Quote:
Originally Posted by Regorium
"Function normally" in the context of arenas generally means that the city is left holding the bag.
I (and many others) have provided numerous examples of bad deals. Can you even find a single good public-private arena deal?
My definition of "good" is that the city broke even. Pretty low bar wouldn't you agree?
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Function normally means that some kind of tax or ticket tax was used to fund the facility, and then the use of the facility paid it back. Pretty straight-forward.
As I have said several times, there is an arena and/or stadium in virtually every city. The vast majority are (at least partially) funded with public money. In many, if not most of those cases, there is some form of ongoing tax to cover the costs.
Again, in most cases, they work fine. Some quick examples of cities where there was either a ticket tax, or a sales tax, or a hotel tax, or whatever, that did its job so to speak includes: Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Nashville, St Paul, Arlington, to name a few, and there are many others.
This discussion was about the viability of a ticket tax and the riskiness of its ability to to meet the payments of the debt service.
No one has made any argument that might suggest the ticket tax would be risky or on shaky ground. The Flames aren't just one tenant, they are (at least) three. The viability of the primary tenant (the Flames) is hard to dispute.
That was the point, and moving the goalposts to disputes about whether a team should be paying rent or not, or another deal was poorly constructed because teams didn't have to pay rent unless they were profitable or whatever, does not change that.