--- "Leurquin, Ronald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Amen to a referendum. > My vote would be for the businesses to support themselves or sell out > to someone else. Baseball and football are businesses. If Carl and > Red can't make "enough' money with them then they can sell to someone > that will be happy with the profits they can achieve. A taxpayer > funded stadium is nothing more than corporate welfare. > Ron Leurquin > Nokomis East
[TB] Professional sports have a strange business model, a model that requires a business premises with at either no or nearly no cost to the business owner. Few business can pull that off. It's also a model that generates extremely large amounts of money, most, something in the area of 60% of which flows to the players. Given the revenue split, a subsidy to either football or baseball likely benefits the players as much or more as it does the owners. I don't think either of those groups needs a subsidy. Unfortunately, if we don't put some money into stadium(s), someone else likely will and baseball and/or football will leave. What is the loss? How much is it worth to us to avoid that loss? I can't say I know what that value is. While my history says I'm not going to spend much, if any, money going to games, I may take advantage of some of the things that are available because the 80 some days a year when there is a baseball game enables them to do enough business to stay open. I'm not convinced that a hundred or two million dollars is well spent keeping those places open, it would cost us less to just send them a check. I've been to Denver since they opened their baseball stadium and do think the area around it has developed reasonably well. I think the area around the Rapid Park site is developing reasonably well without a stadium. I'm not convinced its worth a couple of hundred million dollars to keep baseball in Minneapolis for the next couple of decades. That being said, I'm not in favor of a referendum. We elect City Council members and Legislature to make decisions. If they make bad decisions, we elect someone else at the next elections. I've seen enough California referendums that I don't want to start that here. Let our elected representatives do their jobs. Terrell Brown Loring Park __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
