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Originally Posted by Thunderball
The basic premise is that the government should chip in on ventures that directly benefit the city and province/state and achieve their policy goals, rather than sit back and hope for the private sector to do so, tax at will, and hope the private venture doesn't go under or move to a jurisdiction that will be a willing partner and lose the benefits and tax revenue.
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There is a role for government but I question how much is too much with finite tax dollars for other less glamourous projects/services that need funding.
Like some have mentioned, the city should scale back the project design to where the original money was in 2012 dollars.
What Katz is asking the citizens of Edmonton to do dovetails nicely with what is happening with Seattle's new proposed arena with Chris Hansen, a fellow billionaire.
Hansen is putting legally binding personal guarantees to any cost overrun, over and above the agreed to amount of $490M. He is allowing yearly audits to ensure his net worth is at least $300M to make those payments.
There will be escrow accounts set up that have ongoing 5 year's worth of debt repayment from the city/county financing portion of the project plus his original $290 million skin in the game.
He is also paying another $47M for improvements to traffic mitigation and the city owned legacy arena which will be impacted by the shiny new toy.
Does he have bad business acumen compared to Katz? Maybe but simply put, Seattle has a law via plebiscite that prevents tax subsidies to sports franchises after what happened to the taxpayer with Century Link, Kingdome, Safeco and Key Arena projects.
Yet despite all these restrictions, Hansen sees an opportunity to make money. Compare that to Katz who has moved the goal posts and needs a new PR firm.