Rec’ing on…Stadiums and Arenas

Here’s an idea.  Instead of having cities (i.e. the taxpayers) foot the bill for football stadiums, baseball parks, and basketball/hockey arenas…why not have the people who will be directly profiting from them pay for them?  Radical thought, I know.  I mean, when I wanted to buy a house, the city stepped right in and funded the entire…no, wait…*I* had to pay for it.  What was I thinking?

So, here’s my thought process.  Right now, the cost of a new football stadium seems to be in the $250-300 million USD range.

Here’s an idea.  Instead of having cities (i.e. the taxpayers) foot the bill for football stadiums, baseball parks, and basketball/hockey arenas…why not have the people who will be directly profiting from them pay for them?  Radical thought, I know.  I mean, when I wanted to buy a house, the city stepped right in and funded the entire…no, wait…*I* had to pay for it.  What was I thinking?

So, here’s my thought process.  Right now, the cost of a new football stadium seems to be in the $250-300 million USD range.  The 2007 NFL salary cap is $109 million (to which my immediate reaction is: are you kidding me?).  In the NBA, the salary cap for the 2007-08 season is $55.6 million (to which I also say: are you kidding me?)  The cost of a new basketball arena seems to be hovering about $150 million.  Seems to me the solution is pretty simple: tax the salary of every player a certain percentage to pay for future fields of dreams.

Since these structures are fairly durable, you shouldn’t need to build a new one more often than 20 years or so (though longer is better…tradition, don’t you know) unless you are a particularly narcissistic mega-wealthy-type person.  Ideally the sporting field will be around for 30-50 years.  But, for the sake of argument, let’s go on the low side and say twenty.  OK, 1/20 of $300 million is $15 million.  If we tax the players’ gross salary to cover that (lowering the effective salary cap to barely-subsistence level of $94 million.  That means if a player was making the current NFL average salary of $1.4 million, then he’ll only now be bringing in $1.33 million.  Horrors!  How will he manage to feed his kids?

At any rate, we take this tax and immediately take it out of the owner’s hands in put it in a league stadium fund (interest-earning, of course), earmarked for a specific team as long as they don’t move.  All other things being equal, a team can then expect to be able to have a new stadium in no less that twenty years at NO COST TO THE TAXPAYER.  Same thing for the NBA, and MLB.  But what if they only want/need to refurbish, and don’t want to build a new place (lots of reasons for this, not the least of which is location)?  Then they can draw funds for that, as well, out of their account after an appropriate length of time.

What if a team moves?  What then?  I think that the city losing a team should be compensated depending on how much the city supported the team.  Base this on attendance.  If a well-attended team is moved to a new city, then the losing city should get the lion’s share of the building fund.  If the team wasn’t well-supported, then much much less.  I think that any remaining funds for any new stadium or arena be locked from the future owner for at least ten years (in all cases), up to the difference of the age of the stadium/arena and twenty years.

So, how big a stadium?  That’s another consideration.  I think this should also be tied to attendance.  If a city is supporting a team, then they should be rewarded for that.  If mega-rich dude has been willing to support a team with really really bad attendance, he shouldn’t get a diamond-encrusted gilded coliseum as a reward for being stubborn.  A nice place, sure, but leave the frills to the teams that merit it (the cap on the tax on salaries places a limit, in any case, on how elaborate this palace can be–or there can be a league cap on project expenditures to keep the unscrupulous at bay.

So everyone’s happy.  Cities don’t have to figure out how to pay for new stadiums they really don’t want and can’t afford.  Wealthy owners don’t have to go pleading poverty in order to get a new toy.  The league has in place a simply system of staying modern.  I guess the only losers are the players’ children, who clearly will be emaciated from the lack of food their parent can now provide, but in all things there are sacrifices.