Musings from Brian J. Noggle: St. Louis Should Throw Good Money After Bad

St. Louis Should Throw Good Money After Bad

Not only will the Savvis Center henceforth, temporarily, be known as the TBD Center, but apparently the owners of the St. Louis Blues have put the team up for sale:

Citing heavy financial losses and concern about the future, St. Louis Blues owners Bill and Nancy Laurie have decided to sell the National Hockey League team and its long-term lease on the Savvis Center.

Bernie Miklasz, sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lights upon the obvious answer (for a newspaperman): have the government pay for it:

With some cooperative tweaking, local politicians and leaders can ensure the Blues' future in St. Louis.

Apparently, the cooperative tweaking that built and maintains a publicly-funded sports venue is not enough. Instead:

The state and the city have wobbled and given in on the tax issue before. The state and the city and St. Louis County teamed to pay for a football stadium that eventually housed the Rams. The Rams' lease calls for the stadium to be maintained to high standards, so public money is still being used for periodic upgrades, even though the Rams are highly profitable. The Rams also got deal sweeteners, including a new practice facility, for moving here.

The Cardinals open a new ballpark next season, and they're receiving public money for road and infrastructure work and other stadium-related costs. The city also waived its 5 percent amusement tax for the Cardinals owners to keep the new stadium in the city.

Instead of eliminating or reducing, in general, an onerous tax levied on entertainment events (designed, like hotel taxes, to soak outsiders who come to the city for an event instead of taxing the voters), Miklasz favors more crony capitalistic targeted subsidies so the government can prop up select, poorly-run enterprises. The Prince tour that comes through? Well, that private endeavor makes money, so it should shoulder its share of the burden--and that of the sports teams.

So point one is the government should favor the Blues because it favors the other teams. So it should continue to throw (or forego) good tax money after bad.

Argument two:

Again, I know what you're thinking: Who cares? No public money for sports teams. OK, fine. But what will we do with Savvis Center? The city owns the arena. If the Blues head out of town, the city is stuck with the arena. Savvis Center creates full-time jobs, and a part-time workforce on the night of the events.

The Savvis Center however, won't do jack for the city, and downtown interests, if there's no hockey team or NBA team to fill valuable dates. That's the reality. So really, it's up to the city to decide what to do with this investment.

So the city of St. Louis has thrown this money away to build a large public venue that sat empty through the 2004-2005 hockey season. It should forego tax revenue on the main tenant of the building so that the building doesn't go to waste.

Miklasz concludes that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it:

And we have a history lesson to draw on.

Once upon a time, when Ralston Purina sold the Blues, no local owners stepped up. The team was sold to Harry Ornest, who was based in Beverly Hills, Calif. After a few years, our civic leaders were so fatigued by the bombastic Ornest, they organized a local group to buy the Blues just to get rid of him.

Obviously, it would have been cheaper to buy the team before Ornest got a hold of it; instead the local leaders paid a lot more for the Blues once the team passed through Harry O's hands.

Same with pro football. After the Cardinals moved to Arizona in 1988, the enormous cost of luring the Rams here was far greater than the cheaper alternative of keeping the Cardinals here.

If high taxes are going to drive the Blues out of this market - say, to Kansas City - then it'll cost considerably more, long-term, to replace them.

Funny how my obvious solution differs from Miklasz's. Why replace them? If they cannot make money here with the same tax burden and costs of business as any other enterprise, let them fail or move to some other city from which they can suck tax money.

Because ultimately, the only way the city can ensure that the sports franchise stays here would be to buy it outright and run it like another city department. Which cannot be any worse than sports teams run themselves anyway.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:42 AM