and a bittersweet congratulations to the Seattle Seahawks
One of the tricks I used to work with the Sim City game (and its immediate sequal) was to build a pro- football stadium, a baseball stadium, maybe a hockey stadium, and a basketball court — and speed to the end of each year with treading-on-water development of the city. I’d then take stock of the record of the teams, and stick up a sign for an imagined championship of one or more of the teams — sometimes divisional, sometimes conference, and sometimes “World” (as we Americans smugly call our nation-wide titlists). Perhaps to bemuse myslf, I’d unlease a riot — riots frequently happen after a city’s franchise wins a championship, you see.
The signs sat next to the signs I had up that declared the name of the stadium — which I dubbed with such names as “Corporate Welfare Stadium”, and “Generic Corporation Field”.
I wasn’t the only one who did this, and I believe it was Job who I spied working the sports franchises of his Sim City who I asked if this a product of public financing, “Yes. The city loves their teams, so they’re going to pay for them.”
We were so niavely cynical back then.
I was thinking about the bond measure for Qwest Field that Washington State voters approved in 1997 while the Seattle Seahawks won their “Big Game” yesterday. I remember it as something that failed the first time on the ballot, which Paul Allen more or less bought a redo for a ballot measure, which failed in the actual city of Seattle (bunch of liberals there) — though I could be wrong about that one, which failed in every single Eastern Washington county excepting — for some reason — Benton County, and passed through strong support in the Seattle suburbs. I also recall thinking that that was a clever move in moving the Seattle Seahawks pre-season practice to Cheney, Washington — gain some support for the team and the ballot measure in the Spokane-area. It took a lot of strong arming on Paul Allen’s part to get the public to accept the idea of financing his team’s future — (it is a franchise, after all, which since 1984 has finished with a record of less than 6-10 one time, and above 10-6 one time — that one time being this year.) The stadium deal, from my eyes, looked quite a bit more heavily tax-subsidized than the Mariners’ stadium — the Mariners, by the way, had less trouble getting public financing (who, incidentally, were much more beloved than the Seahawks since they had a better recent record of winning). The Seahawks stadium deal seemed to me a continual case of upping the rich corporate-meisters of the economy upping the ante on what the public pays in financing their city’s sports team.
I was hoping that I could find an article like this one when I set out to do a blog entry this morning. And, well, there it is. The line that I find myself musing over is:
It is not a stretch, then, to say that about a third of the player payroll is subsidized by state taxpayers, that each player is on the public dole.
It’s a sloppy statistic, “one third”, but I wanted to stick an estimated number to the statistic of what part of the team’s payroll Washington state taxpayers “bought”.
I repeatedly reference the attempt on the part of the New England Patriots to move to Hartford, Connecticut for a sweet stadium deal because, for whatever reason, I was keeping my reading-glasses and eyes and ear to that story. It would have been the most egregious example of public-stadium financing, and it’s difficult to think of any way of laughing at Hartford, Connecticut for its attempt to be “Major League”. (Hartford, Connecticut had just lost its NHL franchise, the Hartford Whalers.) In the end, the deal fell through. The Patriots stayed put in Foxboro.
I remember one quote from someone during this story. An about-face to the idea that the newly developed super-stadiums are going to bring a huge influx of revenue into their cities. “In the end it’s about civic pride. If you support these matters because you think the sports team is going to significantly improve your city’s economy, you’re supporting it for the wrong reason.”
Good enough. As the article of the “13th Man” suggests, Paul Allen is pocketing a lot of money on the Seattle Seahawks, and he brushed aside any risk in his ownership of the Seahawks with the stadium bonds. Congratulations to the Titans of Finance, and enjoy your superbowl — state of Washington.