David Michael Miller
St. Louis has been left high and dry by the greedy, arrogant billionaires who own NFL teams. The owners voted the other day to move the Rams to Los Angeles.
In fairness, the Rams owners took the team from L.A. in 1995, and so you could say they’re now just returning stolen goods. But the real lesson is that they’ll follow the money wherever it takes them. They could not care less about the fans or their loyalty. The NFL just looks at its fans as ATM machines that just keep spitting out money.
There is a lesson in this for all cities: Don’t subsidize these guys. St. Louis built a stadium to lure the Rams, and the taxpayers are stuck with a remaining debt of $100 million to still to pay off and no major tenant. That’s why cooler heads in St. Louis are actually breathing a sigh of relief that the Rams are leaving. In order to keep them the city was offering to help build an even fancier $1.1 billion sports palace, sucking needed revenue from things that are really important to a community like schools, transportation and parks. With the Rams gone, St. Louis can start to focus on investments that really pay off rather than the sucker bets that are sports complexes.
Why did the Rams demand a new facility even while bonds remained to be paid off on the current one? Well, mostly because under NFL rules they get to keep the entire revenue stream from the new luxury boxes. They also make a fortune from ticket sales and TV revenues, but they must share those with the league. To add insult to injury the teams often demand that the boxes be exempt from sales taxes, as the Milwaukee Brewer’s boxes are. So, basically, the owners want the taxpayers to subsidize their obscene new profit centers and offer nothing in return.
All of which leads us back to Wisconsin and to Milwaukee. Like St. Louis, Milwaukee has a proud history that includes a tragic period of white flight and disinvestment. Both cities are recovering, but like all communities they need to focus on putting limited tax dollars where they can do the most good. This is emphatically not in sports facilities for well-heeled professional teams that could afford to pay for them themselves.
In the local case the state of Wisconsin and the city and county of Milwaukee will, when it’s all said and done, pony up $400 million for the Milwaukee Bucks’ new arena. The Bucks’ new owners, New York hedge fund billionaires, have no loyalty to Milwaukee. To them this is just another investment. Like the Rams, if they see greener pastures somewhere else they’ll drop Milwaukee like a bad mutual fund, possibly leaving state and local taxpayers with a mortgage payment and an empty house.
