Building stadiums and you get the bill
Professional sports teams building stadiums and making the public cover the cost is one of the great scams in the United States. Moral luminaries like GOP Presidential hopeful
Scott Walker are proponents of these kinds of practices. A few months ago National Football League's St. Louis Rams began making the early overtures most ownerships make when
trying to get their scam on.
Stan Kroenke won't be empty handed this week when he arrives at the NFL owners meetings in Arizona.
The St. Louis Rams owner will be packing finished schematic plans for the world's most interactive and integrated football stadium, a futuristic, $1.86-billion, privately financed venue proposed for the Hollywood Park site in Inglewood.
You might be saying to yourself, but the St. Louis Rams are in St. Louis Missouri, right? Yes. Yes they are. But nothing scares up some municipal financing like threatening to leave. Also, St. Louis politicians couldn't just hand over the keys to the public coffers in this case because St. Louis had a law saying that the public must have a vote on these kinds of municipal projects. But a month after the above Los Angeles Times article and the NFL's commissioner (Roger Goodell) announcing "accelerated efforts" in getting the Rams moved to LA, Governor Jay Nixon and his stadium task force decided to
sue the city of St. Louis to get out of having a civic vote.
The suit, filed in state court, says a 2002 city ordinance requiring a public vote is “overly broad, vague and ambiguous,” and asks the judge to rule that it either doesn’t apply in this case, conflicts with state statute or is unconstitutional.
It comes at a key time. Gov. Jay Nixon’s two-man stadium task force has been working for months to solidify financing and sidestep project-killing delays before presenting plans for the $985 million riverfront arena to a National Football League owners committee this spring.
Governor Nixon says that the issue was "time" and "not a public vote." What was amazing about this is that the ordinance was created so very specifically for this very reason.
St. Louis residents passed the ordinance in 2002 by nearly 10 percentage points — 55 percent to 45 percent. St. Louis County voters approved a similar measure two years later, 72 percent to 28 percent.
The laws — a municipal ordinance in the city and a charter amendment in the county — prohibit any “financial assistance” from the city and county to a professional sports facility without voter approval. They define “financial assistance” broadly, to include tax reduction, tax-increment financing, land preparation, loans, donations, payment of obligations, and the issuance, authorization, or guarantee of bonds.
Well, today the NFL and St. Louis Rams' owner Stan Kroenke and Governor Nixon got what
they wanted.
The city does not need voter approval before spending tax dollars on a riverfront stadium, a judge ruled Monday, jumping another hurdle in the race to keep the National Football League in St. Louis.
Circuit Court Judge Thomas Frawley declared invalid the city ordinance requiring a public vote, calling sections “too vague to be enforced.” The law has so many “uncertainties,” he wrote in his ruling, “their sum makes a task for us which at best could be only guesswork.”
Judge Thomas Frawley cited various "uncertainties" such as whether the city could conduct internal discussions without a vote or send people out, on tax dollars, to look into the stadium without a vote. Besides the fact that
all of these things happened without a vote and people only wanted a vote to decide whether or not they actually wanted to spend the very real money on the stadium, these arguments seem specious. But who is to say? Maybe the law was written in crayon?
Fred Lindecke, who helped pass the city ordinance, said he thought his group had followed the law on the initiative petition. “The people voted,” Lindecke said. “And now the judge has said forget all that. It makes me angry.
“The law is as clear and straightforward as you can get. It covers every kind of technique known to man for getting into the taxpayer’s pocket,” he continued. “And it says very clearly, without ambiguity, that people have a right to vote before any of their tax money is used to build a stadium. I would hope that someone in city government would be as upset as I am, and would try to do something about it.”
Good luck St. Louis.