majority of studies is that stadium subsidies do not pay off in terms of economic growth or job creation. The limited number of jobs that might be created come at a high cost to taxpayers–often well above $100,000 each.
This theme of subsidies as a bad investment for cities permeated the most extensive scholarly volume on the subject: Sports, Jobs and Taxes, a 500-plus page anthology published by the Brookings Institution. In their opening chapter, Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist conclude that new sports facilities “rarely, if ever, are worthwhile. Sometimes they can be financially catastrophic.”
In another chapter of the volume, Robert Baade and Allen Sanderson analyze economic trends in ten metropolitan areas where new stadiums had been built. Overall, they find that professional sports teams tended to “realign economic activity within a city’s leisure industry rather than adding to it.” In other words, all that public subsidies accomplished was to help shift spending from other forms of entertainment to the stadium, with little in the way of net employment gain. “Professional sports,” they write, “are not a major catalyst for economic development.”
Who Benefits?
If taxpayers are footing the bill and the local workforce is not enjoying a boon, who is benefiting from stadium subsidies? The obvious winners are the owners of the teams that inhabit the stadiums erected at public expense. These owners are hardly in need of public assistance. About two dozen of them appear on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, with a net worth of more than $750 million each. Paul Allen, owner of the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, is said by Forbes to be worth $20 billion, making him the third richest person in the country.
Forbes also calculates the current value of franchises in the major sports. The magazine estimates that the most valuable football team, the Washington Redskins, is worth $1.1 billion; the most valuable baseball team, the New York Yankees, is worth $832 million; and the most valuable basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers, is worth $510 million. For many teams, these amounts have risen smartly in recent years. The value of the Yankees, for instance, has more than doubled since 1998.
New stadiums built at taxpayer expense do a lot to boost franchise values. The Baltimore Orioles, for instance, changed hands for $70 million in 1989, before Camden Yards was completed. In 1993, after the well-received stadium was in operation, the team was resold for $173 million, an increase of 147 percent in only four years. Cases such as these are consistent with a statement made more than a half-century ago by Cleveland Indians owners Bill Veeck: “You don’t make money operating a baseball club. You make money selling it.” Today, owners may also make money on operations, but selling remains a sure thing.
Other sources: louisville.bizjournals.com/louis … rial4.html
and, of course, a Google search will find more sources
That’s why you need mulit-purpose stadium.
The financing of the Rose Garden construction was widely hailed at the time as a good example of public-private partnership; most of the costs were borne by Allen and/or Allen-owned companies, rather than by taxpayers.[32] The bulk of the $262 million[4] construction costs were funded by a $155 million loan from a consortium of lenders led by pension fund TIAA-CREF. As Allen was unwilling to guarantee the loan with his personal finances, the lenders demanded an interest rate of 8.99%, with no opportunity for prepayment.[33] Other major creditors included Prudential Insurance, and Farmers Insurance.[34]
The remainder of funds came from the City of Portland ($34.5 million), Allen himself ($46 million), with the final $10 million coming from a bond backed by box office and parking revenues.[35] In addition, the City transferred to Allen the underlying land. The City maintains ownership of the Memorial Coliseum and the adjacent parking garages, but the right to manage these was also transferred to Allen. In exchange, Allen signed an exclusive site agreement with the city requiring the Trail Blazers to play all home games in Portland for thirty years[27] The City of Portland hoped that the building of the arena would lead to other renovation or development in the Rose Quarter district, but as of 2008 this has yet to materialize.[36]
Unfortunately that’s not what the pro ball owners (i.e. taxpayer rip off-ers) want. For example, the A’s want their own stadium and I believe the Giants do, too.