Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 21, 2023 10:47 am
Is it a truck load of public money when they’re only asking for an extension of the current stadium tax at this point though? If that’s what they stick too, it seems a fairly reasonable request.
They haven't put forward any sort of detailed plan yet, so we don't really know what they're asking for. They keep saying that it's going to be a $2 billion project and they're going to put "at least" $1 billion into it. I mean, you can read a lot into "at least" if you want, but I have a feeling if "at least" meant they were actually looking at putting in, say, $1.5 billion, they'd be pushing the $1.5 billion number instead, so it feels pretty safe to assume they are planning to cover only about half the cost of the project. So if they're looking for a billion dollars in public money, then yeah, I'd call that a truckload, regardless of the funding mechanism (but I strongly suspect it won't be just the existing stadium tax, which isn't going to raise $1 billion for the Royals alone). In the article
bfa posted a few weeks ago, they don't commit to asking for no public money in excess of the existing tax, they just say they won't seek more money
from Jackson County taxpayers. The city or state are presumably fair game (though I doubt the state will be willing to kick anything in). I don't recall seeing any other quote where they are less equivocal about taking additional public money, and I'm not going to go hunt for one myself, but I'm happy to be proven wrong if you have one handy. They are also going to ask the city, state, and possibly even feds to pay for infrastructure upgrades (not included in the $2 billion price tag), and although some infrastructure upgrades are probably overdue anyway (especially if it's the EV site), we are probably looking at more extensive (and expensive) upgrades to support a baseball stadium than would be needed if one weren't there. Just because we wouldn't ordinarily expect a baseball team to finance a new highway ramp or something themselves doesn't mean we shouldn't consider the cost of that highway ramp as a public subsidy to the team, if the team is the one who needs it there in the first place.
In any case, even if they only maintained the current stadium tax with no additional public money, they're still getting hundreds of millions of public dollars from that. They're public dollars that we don't necessarily miss, because we're already paying them anyway, and you can split hairs over how many hundreds of millions of dollars constitute a "truckload" if you want, but fundamentally my question is why the public should continue to invest in an organization that isn't willing to invest in itself.
