My FB feed is all aglow over the proposed design for the new arena. Sorry, Im a lifelong Wings fan and always will be, but I cant share your enthusiasm. Heres highlights from an article earlier in the year that is enlightening. ...just a week after the Motor City declared for bankruptcy, it was announced the public would cover nearly 60 percent of the cost for the teams new $450 million, 18,000-seat arena... Detroit is mired in the countrys largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, staring down $18 billion in long-term debt. Many retirees will lose health care on March 1, only to receive a small stipend. Firefighters and police could see their pensions reduced—some have speculated at 16 cents on the dollar. Local bus drivers are being shot at in the middle of the day. Kevyn Orr was appointed the citys emergency manager in March of last year, but he wasnt the first in town: Since 2009 DPS has been under the watch of an emergency financial manager. As part of the districts 2013-2014 budget, 665 jobs were set to be slashed. The DPS deficit ballooned from $76 million to $82 million. And roughly 600 non-union water and sewer department workers are set to lose their jobs. Somehow, amid all that financial and institutional debris—which neglected to mention the oft-cited bits about the lack of very basic services and 58-minute average police response time in a city where less than half of the 88,000 streetlights work—theres still $284.5 million for a new hockey arena. Few fields of empirical economic research offer virtual unanimity of findings, economist Andrew Zimbalist wrote in 2000. Yet, independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found there is no statistically positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development. In that same paper Zimbalist riffed on years of stadium welfare literature and studies, one of which found no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four professional premier sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not. Compare that to the Detroit Lions, whose value skyrocketed from $150 million in 1996 to $839 million in 2006, four years after the franchise moved to its new publicly funded stadium across the street from Comerica Park. Which is a long way of saying: The franchise owner gets richer, but the citys residents dont. Why hasnt anyone in Washington done anything about it? Think about what youre cheering, folks. deadspin/detroit-scam-city-how-the-red-wings-took-hockeytown-fo-1534228789
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 15:16:45 +0000
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