Remember when just a couple few days ago I dropped this little gem?
As far as I can tell, this has doomed the city to never, ever, ever having a baseball team as long as anyone in MLB remembers what a duplicitous thing the Council did.
And to further reinforce the point, I called that post “”DC Baseball? Not Now. Not Ever”.
Umm….oops.
D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams and Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp said last night that they had reached agreement on a stadium financing package that would satisfy Major League Baseball by guaranteeing construction of a permanent home for the Washington Nationals along the Anacostia waterfront.
Under the new proposal, which the 13-member council is to vote on today, the city will purchase insurance for potential cost overruns on the stadium and split the payments with Major League Baseball. Also, District officials will continue pursuing private financing for the project for several months. But Cropp said she will drop a requirement that 50 percent of the construction costs be paid for with private money.
Now I’m still a bit confused by this “private funding” concern, since part of the original deal the Mayor struck involved raising specific taxes from businesses to help pay for the stadium. Since the businesses agreed to these taxes, which were capped at a specific amount, for a specific duration, and targeted to a specific purpose, you could make a pretty good argument that they’d count as “private donations”. The only thing that makes it public money is that the DC government is going to use the tax-collecting apparatus of the cuty to get the money from the “donors”. Aside from that, there’s no real difference between that arrangement and a donation made on installments.
But this new plan apparently reduces the amount that these businesses will have to pay up, which also puzzles me. I would have thought that since the businesses agreed pretty eagerly to pay an additional tax for the stadium, that the city would be interested in keeping that deal in place. But I don’t imagine the businesses will complain much. They’re going to get the same benefit and it’ll cost them less.
Oddly enough, I find myself on the opposite side of this issue from the estimable Michelle Malkin who calls this the “Mother of all Boondoggles”. I really don’t think she’s looking at the benefits – tangible and intabgible – that a stadium will bring to the city, especially in the very impovershed and crime-ridden Anacostia area where it’s slated to go. Like I’ve said in the past, the MCI Center is a prime example of the good a new sports facility can do for a depressed area and I don’t see any compelling reason to believe that this stadium won’t do much the same for its surrounding area. In fact, my own observations with other cities have shown me that it’s likely to happen.
