Corporate Welfare Dome update

Link to it here. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2013/05/07/edmonton-arena-funding-live-blog.html

Deep 6

Looking at the standings today, here are six teams that could disappear from the National Hockey League and no one would ever know: Carolina, Florida, Columbus, Phoenix, Dallas, Nashville. The NHL just played 34 fewer games than it normally does. It was good. A 24-team league with a 64-game schedule would be more than enough.

Conflicted?

I am a huge Bobby Orr fan. I like the way he played in the National Hockey League. I like the way he thinks hockey. I like the way he talks hockey. I like the way he does hockey. Yet I am a born Habs fan. Go figure.

Well, looks like we're back in business

Nothing like a minor-league scrap to get us in the mood for the OSHL again. It's really just another fight, and an AHL one to boot, but the Jim Carr wannabe really gets into the spirit of the thing.

Just Say No to Carpet-Baggers

Edmonton might just be better off without the Oilers.

What they lose on price, they make up on volume

Glendale eliminates more civil servants to help pay for the hockey rink debacle.

Though Horatio Skeete, the acting city manager, estimated it would cost $6 million to run the arena without the Coyotes playing there, the city projects it will be financially better off in the long term by providing home ice to the team (at a cost of $15 million per year).

Just Say No to Katz

Dick extensions for low self-esteem sports fans cost the rest of us in real and measurable ways.

Oakland, California, the fifth-most crime ridden city in America, faced a $32 million budget deficit last year. It closed the gap by dismissing a fourth of its police force, more than 200 officers. Untouched was the $17.3 million that the city pays to stage 10 games a season for the National Football League's Oakland Raiders and to host Major League Baseball's Athletics in the O.co Coliseum.

This year, the number of murders in Oakland has risen 16 percent; rapes, 24 percent; and burglaries, 43 percent, according to a city crime report. The average response time to emergency calls in Oakland has slowed to 17 minutes this year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in August.

This is the most comprehensive look at pro sports carpet-bagging I've ever read. The number of informative links is amazing.

Read about how pro sports teams take advantage of municipalities' lower borrowing costs to fund their temples.

Enlighten yourselves about how you're cheering for the [Insert City Name Here] Tax Dodgers.

Particularly for hockey fans, marvel at how Glendale city council engages in pretzel logic to defend giving money to the Coyotes while chopping essential services.

Remember Willard Romney bragging about being some kind of free-market guru? You might also remember he was CEO of the 2002 Olympic organizing committee in Mormon Flats:

...if Washington’s powers-that-be want to get the nation’s financial house in order, it wouldn’t hurt to stop shoveling money at every cash-flush sports-related special interest that comes calling on Capitol Hill -- like, for instance, the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, partially made possible thanks to a staggering $1.5 billion in federal handouts.

And finally, a paper that suggests building a sports temple results in demonstrably lower revenue to the taxing authority that paid for it.

Our results indicate:
• The professional sports environment in the 37
metropolitan areas in our sample had no measurable
impact on the growth rate of real per capita
income in those areas.
•The professional sports environment has a statistically
significant impact on the level of real per
capita income in our sample of metropolitan areas,
and the overall impact is negative.

Tampa may get its own Corporate Welfare Dome

Corporate welfare queens in Tampa want taxpayers to foot the bill on a new baseball stadium.

Welfare Domes

As I've long maintained, the only argument in favor of publicly funded playpens for sports teams is the truthiness that they help the local economy. Everyone who makes that goofy claim gets the standard, "show me the data."

This story suggeststhe economic benefits are over-stated.

Make sure to click to the link to the Atlantic piece on the Coyotes, which contains this gem of a pull quote:

"Take whatever number the sports promoter says and move the decimal one place to the left. Divide it by ten. That's a pretty good estimate of the actual economic impact."

A closer look at the KHL

Globe business writer Eric Reguly travels to Moscow to take in a game with Tretiak.