The National Basketball Association held its hand out for welfare, and the Oklahoma City Council obliged. Today the league announced a deal to have the displaced New Orleans Hornets play 35 of its 41 home games this season in Oklahoma City’s Ford Center. OKC was in the running against at least four other cities, but in the end local officials made the Hornets an offer they wouldn’t refuse:
City Council members unanimously approved a lease that would provide financial support for the Hornets should their revenue drop in the temporary venue. If the team does not earn 5 percent more in local revenue than it made in New Orleans last season, taxpayers and local businessmen pay the team as much as $10 million.If the team exceeds last season’s revenues by more than 5 percent, Oklahoma City would receive 80 percent of the proceeds to cover its expenses. If all the city’s costs are covered, the team and the city would split the remaining profits in half.
. . .
City manager Jim Couch said the city would have about $2 million in expenses to recover, including about $1 million in game-day expenses, $500,000 in relocation costs including housing, $300,000 for office space and $200,000 for improvements to the arena.
This isn’t any different from using of eminent domain to transfer private property from one business to another. In this case, we’re just dealing with confiscated funds instead of land or buildings. As with “economic development” property takings, the city’s justification here is that the Hornets will generate otherwise unrealized sales tax revenue. So this means local businesses get hosed at least twice—once in subsidzing the Hornets, and twice in dealing with the increased regulatory burden additional sales tax generates.
I just hope that members of the sports media don’t try to label the Hornets “America’s Team” as they’ve attempted to do with the New Orleans Saints.
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Thank God we still have tennis!
The politicians, educators, and the press fail to recognize the nature of professional “sports.” They are the American religion. Subsidizing a stadium is the economic and religious equivalent of the Jewish theocracy requiring that cows and sheep be burnt to ashes – the first recorded agricultural support program.
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