Quote:
Originally Posted by nik-
There are a lot of things a city pays for that don't make money or are only used by a small portion of the city. Most of them don't have TV deals or 19000 tickets to sell.
Lets drop the ridiculous comparisons a little bit.
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Agreed. Its standard operating procedure for the city to pay for things that they feel will benefit the city, even at a loss. (Remember the giant red ball? Blue Hoop? They are really crushing it, by the way.) Generally, these projects have an intangible benefit that balances the deficit in the value equation. Does the parking structure with offices as have an intangible benefit? Yes. Do the Flames in Calgary provide an intangible benefit? Yes. The real question here in both these cases are whether the intangible benefit is worth the cost. So this is not a ridiculous comparison at all. The fact that there is private revenue involved in one project vs the other project being entirely publicly funded is not actually relevant to the the conversation. The question is, what is the intangible benefit worth to the city? If you can come up with a metric for that, in order to calculate it in dollars, then problem solved; the city should not pay 1 red cent more then that number, regardless of what project it is.