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.

Share on Social Networks

It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

I just found out that a long-time Facebook friend died a few days ago. I never met Tom Ender, but reading his posts and interacting with him over the years made me feel as though I knew him. He was a kind and gentle man who was also a fierce and principled individualist. When his long-time wife, Julie, died several years ago, it broke his heart. About a year ago, he posted an old photo from their wedding long ago and wrote, “18 months ago, Julie passed from this world. I believe we will meet again, though I don’t know details of how.” As I mourn the death of this gentle and brilliant man, my fondest hope is that he and Julie are together again by now. Goodbye, Tom.

When Francesca Montanaro’s school shut down in March due to fears about the new new coronavirus, she had nowhere to go. Francesca’s mother is a nurse working long hours in New York City. The grandparents who would otherwise have provided child-care were old enough to be vulnerable to the bug, so they were out. That meant Francesca has spent the last few months with her dad at his pizza shop in the Bronx. In this six-minute piece from Radio Diaries and NPR, we take a look at what it’s been like to be a bright and typical 11-year-old thrust into a completely different world. She puts pizza boxes together and answers phones. She’s even learned to make perfect pizzas. I found the story touching. It reminds me of the degree to which children used to learn more about the real world than they do today. Even though she won’t follow in the pizza-making footsteps of her father, I’ll bet this will be one of the defining experiences of her childhood, one that she will treasure for years to come.

I noticed three instances over the weekend of people talking about Donald Trump’s “campaign of hate.” I wanted to correct them — because they misunderstand this narcissist — but I knew they wouldn’t get my point. It’s not that I’m defending him, because what he does is worse than hate. You simply have to understand the way narcissists think to understand him. Trump doesn’t hate. It’s worse than hate. He’s indifferent and angry with anyone who doesn’t obey him and worship him, those who don’t give him what’s called “narcissistic supply.” People believe that Trump hates blacks or Hispanics or foreigners or whatever group which he’s seen as hating. It’s true that he experiences rage at people who will not give him what he wants, but he’s not in touch enough with his real self to feel real hatred, much less to feel real love. He’s like a vampire who sucks all the available praise and adoration from any group of people — any way he can get it. He doesn’t love rural, blue-collar white folks, but their adoration gives him what he craves. He’s not emotionally mature enough even to hate. For a narcissist, people are simply objects to manipulate, depending on what he can get from them. Trump’s indifference is far worse than hatred. This isn’t ideological or political. It’s pathological. He’s not mature enough to hate.

The decline of modern culture can be seen clearly by looking at what passes for public discourse. There was a time when people who wanted their ideas accepted made rational arguments. It was assumed that most people were bright enough and rational enough to evaluate those arguments — and a surprising number of them really were. Today, the arguments are made in the form of irrational and simplistic graphics called “memes.” Because these graphics can’t convey complex or nuanced information, they present dumbed-down presentations of positions which are stunningly juvenile and seem designed to offend rather than to convince. We have regressed from books and dense pamphlets to a level more like that of angry kindergartners making crayon-scrawled hate notes to send to other children. Reason no longer plays a role in public discourse, and this signals the coming fall of this society.

Related Posts