Billionaire Boondoggle : How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs (9781250162342) by Garofalo Pat

Author:Garofalo, Pat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

6

THE STADIUM SWINDLE

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE concourse at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, a merch stand sold all things Golden Knights. That made sense at the time: This was October 2017, and the team was in the midst of the first home stand of the first season of Sin City’s first major professional sports team. After years of what-ifs and maybes, the National Hockey League had finally brought big-time sports right to Las Vegas’s famed Strip. Thus, the helmet logo of the Golden Knights, with its capital V in the negative space, trimmed by black and gold, was everywhere one looked. Given what a successful inaugural season the team had, winning its division in a walk and then making a run all the way to the Stanley Cup final, perhaps I should have bought some mementos and sold them off on eBay later.

But I wasn’t on the prowl for Golden Knights gear on that day. In the corner of one of those airport stores where you can buy peanuts, phone chargers, and gaudy tourist T-shirts, I found what I was looking for: Raiders apparel. A few T-shirts and some mugs, with the iconic eye-patch-wearing black-and-silver player, were available. Notably, none of the stuff mentioned anything about a location. It just said “Raiders,” if it said anything at all. That’s because, while at the moment they were still the Oakland Raiders, plying their trade in that city’s old Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, in a few years the plan was to have them pick up and move to Vegas, the beneficiaries of the largest stadium subsidy in American history.

For years, it had been no secret that the Raiders ownership wanted out of Oakland and the aging Coliseum, which opened in 1966, making it positively ancient compared to nearly every other arena and stadium in America. The Coliseum is also the last American stadium shared by NFL and Major League Baseball teams, with the Raiders splitting time with MLB’s Athletics, which makes for a suboptimal field situation for everyone involved. When Nevada put a pot of money on the table that would enable the Raiders to move, it was almost inevitable that the team would jump on it. In March 2017, by a vote of 31–1, the NFL team owners okayed the move, setting up the Raiders to follow in the Golden Knights’ footsteps and come to Nevada.

And how much did Nevada taxpayers have to kick in for the shiny Las Vegas Stadium that would be the Raiders’ new home? A cool $750 million.

Though the Nevada state legislature set an American record by devoting that much public money to a new professional sports stadium, big spending from the public coffers on NFL stadiums is a bet that not only Vegas has made in recent years. Per ESPN, $6.7 billion in taxpayer money has been spent on a several-decades-long stadium building spree by the NFL alone.1 Billions upon billions more have been spent to build facilities for teams in the other major leagues, too—$17 billion between 1986 and 2012, per one Bloomberg News analysis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.