Anyone still want to challenge me on my take on the Sports Authority and their financial impact on Harris County?: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7206641.html
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread hey you, get off my cloud! ps - stop being such a downer. who cares if we become the next Detroit. we have 3 downtown stadiums!!!
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Considering how much it sucked here during those years without a NFL franchise, not gonna get all upset about the Sports Authority and related stadium issues. Why aren't people up in arms about all the tax breaks and financial incentives Continental gets to keep their HQ here, but now that is about to end due to the United merger?
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Because in theory those tax breaks went to subsidizing regular paying jobs, not multimillionaire salaries for players and owners. It's arguable but the companies who get breaks have to have some committment to investment and/or jobs and the County and City has tightened up on enforcement in the last few years on these tax breaks. However, you could argue Continental and others were never moving to begin with and thus the tax break was a waste.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread My real argument is that the majority of people are pretty clueless about how things work, how taxes are gathered, how taxes are spent, how projects are funded, etc. Stadiums are nice big obvious things that the willfully ignorant can point at and rant and rave about while ignoring the trail of much greater amounts of money. The fact that so many people still lump the Dynamo stadium into the same kind of caste system as Reliant, Toyota Center, and Minute Maid is just more evidence of how they'd rather complain incessantly instead of finding a way to be a positive influence on the issue or in the system.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread I agree, and most of the comments on the Chron website will lump the Dynamo stadium in with the others in an inappropriate manner. But it highlights the collateral problem of bringing in the Sports Authority to the deal for no other reason than to grease up the payola machine for the friends of El Franco, Gene Locke, etc. I would think that rather than spending time on figuring out how to spend AEG's money, they would be better served hammering out new financing deals. And it also highlights the massive credibility problem that the Sports Authority and Harris County has on this issue, namely that no property tax dollars will go to the stadiums. Anyone with half a brain can see that County general fund revenues are going to be going into covering the shortfalls; they just write the checks from different parts of the budget to make it look like it isn't coming from the general fund but that doesn't fool many. I don't expect any of this to ultimately matter, but it was avoidable.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Huge difference, huge difference. Transport whether it by land, air or sea = commerce, industry, jobs with livable wages and benefits. Reliant, Toyota, Enron Field = subsidies for billionaire owners that employ a couple dozen semi-literate ball players that fake their way through Big State U. These palaces create minimum wage Aramark jobs that do NOT provide livable wages or employee benefits. if you want to get all Che Guevara about it then you wouldn't side with the McNairs, Leslie's, AEGs or Uncle Draytons of the world.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Having the HQ here doesn;t produce jobs with livable wages either, it just moves the type of jobs for the type of people that will move around with those jobs, I don't believe in subsidies for HQs or stadiums, they don't really help the city that much. But if I had to stop being a European socialist snob and I had to choose one or the other, I would choose stadiums all the way, I love going to MLB, NFL and MLS games, heck, I even go to a few NBA games and I don't even watch basketball on TV. You could also argue that you don't really build stadiums so that a few thousand fans can sit in their seats, but that you build them to have a team in your city, and that having a team helps the city, it unites, it gives your city an identity, etc, etc, etc. The way I see it, I don't really live in Houston proper, so I have no problem with the city or the county suing your money to build stadiums that I will use, even if I only go to the nose bleeding section.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread You are about 100% wrong on that. HQ jobs aren't just the ones for the company itself, its the suppliers, accounting and law firms, banks, etc. that support the company at its HQ. It's a big deal and one reason why Houston hasn't been hurt as badly as the rest of the country - we have a lot of Fortune 500/1000 firms here in town with good paying jobs.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread stop agreeing with me. you're going to ruin my rep (and I don't mean on BS). i was recently having a similiar discussion with a client of mine in Chattanoga, TN where Volkswagen is opening a plant due to the tax concessions being given to them by the city and county. there's actually people opposed to it. Which is idiotic considering the size of the planned plant. it will bring a couple thousands of jobs to an area that needs them. the livable wages and healthcare benefits paid by VW provide for a happy prosperous employee than can turnaround and purchase a home or maintain their current home. Which then keeps the county collecting property taxes. industry does this......moving the Titans/Oilers from Nashville to Chatt and building a new stadium does not.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Hotel/Motel tax revenue does not go to the County General Fund. Try again.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread While your absolutely right -- the big corporations with the big commerce only want to HQ and build their empires in cities with "culture" that includes major league sports. You want to attract business? Better have major league sports. To get the major league sports, you have to subsidize their major league venues because others who want the teams will. I don't intend to argue with anyone on whether it is actually true that national & multinational businesses will only relocate/expand in cities with major league sports. I think many sportsless communities do just fine. However, economic development professionals swear by it. Chambers of Commerce leaders swear by it. Whether they are right or not is not my point. While many regular folks missed the Oilers. The business community was aghast and privately demanded a fix from the government folks.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Why don't you try again? This particular diversion is from the County hotel/motel tax collections to the Sports Authority - so what happens to the designated expenditures that were targeted from the County hotel/motel tax collections? They either are cut OR backfilled from the the general fund. So like I mentioned, the check gets written from the hotel/motel tax account but then they cover what the hotel/motel tax was supposed to fund from the general County revenues. You can try your witty County government-backed semantics all you want but it is clear - monies that were dedicated for other uses are going to be diverted to cover the Sports Authority debts because Harris County has an implied backstop on all of this and you know it.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Well exactly I know that. This post here is exactly true. It is just not what you originally wrote. You wrote "Anyone with half a brain can see that County general fund revenues are going to be going into covering the shortfalls." You now write that general fund money MAY be going to cover the shortfalls. And that is very different, but we can agree on it.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread i get it. its the what comes first argument "the chicken or the huevos rancheros". btw, i'm not opposed to the building of Enron Field/Reliant Stadium/Toyota Center. i'm not even completely opposed to the way it was funded. what bothered me was the mismanagement of those funds. if anything the Dynamo/AEG are doing it the correct way, but may get caught in an unfortunate PR battle they can't win because of HCSA's 'administrative' involvement.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread It's really not different. It's lawyerspeak to contest that the shortfalls aren't coming from the County general fund because unless the County just decrees that they won't spend any dollars on tourism, or suspends all tourism/arts spending that was originally budgeted out of the hotel/motel tax pool, then any spending on those items that were supposed to come out of the hotel/motel tax is an indirect transfer from the general fund to the Sports Authority. They aren't going to fool anyone with inaccurately characterizing the ultimate transfer of the funs. But there's not much point to debate this further.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread lol. Ok .. then don't debate it further. lol lawyer speak?? ouch. So why can't the county just reduce their normal tourism spending by the $2 million they are sending to the sports corp?
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Art/Chris, can we move all this political, tax, chicken and egg stuff somewhere else? It's the only positive we have...so let's keep it this out of it. Send it to the "Politics of Other Stadiums and HQ Subsidies" or something.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread They can - but then they need to admit that they reduced tourism spending to spend those funds on the Sports Authority, not recast the shifting of the spending as some "cash flow" situation. Right now, they are still trying to tag everything to the Sports Authority as being temporary or an advance but eventually if people watch the flow of funds process to the end, they'll see they spent dollars tagged for another purpose on the Sports Authority - but you'll never see them publicly admit that.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Another bit of evidence of how the County is cutting funding to others because of the money they have to use to cover the Sports Authority debt: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7239083.html See, if they keep funding the things they promised with the non-existent hotel tax money, then they'll essentially be covering the Sports Authority shortfall with property tax revenues, thus you are SOL if you needed those funds from the hotel tax and Radack or another commissoner doesn't like you.
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread Oh, how I hope this would be true, but I think this column was designed to help Garcia get out the vote: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/casey/7267479.html
Re: Dynamo Downtown Stadium Thread The presidents budget coming out tomarrow will include funding for the METRO light rail expansion. There was speculation that it would be cut.