Quote:
Originally Posted by Hoover
That answer just doesn't work. I understand that's how you feel and its legitimate, but from a team (ie business perspective) it just doesn't work that way.
This is a really good post.
Here is my my take on all of this.
1. The public has do decide if they want a piece of the action or not. I get the argument that the tax payer shouldn't have foot the bill for a new baseball stadium downtown when they love the existing one. And why are we building stadiums for rich owners anyway.
On the other hand, by not extending an existing tax that helps fund the stadiums, both teams will explore their options and they are going to do what's in their best financial interest. While I think the Chiefs are locked into the area, baseball is a different story, what if Oklahoma City really wants a baseball team? It wouldn't surprise me at all if they would bend over backwards to build a downtown stadium. Another option would be Nashville. Both of those cities would love to bring another sports franchise to their cities, and if I were them I'd be aggressive as hell. Going to either city makes sense for both the city and team.
2. As someone mentioned here the other day the Chiefs are now in a power position. If they did decided to leave the Truman Sports complex, people will rightly point to this vote as the reason why it didn't work.
If I'm the Chiefs, I can't justify sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into facilities that they public no longer wants to support and the team doesn't own. So the only option for the Truman Sports Complex is for the county to sell it to Hunt and the Chiefs. Its a great piece of property, but you are going to sell it for pennies on the dollar (like the Snead trade) because you are getting the Hunt family to permanently stay and invst there and in return you get to property tax revenue from the property.
The Chiefs owning the Truman Sports Complex allows them to totally reimagine it. I'm sure local governments would give the team some tax incentives (TIF) to help with the cost of redevelopment. You could also give the team a sales tax rebate which would allow them to keep a chunk of the sales tax generated on the grounds for period of time.
Such incentives would encourage the team to build a new stadium, build new state of the art facilities, and probably an entertainment district (Hotels, Restaurants, and Bars), which is what I want to see done.
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I understand why TIFs exist, but I really dislike them. The government essentially is saying, "You're big and important, so we'll give you a lower tax rate than we will for small businesses and individuals." They're inherently unfair and tilted toward rich people. And then those rich people retain the option to just move on to the next city when the TIFS expire and repeat the process. [Glance toward Kroenke here.]