Archive for December 16th, 2008

From Councilman Rodney Glassman’s weekly email:

SPOTLIGHT ON THIS WEEK’S COUNCIL AGENDA – This week’s Council agenda has a few interesting items. …….The City Council needs to talk about concepts likewealth-creation and broad-based service provisions, which will dramatically impact the quality of life for our residents. Strong businesses feed tax revenue, which feeds government and keeps services coming!

Finally, maybe – just maybe - the City of Tucson will start seeing the connection to a healthy business climate and strong tax collection. 

Here’s my two cents…..Hey  Mayor and Council, Council Aides, bureaucracy, development services and the guy that wrote me up for having a banner hanging from my window in my downtown business; WE COLLECT YOUR SALES TAXES! We are fortunate enough to collect your 2% because we took a big risk to open our doors. We rolled the dice, cashed in our life savings, committed everything we have (lord knows the banks were useless in the beginning stages of our venture) and took the step to open a business.  Never mind that we employ almost 90% of the people that live in our community. I guess you’re finally seeing that we are a fairly important part of the community. 

Regulate Me To Death!

City of Tucson, we go through your maze of regulations to open our doors. We wake up each morning and live in constant uncertainty as to  what’s next. Who will have their hand in my pocket today? Will it be OSHA, a workers comp issues, a new business license I need, an unemployment claim I need to fight from an employee that should have been fired years ago. Do I need to get in the middle of a court garnishment for back child support from my manger?  Will the board of health come knocking? Will the federal government push corn based ethanol ( we all know the corn farmers have such a huge lobbing arm in DC). The ethanol revolution jacked up every single commodity price I pay from my suppliers? Of course I can’t pass along the price increases to my clients because they’ll stop coming – they are hurting too! I really don’t think you realize the ramifications on some of your decision. Rainwater harvesting, plactic bag ordinances, kidco, JobPath, an access cable channel, come on!

Development Services NIGHTMARE!

Heaven forbid I have to go to you for anything to expand my business. I’m so terrified about changing anything in my old ‘grandfathered’ building that I won’t even try. The stories I hear from fellow small business owners about having to move my toilet 1″ to the right, or that the new doorway they put in needs to be moved 1 foot to the left.  Never mind that the city design review ‘god’ downtown approved my neighbors plans said all was good to go. The inspector in the field told them it had to be changed and ‘wasn’t up to current code’ and had to be redone. It took my friend 8 months to open up their business on 4th Avenue. Do you have any idea how 8 months of writing checks without income feels? Of course not, even as we are experiencing some of the toughest economic times since the 1920′s I still don’t see the local governments laying off employees.  

CofO Process Broken

Oh and if I raise my head too far up you’ll learn that I don’t have a CofO(Certificate of Occupancy) and because I am downtown, I can’t meet your new parking requirements. My building was built in the late 50′s and you’ve changed the calculations at least a dozen times. What about the charm and character in an old building?  Why don’t you take some of the extra parking spaces and major heat islands from the new shopping center near my house. I have NEVER seen that parking lot more than half full. Who comes up with these calculations anyway?

Taxes, Taxes and More Taxes!

Then you tax me. I collect your 2% sales tax and have to report it and pay it monthly. But what about the County’s Personal Property Tax. This one is great! I pay a tax on every piece of equipment, every chair and every fridge my new meat slicer.  If I go out and buy something new I have to report it to you and pay a tax on it…FOREVER.  I paid you sales taxes when I bought it shouldn’t that be enough?

Truth in Bonding – Where are the roads?

Add in my exorbitant property tax bill I pay to Pima County for the privilege of letting the County plan, build and maintain the infrastructure….you know the roads, bridges and mass transit.  I should say LACK OF INFRASTRUCTURE. We are STUCK IN THE 1970′s.  I voted for your 1997 bond package to fix roads AND I voted again for the RTA package. Come to find out over 2/3 of the RTA projects were the same projects unbuilt roads we approved in 97′. 

Oh Give Me A Home – Where The Pygmy Owls Roam

Here’s a thought, why don’t you take your credit card and max it out to purchase more open space. You have something line $200 million already lined up and now I hear your going back to me to approve another $500 million.  Am I missing something here…..open space?! I love the desert and environment as much as the next guy but how about a freeway or a easy way to go from east to west?  When a community values wildlife more than people we have a problem.

Did I mention that I lost 30% of my business since January? All those construction workers that used to come by for a beer after work, gone. How about we find some different industries other than construction?

Rio Nuevo…..I don’t even want to go there – I guess I’m not alone.

Wonder if I’ll make it?

Tucson has had a relationship with baseball since the 1940′s. That relationship is under some stress as the Chicago White Sox recently left our community for greener (as in $80.7 million in green backs) ball parks in Glendale.  First off, why would the State of Arizona Dept. of Commerce, or the AZ Sports Authority let one community poach from another. I guess we aren’t on the same team.

With the White Sox leaving the two remaining teams have clauses in their contracts allowing them to leave if there aren’t 3 Tucson MLB spring training teams. Baseball really could be heading north. The Cactus League of Spring Training teams is really becoming an economic boom to Arizona. Just not Southern Arizona.

Groups are working to build a new stadium, fix Hi Corbett and attract a third or fourth team. If all goes well the voters will get a crack at passing a special sales tax to fund the projects. Good luck with that in this tough economic climate. 

The reliable estimates are that MLB spring training brings in $10 million per club to our local economy. The $30 million injection annual means more hotel booking, golf course rounds of play and fans to eat and drink in local restaurants.  The big question is; Is it worth investing in staduims to attract or retain new teams?

Footing the Bill for a Ballpark

By David Wilkening

The once popular practice of spending public money to finance sports stadiums has recently been striking out. That’s no surprise when you consider the books economists and journalists are writing these days: “Loot, loot, loot for the home team,” is a chapter in a 2005 book called The Great American Jobs Scam by Greg LeRoy, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit development watchdog group Good Jobs First. The 1999 book Field of Schemes offers a similar take. Its author, journalist Neil DeMause, sums up the situation as follows: “In almost eight years of reporting on stadium deals, I’ve spoken to every economist I can find about the impact of sports stadiums. And I’ve yet to find a single independent economist (by which I mean one not actually working for a sports team or league) who thinks that stadiums are any use as an economic engine.”

LeRoy explains in his book that the whole system of public financing is usually traced to the 1950s. Until then, team owners paid for their own stadiums— with few exceptions. The trend started in 1953 with the first team relocation in half a century, the Boston Braves’ move to Milwaukee. They were lured there with a new stadium built with public money. Since then, politicians everywhere have been “taken in by the assumption that the presence of a professional sports team is a leading contributor to the vitality of cities,” LeRoy writes. “That notion has so captivated politicians that they are willing to give sport team owners subsidies that are far beyond wha tother private-sector businesses can hope for.”

  Nationwide, there is growing opposition to funding sports programs with taxpayer monies. In a 1997 Rasmussen poll on the subject, 64 percent of respondents answered “no” to the question of whether taxpayer dollars should be used to build a professional sports facility. Still, Adam M. Zaretsky, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote in a 2001 policy paper on the subject, “Should cities pay for sports facilities?” that between 1987 and 1999, 55 stadiums and arenas were refurbished or built in the U.S. with more than $8.7 billion. Fifty-seven percent of that, or roughly $5 billion, was financed by taxpayers.

Clearly, the debate about whether stadiums are good for cities extends far beyond Miami. The NFL’s San Diego Chargers spent five years trying to secure funds and a location to replace the outmoded, 40-year-old Qualcomm Stadium. San Diego residents also want a new stadium: in a January 2006 poll conducted by the San Diego Union-Tribune, 68.6 percent of 27,575 residents polled said the city should donate land to build a new football stadium. An overwhelming 95.6 percent said they would support a new stadium if the Chargers paid for it, along with the requisite infrastructure improvements.

According to the proposal the Chargers made to the city in October 2005, the new football stadium, completely funded by the Chargers and their development partner, would be built on 60 of the 166 acres of current Qualcomm Stadium land in Mission Valley. The remaining acreage would be used for parks, streets, parking garages, and commercial development. But as the Chargers’ general counsel, Mark Fabiani, explains, the plan didn’t pan out because the city of San Diego, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, decided to set aside the question of stadium funding for other priorities.

The Chargers consequently could not find a suitable development partner, according to Fabiani, “not because the project wouldn’t have worked out, but because no one wanted to get mired in the city of San Diego’s chaos.” Not surprisingly, last year the city amended the terms of its lease with the Chargers so that they could begin to look elsewhere for a home. And plenty of new cities are lining up to court them, including nearby Chula Vista, National City, and Oceanside, California. Even Las Vegas, Nevada, showed interest, though the Chargers’ contract restricts relocation talks to cities within San Diego County. “Private funding for a stadium is very difficult to pull off,” Fabiani says. “In California, people are just not eager to subsidize these stadiums.”

Stadiums have fared better in other cities. In Minneapolis, for example, after ten years of struggling with the issue, the Minnesota Twins last year reached an agreement on a new $522 million stadium that will be partially funded by a sales tax of 15 cents for every $100 in sales in Hennepin County, where the team plays ball.

But there seems to be a growing heap of evidence that stadiums don’t make such good long-term investments for cities. Robert Baade, an economics professor at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois, studied baseball stadiums specifically. He looked at the per capita income in 30 cities that have built new sports stadiums over the past 30 years and found that in 27 of the cities, there was no observable economic impact.

“In the other three cities, income looked to have gone down as a result of the stadium,” Baade says. Stadiums do offer some clear benefits to cities. “Bars next to stadiums see an increase in customers on game days,” Baade says. But even that has a down side, however, because the bars only do well when a team is winning. “When a team is losing, who wants to go out and celebrate another loss?”

Baade found that, “In only a small fraction of the cases examined does manufacturing activity… correlate significantly with the presence of a new or renovated stadium. We conclude that measurable economic benefits to area residents are not large enough to justify stadium subsidies and that the debate must turn to immeasurable intangible benefits like fan identification and civic pride.”

Stadium boosters in Miami are vowing to try again next year, especially if it means keeping the Marlins from pulling up stakes and heading to a new city. One man watching the Marlins’ quest with special interest is Jack McKeon, the former Marlins manager who led the team to their World Series victory in 2003. Now 76 and semi-retired in Elon, North Carolina, the cigar-smoking, tough-talking McKeon (nicknamed Trader Jack) still works as a part-time consultant for the Marlins, mainly as a talent scout. “It would be a shame if they don’t have baseball in Miami,” he says. The sentiment is certainly shared by South Florida Marlin fans, whatever their numbers.