Sports fan lobbyist fights NFL blackouts, taxpayer-funded stadiums, and Comcast | Hacker News Reader

Sports fan lobbyist fights NFL blackouts, taxpayer-funded stadiums, and Comcast

arstechnica.com

42 pointsandrewfong12 comments

I hope this guy succeeds. In most markets, blackouts are rare, but when they do happen, it's nothing more than a disgraceful power play and a relic of rules that were devised 40 years ago. The real crime is publicly financed stadiums.

The tax-payer funded stadiums racket is usually driven by teams explicitly or implicitly threatening to move - the oldest and most effective trick in the book. A recent example was the half a billion dollars the Minnesota legislature coughed up to the keep the Vikings from (probably) leaving for L.A. Remember that the most popular and profitable American sports league doesn't even have a team in the second largest market (even though it used to have 2) and realize that the NFL will continue to be able to hold cities hostage under threat of relocation.

Even the New York Yankees have tried it ( http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sports/features/2860/ ) and ended up with over $200 million of public financing for New Yankees stadium if I remember correctly. Almost as if someone actually believed that they might become the New Jersey Yankees??

The most egregious recent example is the New Braves Stadium in Cobb county that was subsidized with around $300 million of taxpayer dollars by "tea-party conservative" Cobb county officials. All of this for a stadium that isn't even 20 years old...in a county that had to lay off around 200 teachers and furlough the rest.

Not a bad business, if you're an owner in a North American sports league. The NHL is a different story for most markets, but owning an NFL or MLB team is unquestionably a license to print money. NBA owners love to plead poverty when the CBA is up, but the goddamn Milwaukee Bucks sold for over a half a billion and the wait line to buy an NBA is longer than ever.

To be fair, the Metrodome was an eyesore, but the level of public funding for the replacement is absolutely ridiculous.

At the very least, if the public is going to pay for a large portion of the costs, don't turn around and call the completed public work "Jeep Cherokee Stadium" or whatever the hell else.

Yup. We had the same problem here in Hamilton. Nobody even cares about the CFL, but the Hamilton Tiger-cats had enough pull to bully the city about where the Pan-Am stadium would be located and how much parking and how big it would be. Again, constantly threatening to leave (when every city they threatened to move to said they weren't actually that interested in paying for a stadium).

At the end of the fiasco, it got located right back into the same depressed residential area as the previous stadium. For like $200 mill. And the new one is smaller. And it wasn't ready in time.

For once I can commend the Miami county commissioners for not caving to a sports team owner and calling the bluff of Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. He wanted $250M to refurbish/remodel his stadium, they said no, because they knew he wasn't going to move the team. Though I think they did agree to tax concessions which are going to negatively impact the surrounding neighborhoods ability to police itself.

There is no way the public should be in the position of lacking hospitals and fundamental public services while sustaining huge commercial payouts for already astronomically rich sports ventures. Yet, this is clearly the case. If this guy had a kickstarter or similar crowdsourcing option to sustain his legal campaign I'm pretty sure Comcast and co. should be even more scared.

I'm sure if hospital threw off hundreds of millions in entertainment and tourism revenue municipalities might be more amenable to funding them...

If you start counting secondary side-effects in terms of income then I'm pretty sure that hospitals come out WAY more positively in terms of the millions upon millions they have 'created' in revenue terms by having a healthy and functional (i.e. not dead) workforce that is out and about working and spending their way through life.

Sports would be a shadow of what they are today if they weren't so heavily subsidized. I remember a statistic that something like 80% of a basic cable TV subscription goes to pay for ESPN.

Everyone hates lobbying until it's used as a tool to tell legislators what they want legislators to hear.

You mean a voice for the public where it rarely, if ever, has one? Yes, why would people be in favor of that?

Rare? That's not an accurate depiction of the status quo in the least. AARP is one of the more influential groups in DC not because it gives away a lot of money but because of the voting block it represents. If you did an analysis of who you are as a voter then reviewed groups in DC representing your interests, I bet you could get 2 meetings on the Hill before the end of the year.

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