Bucks Threaten to Relocate if Arena Deal Doesn't Go Through

Facts have biases against false narratives. You haven't provided a single concrete example of a city or state benefiting financially from spending state funds to finance professional sports arenas. "Exposure" and "tourism" are really hard to quantify and directly attribute to buildings.

 

did ou fail to read my previous post? Or just you took out the last two sentences?

In fact forget it. If you were an unbiased person you could go search yourself on the numbers, and see how much Oklahoma benefited financially by getting a NBA team in both state taxes, people visiting the city and spending in hotels and restaurants and tourism, but I won't do the homework for you.
Maybe when it's Houstons time you and your other tin foil conspiracy theorists can have debates.

Milwaukee and the Bucks fans saved their team and it's a time of celebration.

 

Thanks for the reference. I have also enjoyed the work presented on the Freakonomics blog. Here is a blog piece from a few years ago when Sacramento was working to keep the Kings: http://freakonomics.com/2012/03/13/how-the-nba-takes-money-from-people-who-don’t-like-basketball/

 

It is a good thing that the Bucks will stay in Milwaukee for their fans. Bravo.

I provided numbers with details on the total public cost of the arena, including bonds, tax breaks and county offsets. On a deeper level, you haven't provided a justification beyond "exposure" and "publicity" for the state giving much-needed money to a pair of billionaire owners who could've paid for this building this themselves many times over.

That's the root of it: I find it distasteful and disgraceful that cities and states are so eager to give away money to people who then pocket all of the returns when they could've paid for their own building in the first place. Perhaps you don't. We'll see how each of us feels when this inevitably gets raised, sooner rather than later, in our respective cities.

 

Do I benefit financially when I attend a Rockets game? No. I pay money to be entertained. Financial benefit is not a part of the equation. If you want professional sports entertainment then odds are the collective will have to pay for it. If not fans somewhere else will because people like being entertained. Sure, owners could pay for it. Wouldn't that be stupid though when they have the option to get it free from somebody? Do you typically choose to pay for stuff you can receive for free, legally? The owners have a hell of an advantage....30 teams....hundreds of markets. Life ain't fair.

Obviously the people of Milwaukee wanted basketball entertainment enough to pay for it, just like Houstonians did. Using a local example, I didn't benefit financially when the Oilers were here. But my entertainment options completely changed when they were gone. I happily paid a tax to get that entertainment option back.

 

The state of Wisconsin will lose millions of dollars from taxes. This will lead to FURTHER cuts from the universities they already implemented this year. They will also have to pay 100 million to the previous arena. They owe it.
So don't you see a financial gain?
And that's even before taking into account the jobs that will be created and the development downtown.
You confuse Houston with Milwaukee. Milwaukee downtown called East Park has been available for development for years and noone has done it because the ground is toxic. The owners offer to develop it. Even digging up one block costs thousands of dollars because the ground is toxic because they had there some factories.
Also Milwaukee needs tourism and exposure. Noone knows or cares about it. But because of the Bucks you have people from the near cities and Chicago (yes there exist Chicago bucks fans) who travel and stay in hotels and eat at restaurants and go to the games. (and will go to other envent in the arena). Normally the people from the nearby cities don't ever got to Milwaukee and stay in the suburbs because Milwaukee has the name of being very dangerous city.

Also the county can pass the debt collection to the state, Abelle has this option. The first proposal wasn't this they changed it in the last 1 day because of the Democratic senators.

 

That's a fine way of looking at it and I agree that, yes, it's good entertainment. I love basketball and the Rockets.

What I struggle to get over is when a local or state government neglects, and struggles to pay for, roads, schools, hospitals, etc. over many years, yet suddenly finds the funds to pay for an arena whose tenants could easily afford to pay for it themselves. It feels like giving money away.

And I genuinely worry that the bar for toxic stadium deals keeps getting lower every year. Look at Glendale vs. the Coyotes or the Atlanta Braves and Cobb County. These buildings are, relatively, still pretty new. But the terms "obsolete" and "outdated" are being misused by owners in their pleas for "state of the art" arenas that they don't have to pay for.

 

I'm a foreigner and not a local. But I have been a Bucks fan long enough to learn all this.
And for me taking a team from its fans is just.. beyond imagination. I could easily say I don't care less if it's Milwaukee Bucks or Las Vegas Bucks. But seeing my fellow fans put up such a fight and their pain and stress to keep the team and now the reward of their fight is all I need to root for them.

 

They "find" the funds by asking us to pay for them, and we typically say yes because we don't mind paying for entertainment. This is obvious in all walks of life. We will pay to have fun. Houston has a budget deficit now and politicians don't want to ask us to pay extra taxes because they think they will lose votes. We don't like to pay for roads, schools, hospitals, etc.

It's not giving money away when the alternative is for the team to go to a city that will happily pay. You are only as good as your options. We don't have the leverage in these situations. It's no different than me being in a airport and having to pay $3 for a soda because I have limited options to get one.

 

You are totally correct. In the end, I admit that you're right. It's regrettable that cities are leveraged against each other such as they are, but it's the system we find ourselves in. Seattle will now always be the NBA's boogeyman just like Los Angeles is the specter haunting small NFL markets.

 

I think this is basically it. People in a locale wanna be entertained by a certain sport and are willing to pay the tax to have it. Of course, most locals never attend a game, but that is another story altogether. At least people get local games and a chance to affiliate civic identity with a pro-team....

The economic rationale have long been debunked. There are different projects for which public funds can be invested that would generate more of a return than a sports team.

It sucks that the current league-monopoly system is what we have, but it is what it is... until we decide it shouldn't be that way anymore. Besides, rooting for a sports team based on locale is mostly an irrational act to begin with, so, given human nature, there should be little reason to expect decisions regarding funding those teams to be rational.

Congrats to Bucks fans. Hopefully, the team will continue to improve.