“Better not to feed the trolls,” a friend said, referring to Canzano and his scuff with the mayor. And with that I scrapped my extremely offensive letter drafting the sports talk host to run as a Tea Party candidate for city council. The path from radio jockey to jingoist zealot, after all, has already been laid by Glenn Beck.

But no. Better off passing on that one. Things have gotten dumb enough.

Instead, let’s take a completely neutral source from across the country and give them the last word. Seems fair, right? So take it away, Ken Belson of the New York Times. Share with us what you learned in researching public stadium financing. From “As Stadiums Vanish, Their Debt Lives On”:

It’s the gift that keeps on taking. The old Giants Stadium, demolished to make way for New Meadowlands Stadium, still carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident, even though it is now a parking lot…

New Jerseyans are hardly alone in paying for stadiums that no longer exist. Residents of Seattle’s King County owe more than $80 million for the Kingdome, which was razed in 2000. The story has been similar in Indianapolis and Philadelphia. In Houston, Kansas City, Mo., Memphis and Pittsburgh, residents are paying for stadiums and arenas that were abandoned by the teams they were built for…

How municipalities acquire so much debt on buildings that have been torn down or are underused illustrates the excesses of publicly financed stadiums and the almost mystical sway professional sports teams have over politicians, voters and fans.

Rather than confront teams, they have often buckled when owners — usually threatening to move — have demanded that the public pay for new suites, parking or arenas and stadiums.

With state and local budgets stretched by the recession, politicians are only now starting to look askance at privately held teams trying to tap the public till.

9 replies on “A Final Word in the Adams-Canzano-Baseball Debacle”

  1. I think Sam is a terrible Mayor.

    I think Canzano is a terrible columnist.

    I guess that makes me impartial.

    On this issue, Sam got it right. Deciding not to spend taxpayer dollars on a minor league baseball stadium was clearly the right decision. Government should be in the business of providing basic services, and not supporting the egos of politicians and their friends with expensive boondoggle projects.

  2. The best part of this entire rigmarole is hearing from the people that call into Canzano’s show and comment on his columns who think he offers cogent analysis or good writing. Hunter S Thompson he is not, he just kinda looks like a dumber, fatter version of him. Team Canzano is filled with more dick heads and monster truck fans than WSH’s sex dungeon (i.e. basement).

  3. Just to clarify this is not a comment from an unemployed libtard hipster that is so prevelant on this site…. But I digress… I wonder what they will do with the stadium after the MLS goes bankrupt within 5 years ?

  5. Ken Belson could also use the Baltimore numbers. A buck from every beer sold in two counties is transfered to the team owners.

    Lets go back to the origin of this madness of cities thinking that they can use municipal debt to subsidize a private monopoly.

    http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/art…

    One can also read the sport economics textbooks and see this is a no win for a city.

  9. No Blabby, hundreds of millions of dollars of public debt for a new Giants Stadium doesn’t exactly compare to less than $20M in spectator funds for a renovated PGE Park.

    If the public was entirely on the hook for a brand new $400M MLB stadium here, then yes.

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