This week, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx called a new, tax-subsidized stadium for Charlotte Charlotte Knights a “hard sell” and made skeptical noises like he doubted it would happen. He didn’t mean it.
That’s just how things get done around here. The politicians who plan to push something go through a sort of 12-step process with these things, with the first step being public denial. That way, later on, when they come out and push for the stadium, they won’t look like push overs, but people who’ve convinced by the overwhelming merits of the plan.
The Knights obviously know Foxx is bluffing. Otherwise they wouldn’t have asked for $11 million for the AAA stadium from the city while he’s making negative noises. It’s all political theater. Trust me.
What’s incredible here is that if the city forks it over, taxpayers will have paid more than half the $78 million cost of the thing, including $8 million in stadium infrastructure and $24 million worth of uptown property from the county plus the $11 million from the city for a total of $43 million.
Forget any objections to spending taxpayer money for a minute, because no one around here cares about that. That’s still a HUGE amount of treasure spent on AAA baseball, especially when even the contrived, manufactured, rah-rah impact studies supporting construction of the Knights stadium show little real economic impact.
Surely there’s a bigger, better use for that money. The pot of money that could be used for the city’s contribution stadium is currently used to market the city across the country to bring in outside events like conferences and sports events. To put that in perspective, Myrtle Beach, which has less than a quarter of Charlotte’s base population, spends $25 million a year marketing itself, more than twice what we do. That’s what we’re up against, and every mid-sized city in the country now has a marketing budget for similar purposes.
Given how tough it is to market Charlotte as a destination, and given the national competition, I’m not sure I’d want to give up any outside marketing money, again, for AAA baseball when we already have the NFL and the NBA. How does AAA give us an edge and how much of an edge does it give us? No one has said.
It just seems like overkill.
If the powers that be want to throw money around uptown, is AAA baseball really worth blowing a hole this big in the hotel-motel tax revenue stream and spending taxpayer millions beside that. I just don’t see it.
