Stadium is fielding money — from us

"Just remember, it's not a lie, if you believe it." — George Costanza

I wasn't overly alarmed when a Deseret Morning News headline announced last week that the funding of Dave's Big Soccer Stadium will cost much more than we were originally told.

Gee, what a shock. Who saw that coming?

Try to think of Dave Checketts and his eager band of developers and Sandy city flunkies as car dealers. Now we've reached that point when it's time to pay for the car, and they're telling us the hidden costs — tax and license fees, interest on the loan, delivery price, extras (oh, you wanted FOUR tires!) — they neglected to mention earlier.

When it came time to finalize the funding details for the soccer stadium last week, someone finally got around to mentioning that it will cost more than the $45 million as advertised — it will cost another $28 mil in interest, bringing the price tag to, ka-ching!, $73 million.

OK, we know there are always going to be interest payments, but it's strange that they never bothered to mention this before and that they always told taxpayers their cost would be $45 million.

You gotta love these guys (but not really). First, they're turning to the governor and his wife to ram the deal through against the wishes of the public, a county mayor and a couple of auditors, then it turns out they were telling us less than the truth about the actual price.

Oh, well, that's just the cost of doing this dirty business, and what's another $28 mil to make Dave, the Legislature and our first lady happy?

Anyway, what really caught my eye was when a guy named Randy Sant — Sandy's economic development director and head cheerleader — tried to ease the pain of this hidden expense by saying, "I think when we show them what's going to be developed around there, we'll show them it's going to be a great economic development tool."

OK, class, who still believes the old fairy tale that public funding of athletic stadiums means "economic development"? Oh, please. That tired, old line has been used to justify public funding of stadiums for decades, with nothing to support the claim.

It's the biggest lie since "Check's in the mail" and "I have never used steroids." That myth has been ripped to shreds by numerous experts. University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson once told Jay Evensen of the Deseret Morning News that the only investment with less economic returns would be a cemetery.

Evensen quoted a New York City budget office study that reported, "Research consistently finds that new stadiums do not produce economic growth in metropolitan areas."