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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

with the professional teams flush with so much broadcast money there needs to be a bigger push to legally block them from exploiting deals from cities and counties for building costly venues at taxpayer expense. throw in the IRS really needs to revisit its rules which allow the write off of tickets to such events as business expenses

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Who is going to create such laws? The federal government? Why should they tell cities how to spend their money?

Because tax exempt municiple bonds are used to pay for stadia.

Actually the federal government underwrites these stadium deals through the tax code.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2016/09/09/top-...

Yep, everybody is paying for them whether or not they're into sports http://investigations.blog.ajc.com/2016/09/12/report-tax-fre...

I agree that everyone is paying for them via the tax incentives. But I think the media portrayal is often incorrect about who benefits. The benefits of tax-exempt bonds are split between the municipality issuing them and the high-income individuals buying them. But most of the gain is captured by the municipality (because the high-income people would be getting a lot more interest in a taxable investment so the municipality would have to pay a lot more interest to raise money if they had to compete with those investments).

If players have a union and collectively bargain, and the owners collectively bargain, then the fans/cities should also collectively bargain. Create a union of the cities that host the leagues, and have them bargain for rules such as no taxpayer subsidizing of stadiums.

Federal Government should not be allowed to tell cities how to spend their money, but something needs to be done what devinhelton said. Look up Atlanta about their stadium deals for the Falcons and Braves. The City Council basically ignored the citizens completely and went ahead to spend millions to replace 2 stadiums that really wasn't that old to begin with.

Did the city council get re-elected when they went against citizens?

Im not sure. I remember reading an article about it awhile back and wondered if they would get re-elected, though I cannot find that article at the moment. I believe it was to approve additional funds for the Braves new stadium. If I remember right, they kept anybody who was against the deal from speaking about it at the meeting. There was a big scene and they went ahead and voted for the additional funding.

The Braves aren't in Atlanta/Fulton anymore because the city wasn't willing to pay for a new city. They are in Cobb County - a suburb of Atlanta.

Cities do have a "union", it's called the city government. Fans (aka people) bargain by electing people that agree with them. So far fans (aka people) are electing people who think the cost/benefit of paying for stadiums is a net positive. If so many cities wind up taking a loss on the matter then I suppose things will change.

Totally agreed with this. As part of the selection criteria for the host cities, they should be some commitment by the city to do something useful with the venue after the event.

They're kinda forced to commit to do something else with the venue once the tax beneficiary moves https://www.yahoo.com/news/nfl-rams-gone-st-louis-still-stuc...

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