Comments

1

"because attendance is down at Major League Baseball games, the team needs help"

Meanwhile, minor league attendance is on the rise.

Dumping millions of taxpayer dollars into a new beer garden or whatever won't change the fact that many people don't want to spend a fortune watching one of the least successful teams in U.S. professional sports lose. Charge less, and win more.

2

Good

3

I can think of very few bigger wastes of taxpayer money than throwing it at sports palaces for billionaires.

Not one dime of taxpayer money should be spent on this.

5

I love the implied claims (a) the Stadium District needs another brewpub, and (b) it should be bought with our tax money.

We King County taxpayers voted no on the original stadium proposal in 1995, and we should now make it clear that's how it always should have gone.

6

Kohl-Welles said “I don’t think anybody would deny that it is critical that people have homes… For me, it doesn’t have to be an either/or.”

Indeed. We HAVE a housing crisis. But we DO NOT have a sports stadium crisis.

Budgeting is a zero-sum game; every dollar spent on corporate-welfare is one dollar less that's available for critically needed housing.

Kohl-Welles should be ashamed of herself for siding with billionaries instead of... well, anyone.

7

While the US champions free market and deregulation, it has the most regulated professional sports systems in the free world. From franchise teams that never get delegated to a lower league due to poor performance, to communities asked to finance for-profit teams.
Down with socialism!!!

9

Aren’t the M’s avoiding $11million this season in salary obligations due to tje fact Cano is too stupid to avoid testing positive for PED’s? Why can’t they use that money for a new hot dog stand or whatever?

10

Okay---now I'm all for making as many profiteering one percenters homeless as possible.
@8 Sargon Bighorn: What's the K.C.C.?

11

@10: It's the William Rufus King County Council (KCC for short) - composed of 8 districts, represented by 6 democrats and two republicans.

12

And all report to Chairman Dow.

14

Oh, classy “my life story is so complicated i can't even tell it, the sun shines out of my asshole” raindrop.

15

@13 - it only adds insult to injury to point out that the taxpayers of King County own professional sports stadiums.

The Mariners should be paying for far more than the majority of the improvements over the life of the lease. They should have built their own damn stadium to begin with.

16

To be fair to the politicians, they're doing exactly what their constituents want.

People SAY they don't like corporate welfare - but heaven forbid we risk losing a professional sports team...

17

@6: We also have not declared an Arts crisis - let’s devote the 37.5% dedicated to arts & cultural programs to paying artists to build tiny homes for the homeless, and kill the non-crisis programs otherwise funded.

18

How about this. We’ll support the stadium for the Mariners if they use it for emergency housing on the off season. Think about it. Bathrooms, kitchens, shelter from the weather. It doesn’t have to be hideous and if properly done is a good housing resource.

19

@11

I guess you are still against the MLK holiday too.

20

Money for the homeless no corporate welfare.

21

@11: William Rufus King was a slaveholding piece of shit, which is why the county no longer bears his name. And there are three Republicans on the King County Council. Dumbass.

22

King County is real big on building jails and providing corporate welfare. That should tell us where their heads are at.

24

@23 Just so we're clear, if a landlord negotiated a lease where the cost of rent did not cover maintenance of the rental property, that landlord would be incredibly foolish.

If the Public Facilities District owns the building, then yes, they should maintain it, but since the PFD is supposed to represent the public, it shouldn't be asking the public to subsidize an incredibly foolish lease agreement.

25

@11 - so much wrong here. It's the Martin Luther King Jr. County Council, and there are NINE members of the Council. not eight. You need an odd number of voting members in a governing body if you want to avoid tie votes.

26

@23 "We had the opportunity to have another stadium paid for 100% by private money, but in the city's infinite wisdom declined a privately paid for stadium."

Bullshit. $1.2 Billion in mitigation and loss of opportunity costs for other businesses is not free, even if your lunch is.

27

Just elininate the tax a together. The money won't be spent wisely on sports or affordable housing.

If we need a similar tax that solves nothing, we could tax protestors. They have enough money to not go to work.

28

What's the argument for dollar $1 going towards this?

What leverage do the Mariners have? They can't move - there's no market that can give them something better than Safeco in their current state, and they make most of their money based on their ownership of the Regional Sports Network. How can they ask for absolutely anything? I hope the M's do the right thing and swallow 100% of whatever costs are needed.

29

@23 Literally, explicitly, how do the benefits of Stadium Improvement benefit King County taxpayers? The economic development arguments have been disproven over and over and over again - that argument is straight up a non-starter, don't even bring that to the table.

How many non-Mariners events are there per year, and how much revenue does that contribute directly to the county? Does the team or the county own the parking receipts? Or the concessions revenue? If it's profitable for the county to continue investing in the stadium, I'm all for it. But I haven't heard a reasonable argument that it is worthwhile.

30

@29: There is no argument which benefits us taxpayers. The argument has always been that professional sports are a good product for the for-profit media to sell, and said media can pretty much dictate how voters view politicians. Therefore, politicians vote to spend public money on professional sports palaces. Everybody wins! (Except the people paying for it.)

This was starkly on display in 1995. During the only pennant race the Mariners had ever seen, we King County voters rejected a stadium proposal which all of Seattle’s for-profit media had endorsed. The end result was a stadium that cost us far more than the proposal we’d rejected.

31

@30 i might have a different opinion now, but as a 14-year-old during the '95 pennant chase, that was a magical time for me. My dad died the previous year, having indoctrinated me into being a Mariners fan at a time when it many believed the team was cursed and would never, ever, have a winning season, let alone a playoffs. I thought about that a lot, that he never once saw any of the time and heartache paid off while the rest of us turned up Dave Neihaus on the radio and watched the Double over and over and over again.

But anyhow, one big difference this time around: The Mariners aren't moving no matter what the county does.


Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.