From Deseret News archives:
Avoid a stadium rip-off
As one of them put it to a reporter for this newspaper, this is necessary because it's been so long since this community has had a new major-league franchise brought to it. People just don't understand.
All we can say is, get Real.
A lot of cities with a lot more major-league teams than Salt Lake City have been waging this battle for years. Often it pits austere members of the public, aided by knowledgable economists, against city officials. The opponents are armed with hard facts about how sports stadiums add nothing to a local economy. City officials and team owners are armed with empty promises about economic development and an infusion of money from new fans and tourists.
At the moment, the city of Washington is struggling with plans for a new baseball stadium funded entirely by taxes. According to some polls, nearly 70 percent of the district's residents oppose the plan, and yet the City Council and mayor are forging ahead anyway.
And here along the Wasatch Front, a Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll shows people oppose public funding for a soccer stadium by 2-to-1. Perhaps more ominously, the same poll found that only 13 percent say they would even probably attend a game by the new team.
Team officials and proponents at City Hall, including Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson and officials in Murray, who also are vying for the stadium, would counter that they are considering using tax increment financing, which means they would advance money for construction and reimburse the city with the extra taxes the new stadium one-day generates.
In the meantime, of course, the entities that would have benefitted from those extra taxes, including schools and libraries, will have to wait until the loan is retired. There truly is no such thing as a free lunch, just as there is no such thing as economic benefits to equal the amount a government sinks into a stadium.
The economic studies backing that opinion keep piling up. Most of them focus on an economic principle called the substitution effect. Simply put, the people who attend soccer games will do so with money they otherwise would have used to attend a movie, go to dinner or engage in other forms of entertainment. The same can be said for the other events officials say they would like to stage in the stadium.
A new stadium won't generate new money. It will simply move money away from other businesses, and the jobs created by a new stadium are seasonal and low-paying. That is, except for the high-paying jobs of the athletes, who often are not full-time residents of the city in which they play.
We're not opposed to Major League Soccer. In fact, we welcome Real Salt Lake to the area and hope they succeed. But they should do so the way any other business does, without a public handout. They should do it the way Larry H. Miller wants to build a car racing track in Tooele County, free from taxpayers.
As for city, county or state officials who are looking at this, we urge them to what state lawmakers recently did regarding tuition tax credits: Commission independent and reputable scholars to study the claims about economic benefits and new jobs before making any decisions.
