Quote:
Originally Posted by TX_Flame
Essentially, they ARE paying for the arena themselves with $200M out of pocket & $250M financed to be paid back from a share of ticket revenues (ticket tax). The public funding is essentially for the fieldhouse/stadium.
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That's one way of looking at it, but they're also expecting the city to put significant funds into cleaning up the land, potentially moving the roadways, and then foregoing any significant sale or tax revenue that the city would get from what becomes the most prime available land in the city. I love the idea of this project, but that's tough to swallow.
Look at the library in the east village. Yeah, a lot of public funds went into it, but it occupies only a small amount of land out of the east village development, and the city will get a great return on the rest of that project. With the west village, the stadium/arena complex looks to take up maybe 50% (just estimating by looking at the map), and probably the more valuable portion of it, at that. The city could build a fieldhouse in that location (or better yet, across bow-trail in the pumphouse area), forget the arena, clean up, develop, sell, and tax that land that the arena would be on, and probably come out a lot further ahead than this proposal.
I want the various parties to find a way to make this project go ahead, but I also don't want to see the city get screwed here. There needs to be an opportunity for the city to make back their share and then some, given that they're the ones taking by far the larger risk.