[Summit] Stadium update , from our other Councilman, Seth Yurdin

[Robert Mathiesen]

I tend to think that the age of mutually beneficial private-public
investment partnerships is over forever, for two reasons.

First, the current climate in business, and especially investment business,
has changed since my own boyhood over to a "winner-take-all" mentality,
where the rich eat the poor alive and give back just enough to the wider
community to "salt the mine" or "sweeten the pot" for the suckers, I mean,
for the investors.

And second, we have passed peak "cheap energy" about a decade ago.  From
here on out, every use of energy will become increasingly expensive, every
new project -- whether a stadium or a dog park or repaving the roads --
will always end up costing the public far more than the initial estimates,
due to unanticipated factors.  Heck, we can't really even keep up with
infrastructure maintenance costs any longer; and that's not going to
improve.

So I'm against the stadium, and I would be against each and every
large-scale public-private project pushed by wealthy investors.  If it
promises a brighter future in exchange for public moneys, it looks like a
scam or a delusion to me.  I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes in
general, just to this sort of drain on our tax dollars.  Fix what we
already have first.

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Christopher Buecheler <
cwbuecheler at gmail.com> wrote:

> The "best thing that can happen" would be to let some other, dumber city
> foot the bill for a AAA baseball stadium that's going to struggle to fill
> seats and not provide a fraction of the economic benefit being claimed. You
> want real benefit to the city's economy? Keep the green spaces and use the
> land that's going to be turned into stadium/parking to instead build
> mixed-use buildings, and continue to support small to medium-sized
> businesses in the med/tech sectors.
>
> You'd think Providence would've learned its lesson about putting all of
> its eggs in one big, stupid basket. Relying on the repeatedly-disproven
> economic benefits of a stadium, especially a *minor league* stadium located
> in a downtown that's already a complete nightmare to navigate (not to
> mention a ripoff to park in), is spectacularly shortsighted.
>
> --
> -Christopher Buecheler - @cwbuecheler
> -http://cwbuecheler.com | Web, Writing, Cocktails and More
>
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