Super Suckers: Indy taxpayers take bath in red ink to build stadium

By David McElroy · February 5, 2012

If you’re one of the millions of people watching the Super Bowl today, take a good look at that expensive stadium in which the game is being played — and then give thanks that you’re not unlucky enough to have been one of the suckers in Indiana who paid for the thing.

Lucas Oil Stadium cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $720 million to build. Local governments in the Indianapolis area have raised motel taxes, restaurant taxes and rental car taxes to pay for the stadium. The primary tenant of the stadium is the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, who pay only $250,000 a year for the place. (That amounts to just two thirds of the NFL’s minimum salary for the kind of unused player who stands on the sidelines and holds a clipboard.)

In addition to massive direct costs, local governments in the area have shelled out millions of dollars because of operating costs that weren’t covered in the original plan. (Another tax was added after the fact to cover that.) And financing costs went through the roof during construction because of the collapse of the sub-prime lending market.

When I look at this kind of boondoggle, I’m thankful that voters in the county where I live soundly rejected an insane plan to build a domed stadium in1998. The usual kind of downtown central planners came up with pie-in-the-sky plans that year for a domed stadium and a variety of other things. It was called the Metropolitan Area Projects Strategy (MAPS). It was a virtual wish list of everything that pretty much every local group wanted to build. Supporters of the plan were trying to buy support by spreading the cash around.

The plan was to pay for everything with tax increases, of course. Fortunately, the plan passed by the Legislature required that taxpayers vote on the thing. Despite a very well-funded campaign by all the usual suspects about “investing” for the future of the area, the MAPS tax was defeated very soundly.

I consulted for the anti-MAPS group and produced the only piece of large-scale marketing that was done against the tax — a direct-mail piece that went to every voter household in the county. (The obvious front cover headline: “Doomed Dome.”) By the time of the election, I was on a cruise ship somewhere along the coast of Alaska, but I called that night to find out how we did. I can’t remember exactly how much we won by, but it was substantial. Despite that resounding defeat for the tax-and-spenders, various local politicians have worked hard in the 12 years since then to revive the plan (or a new version of it). For many of them, it seems to be more about civic ego. It certainly can’t be about dollars and cents, because none of these insane projects ever live up to what they were sold as.

One of the worst things about such municipal boondoggles is that taxpayers are stuck paying for them for decades, sometimes long after the facilities are no longer in use. This New York Times story from 2010 outlines how that’s happened in New Jersey, Houston, Seattle, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Memphis and Kansas City. For instance, the Kingdome in Seattle was torn down (through implosion) in 2000, but the taxpayers of the area still owed $80 million on the demolished stadium as of late 2010. Sadly, this isn’t an unusual story.

The pitch is always the same. We’re told about how this time it’s going to be different. This project will be the economic engine to drive growth for an entire area. But it never turns out that way, according to academic studies that consistently agree. (Here’s a PDF version of that paper.)

Central planning is a bad idea, and it doesn’t make any more sense when it happens to be building facilities for popular sports teams. If taxpayers are willing to set aside their team loyalties and look at the money that these stadiums are costing them — directly and indirectly — they can force politicians to listen and quit pouring money down a rathole that does nothing other than subsidize people who are already very rich.

Note: Bloomberg has an excellent editorial about this from Friday, so I highly recommend this summary of why these taxpayer-funded stadiums are such a bad idea.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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