Anne Linehan over at blogHouston.net has been having fun (as has Tory Gattis) watching Houston city officials try to rationalize how the city is not really going to have to cough up any money to subsidize a portion of the Houston Dynamo’s proposed new downtown stadium. Anne’s coverage of this issue is particularly timely given this recent San Antonio Express-News article that reports that the San Antonio Spurs are seeking another $164 million from the local government for the ATT Arena that is only five years old!
To make matters worse, San Antonio — which has its share of infrastructure problems — has not enjoyed any of the economic growth around the ATT Arena that was predicted by promoters of the arena when it was approved back in 1999:
When Bexar County asked voters in 1999 to approve a $175 million arena for the San Antonio Spurs, officials promised it would spark “economic development opportunities” for the neglected East Side.
Today, few businesses have opened their doors near the arena ó even as the Spurs ask for more tax dollars to upgrade the 5-year-old AT&T Center.
A new tattoo parlor on Houston Street appears to be the latest investment in the neighborhood. It opened in a stretch of boarded-up buildings in early 2006, said David Leon, the shop’s ornately tattooed owner.
Business is good, Leon said. But no customers stop by after a Spurs game.
“I think they’re too scared to even stop, because of how bad the label of the East Side is,” Leon said.
Despite a lot of talk and studies, the neighborhood around Leon’s shop hasn’t changed much since Nov. 2, 1999, when voters overwhelmingly agreed to subsidize the arena with a venue tax on hotel rooms and car rentals.
The team wants to tap into the venue tax again, a move that will be up to voters. The Spurs started with a wish list of $164 million in improvements for the AT&T Center. The county told the team to whittle their proposal to $75 million.
But so far, the arena has failed to accomplish everything voters were once promised by the county. Sluggish growth near the AT&T Center has troubled those who argued against the location.
“It’s been disappointing to me that there hasn’t been more development in that area,” said former Mayor Howard Peak, who tried unsuccessfully to have the arena built downtown. [. . .]
From the Spurs’ perspective, spokesman Leo Gomez said the NBA team is proud of its neighbors. But he emphasized the Spurs never promised a new arena would bring them an economic boom.
“We know better than that,” Gomez said. “It hasn’t worked in any other community in the country. And it’s not going to happen here.”
Gomez said the real question for voters is simple: Should the AT&T Center continue to be a top-notch facility for San Antonio? If so, he said, it needs more tax dollars to keep it that way.
Within view of the arena last week, a woman stood across from Leon’s tattoo parlor, hawking purses to passing motorists. . .
As noted earlier here, the notion that professional sports stadiums promote economic development is a myth. Maybe there is a good reason to provide public financing for a downtown soccer stadium in Houston. But building it to spur economic development is not one of them.
First of all, while the Spurs might be a model of how to run a franchise on the court, this is just another example of how higher management has no clue what they are doing in respect to the infrastructure. They complained for years about HemisFair Arena before finally getting SA to pony up the money to build the AlamoDome. And that only got financed because the city government somehow got it in their heads that they could get an NFL team.
But the AlamoDome wasn’t good enough, so the Spurs got the city to then turn around and build them the SBC (or now AT&T) Center. And apparently they low-balled the effort, if they need improvements already. This is the height of greed and idiocy. I am in no way opposed to public financing of sports arenas. Critics say it is just throwing money away, forgetting that, in the US, there is a certain level of prestige in having professional sports in your town. Let’s face it, Houston was considered a second-tier city once the NFL left, and it didn’t regain it’s top-tier status until they returned. It’s just the way it is in the US.
However, cities shouldn’t give owners new venues and then have them turn around in 5 years and complain that it isn’t good enough. The Spurs should have been honest about their desires, and the city gov’t shouldn’t have been dumb enough to build the AT&T Center out in the middle of nothing on the east side of town (you can see it from I-10; it is literally an arena in the middle of nowhere. Imagine Toyota Center plopped down south of Greatwood in Fort Bend County or past Katy Mills Mall on the west side).