I’ve written before about the obscenity of the football stadium in Allen, Texas — it’s a $60 million shrine to sports at a public high school. But they managed to persuade the property owners in the area to pay higher taxes to fund it, so it’s difficult to say it was wrong. Stupid, for sure, wasteful, definitely, but not illegal in any way.
But now McKinney, Texas has authorized the construction of a $62.8 million stadium. This is a disease. It may not be criminal, but it’s an immoral waste of resources. We’re talking about schools sinking that much money into temples to brain damage.
The kicker? The new stadium is going to be built 4 fucking miles from the Allen stadium.
Meanwhile, I get chided for disrespectfully referring to generic “sportsball”. I promise to mock sportsball more often. America desperately needs a major priority readjustment in many areas.
Good. It can’t be mocked enough in my view. As for those who fuel and enjoy various types of sportsball? You need to take a good, long look at how much you’re responsible for the bullshit, waste of money, and ongoing injuries for your pleasure.
Wow. Four miles away and they are building another one?!? That’s a lot of money. For a high school sports venue. We have two Universities in our little city and neither of them has a stadium. We have sports pitches, and some cheap bleachers, but no stadiums. There are a lot more useful ways to spend 60 million. Mind blowing. Texas is nuts, but I guess this sports shrine disease kind of creeps across the country.
Not a high school, but Temple U is looking to spend an unconscionable amount of money on further gentrifying its north Philly neighborhood with a new stadium. At a time when we are in huge budget difficulties, like most universities.
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2016/03/15/protesters-against-temple-university-football-stadium-assemble-outside-board-of-trustees-meeting/
People wonder why the people of Rapa Nui kept building moai right up until their culture collapsed… This must be kind of what it looked like.
Even worse, those people haven’t yet learnt that football is a dying game. In ten years they will still be paying off the debt with fewer revenues to pay for it.
I live in a city (Frisco) adjacent to both Allen and McKinney. The vitriol I received from my texas “friends” a few years back when I suggested that there were better ways to spend money was unbelievable. I basically said at the time, “if a single teacher loses their job over this, the people of Allen who voted for this should be ashamed”.
The cognitive dissonance of the people, who voted for the stadium and then complained about their property taxes is mind boggling (I’ve experienced such complaints first hand), especially after the stadium in Allen was shutdown a year and a half after opening to repair cracks that had developed in the concrete. It was closed for 15-months and the district spent an additional $10 million for the repairs. http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/allen/headlines/20150531-graduates-to-reopen-allen-isds-eagle-stadium.ece
Want to bet on how much graft goes along with a $60 million dollar high school football field? And now a second near by in Texas? It’s not difficult to imagine a few rich area contractors with deep connections to politicians, and loads of money passing from one to the other as campaign contributions and fat “evil government” contracts.
But hey, as I’ve been told, I’m just negative.
I have mixed feelings. I agree that high schools (or colleges) building stadiums is an obscenity, and doing it with public money should be illegal where it isn’t already.
But mocking sports easily slips into mocking the sports fans, who skew poor… trundles off to check the accuracy of that statement
OK, so only vaguely true: the average sports fan is somewhere between the 30th and 55th percentile for family income in the US, and somewhere around 60% of sports fans fall below the 55th percentile. That’s a skew, but it’s pretty slight. And the opposite is true of golf and hockey, whose fans skew older and richer. NASCAR fans skew poor, but also skew ridiculously white (94% of fans). Women are more represented among NASCAR fans, which was interesting.
But in any case, in my experience, sports fandom is generally seen as a class marker. So making fun of sports fans is most often a thin disguise for classism. NASCAR is for white trash. Football is for blue-collar types who drink Bud Light. Basketball is for black people (so much so that just saying “basset-ball” is a racist dog-whistle). Etc. For these reasons I shy away from mockery of sports fans.
In Katy, TX a proposed $69 million stadium was rejected a couple years ago. Not to be defeated, the board decided to reduce the capacity of the stadium to bring the cost down to $58 Million and make it part of a bond to build additional schools that were/are badly needed. Before putting the bond out for votes they ran a phone poll to see if there was support for the package, but they misleadingly downplayed the stadium cost saying that it was less than 10% of the total bond ($748 Million). Well, it got approved. So basically they highjack the school district process to fund educational needs to build an entertainment venue, and the worst part is that the district already has a 9800 seat stadium.
http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/katy/schools/article/Katy-ISD-bond-draws-strong-support-5871121.php
http://asumag.com/new-construction/katy-texas-district-begins-building-its-2nd-football-stadium
A Masked Avenger, @8: You could make very similar arguments about mocking religion.
Note sure what you have in mind, but yes: mockery of Islam is often a thin veneer over racism. I think decency requires us to keep our critiques of religion clean, so we don’t stray into racism ourselves or giving aid and comfort to racists of the ilk of Hitch or Pamela Geller.
Just that I don’t recall you popping up to offer warnings about the dangers of mocking religion slipping into the mocking of the religious (and the various race / class issues around that), despite it being a fairly common theme here…
I mean, sure, you’re right about not “giving aid and comfort to racists of the ilk of Hitch or Pamela Geller”, but I just don’t recall the worry coming up.
Maybe now we can be famous for something other than cops beating up black kids at a pool party.
My son went to a city council meeting as part of his politics class. He said everyone at the meeting spoke against the stadium. The ISD refused to separate the stadium funding from the rest of the package, though, and we’ve been subject to a huge advertising campaign to “Protect McKinney’s Future.”
If I understand correctly, we’re getting the stadium at the bargain price of 50 million because they’re adding 15 million unused from an earlier bond – for education. Not for stadium construction. Of course that could have gone towards reducing the size of the bond package, but no, that’s free money, let’s use it to seed something Texas-sized.
On the up side, it may be the one facility on the west side of town where minority kids are welcome.
(Iain – a disgusted McKinney resident.)
Obviously Texas has way more disposable income than Dubai to waste on questionable projects.
What happens when the money runs out?
It isn’t just schools. Here in San Diego the Chargers tried to leave for LA last year but got denied by the NFL. So now they are proposing a new $1.8B stadium complex for which they are graciously offering to pay $350M. The taxpayers would of course pay the rest. The scary thing is, local politicians are not laughing – they are seriously considering doing it.
I’d be surprised if I’ve never said anything along those lines, but in any case I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect me to flag every possible area of concern. I’m not the hall monitor here.
4 miles?
What is your stadium density over there? That seems excessive, especially for a game that’s even less interesting than actual football (the one that actually involves feet on the ball).
In the meantime, a Pennsylvania professor is taken off a plane because people got scared of his math scribblings and thought they were a terrorist plot. Sigh, we’re going down.
Panem et circenses. Stadium building is both a source of graft, and a distraction for the hoi polloi from the rampant graft and corruption all around them.
Not to mention a vehicle for propaganda in its own right. I’ve attended games, because I live in a “sports city,” and watched them not only weep during the national anthem, but also get boners from Air Force overflights and spontaneously(?) sing “God Bless America” in lieu of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch. The (white) nationalism is so thick you can cut it with a knife. A reeducation center couldn’t try harder to indoctrinate its inmates–and for this I shelled out $20 of my own money, plus another $25 for a hotdog, french fries, and beer.
Christ on a Segway. My old hometown has three high schools and they all share one stadium. It’s also used for soccer games, marching band competitions, etc. Even then it feels like too much money spent on football, as other programs not connected had to beg for money. (Marching band did ok at my school, as did cheerleading and dance team. Choir, DECA, science clubs, drama, etc were SOL.)
A Masked Avenger:
You’re saying that you, personally, perceive it as having something to do with class, despite the reality? What does the way it’s “generally seen” in your experience have to do with it?
I don’t know where you got those statistics of “sports fans,” but let’s accept them for now.
(1) you’re characterizing income below the 55th percentile in the US as “poor,” which is not something I can really understand from the perspective of having wildly less money than that — and while in a trivial sense any group belongs to some economic class or another, actual classicism isn’t a trivial or arbitrary problem that you can invent just because you have some numbers
(2) roughly half, according to your own numbers, don’t have incomes below that arbitrary threshold
(3) you admitted that, for various sports, incomes of fans tend toward the opposite side of your threshold, meaning that mockery of a generic “sports fan” would be about a generic thing and have generic results, not specific to the lower-income groups you wanted to focus on
(4) $60 million high school stadiums aren’t being commissioned by poor sports fans or by the (non-fanatical) remainder of the people living in poorer areas of the country
(5) the slippery slope from mocking sports to mocking fans is merely something you’re anxious about, for no apparent reason, not something that I see happening in this thread
(6) given the positive attitudes most people have toward sports, I don’t understand how it’s supposed to occur that there is a widespread and noticeable negative association with sports fans, one that’s supposed to have something to do with class, especially when the “class” in question constitutes a fairly significant majority of the population who would be forming these associations about themselves
A Masked Avenger
These high school megastadiums are thinly disguised looting of the public coffers by crooked developers who essentially own the suburban city councils here. The Allen Stadium was built by a company owned by a guy named Ben Pogue after his father, Paul Pogue, pled guilty to tax evasion.
I still find it amazing that any high school has a stadium like this. Or that many universities have far, far larger ones in the US. According to news reports I found this is planned as a 12000 seat stadium. I thought I would look at stadiums in Canada to see what is comparable. Other than York, whose 12000 seat stadium seems to be a legacy of hosting the Pan-Am games. The vast majority of universities with stadiums are far smaller affairs, between 9000-1500, with an awful lot on the low end. The largest high school stadium I could find has about 2000 seats, and my high school just had a football field with some portable bleachers sitting next to it. US high school sports is on a scale I can barely imagine.
Yes, you have correctly read my post. Congratulations. And thanks for the added fuckwittery of your sneering “despite the reality.”
You understand, for example, that mockery of basketball is often thinly veiled racism, based on the perception that basketball is the sport of black people, despite the reality that black fans (45%) barely outnumber white fans (40%)? You understand that sneering references to basketball (or especially “basset-ball”) mark the sneerer as a racist regardless of the actual demographics of the fandom? If so, you can kindly use your “despite the reality” as a suppository.
I fucking looked them up, as indicated in my post. You’re allowed to ask for a reference, although Google will get you there very quickly (but without the pleasure of yet further sneering).
Did I piss in your cheerios IRL or something? Or did you step on a lego right before posting? Or are you just generally inclined to come on like such an asshole?
They’re building a new huge stadium for the local Catholic college here, despite essentially everyone’s protests and the fact that this college’s athletics program is pathetically minor…apparently because they don’t want to share the current perfectly adequate stadium with the high schools.
What you can’t understand is English, I’m afraid. “Skewing poor” doesn’t mean that fans are poor; it means that the mean income of fans (or other suitable metric) is lower than the mean income (or suitable metric) applied to the population as a whole. A randomly-selected sports fan will be ever so slightly poorer than a randomly-selected American.
You also seemingly failed to read the bit where I said “skews poor” and only afterward went to double-check the actual demographics, at which point I issued a clear and specific correction of my earlier statement. I apologize for your failure to comprehend that.
Yes, I admitted it. You so caught me, like red-handed. Or maybe, just maybe, I quite deliberately stated the facts as accurately as possible, whether or not they agreed with my experience? Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick.
What the actual fuck? Association of sports fandom as a marker of lower social class is certainly more widespread than this sample of 1, and it exists whether or not the actual demographics bear it out, so your suggestion that I’m a lone weirdo out of 300 million Americans is… really, really bizarre.
But why are you telling me that this is a personal concern based on my own experiences, as if I hadn’t very fucking clearly already said so myself? Why do you get off on telling me what I just said, as if you’ve somehow cracked a difficult case?
@A Masked Avenger, sneering references to basketball in particular seem to be quite different from mocking sports fandom in general. When I think of the average sports fan depicted in a tv commercial, for example, I think of a white, middle aged, middle class, slightly overweight football fan and perhaps his conventionally attractive wife or girlfriend.
qwintz: individual sports have their individual stereotypes, I agree. I mentioned some of them:
* NASCAR fans as lower class, uneducated, wife-beating white people.
* Basketball fans as black.
* Football fans as blue-collar types who drink Budweiser.
* Golf fans as old, rich, white dudes.
* Wrestling fans as NASCAR fans, only worse.
* Bowlers and bowling fans, likewise.
But sneering tends to be sport-specific as well, generally. Anecdotally I don’t see a lot of people saying, “Those dumbass sports fans and their dumbass sports!” It’s usually football fans specifically, probably because football is by far the most popular sport in the US. Or NASCAR, which for many is synonymous with white trash even if it’s true that John Kerry loves NASCAR, as he claimed during his campaign. Or basketball, which is often associated with black people.
Interestingly, again in my experience, baseball manages to retain its reputation as a wholesome American pastime.
Arisjocracy: A privileged and wealthy class permitted to convert public lands and public purse into private profit.
Aristojock: A person skilled in the misdirection of the public interest and public purse into projects of no permanent or public value.
I like basketball and last time I looked in the mirror, I was pretty much white. Well, more of a beige/pink kind of colour. But whatever. I’m also Canadian and even though I played it for years as a youngster and into university, I no longer care in the slightest about hockey. Do I have to revoke my citizenship for that?
OK, I read some other articles. It turns out this stadium is not being built for a high school. It’s being built for a school district with three high schools. The three teams will share the place.
$60M for it is still too much, but it doesn’t look quite as bad now.
By all means, build the thing. Just a few modifications:
– No turf, but a proper lawn or garden on the outside might be nice
– take out the slopey bits with all those seats; noone likes to live on a slope and too much time spent sitting down is bad for you
– Add a proper roof, some more stairwells and elevators (keeping in mind accessibility for the disabled)
– Now our building has a lot more volume. Let’s carve that up into lots of rooms. Say, groups of three or four. Some of them bedroomsized, some shaped like bathrooms and some designed to be … kitchenlike. It’ll be nice, it’ll feel just like home. We could even add fixtures, make it more homely still.
– Some balconies around the rim
– cellar for washing machines, bicycles, some individual storage rooms and garages
– Add a small office for a receptionist and / or janitor
I call it the Apartment Block Stadium and I can think of hundreds, maybe thousands of uses for it, depending on how many of those suspiciously apartment-like clusters we can fit in there, all of which are better than sportsball. But don’t worry, it’s still a stadium. Look, it says so in the name! It’ll even have synergistic effects with the nearby Stadium Stadium. Avid sportsball-watchers can rent clusters in the Apartment Block Stadium so they won’t have far to go.
qwints @22,
Ah yes, The Pogues.
A Masked Avenger:
I could’ve just said that my experience is different from yours, although I don’t think that would’ve accomplished much. I was assuming you did actually want to say something about reality, not just your own possibly distorted perceptions.
I’m not aware of any mockery of basketball. Perhaps someone, somewhere, at some time, has mocked basketball. I will believe that, although it’s still not something I’m at all familiar with. But as a significant widespread pattern, with or without any associated racism that “often” occurs? It’s harder to believe that’s actually a thing, which I’d just happen to be totally unaware of.
You issued a “correction,” then (in the two sentences I quoted) apparently decided to disregard that, to restate your original position. I don’t know how to “comprehend” two contradictory claims, and it still isn’t clear which you actually have. If it’s supposed to be both or neither, both and neither, or something else, then yeah my comprehension levels of that nonsense will probably be pretty low.
You can admit a piece of evidence (favoring or disfavoring a proposition), which is how I was using the word. I was crediting you for doing so. It wasn’t being used to say you admitted to being guilty of something, and of course I can’t even imagine what that could be in this case. Sorry it was written somewhat ambiguously. But you could try to read it charitably and in a way that makes some kind of sense. That wouldn’t give you an opportunity to act insulted, but it could carry the conversation forward to some of the substantive points that I guess you don’t have a genuine answer for.
You clearly said that your concerns are irrelevant to this thread, because this thread isn’t about that and doesn’t contain even a hint of a possible instance of the thing you’re concerned about?
Full disclosure: I’m a lunatic sports fan from football to cricket.
1. Holy shit, these people really need to re-examine their priorities and
B) I think “sportsball” is a hilariously condescending catch-all for sports in general. My only concern here is originality: Atrios has been saying “sportsball” on the Little Blue Satan for a while now.
Travis@23, yeah, the importance of high school and college sports culture in the US, versus their importance in Canada, are kind of hard to understand given other cultural similarities. Of course part of it might be that high school and college football and basketball serve a major role as the source of future NFL and NBA players. Do well on the high school team and you might get picked for the college team. Get picked for the college team and you might end up in the majors and make a bunch of money. In Canada, nowhere near as likely. Meanwhile, future NHL players come out of a system that isn’t run by the high schools and colleges. So there isn’t the same pressure to build fancy education system owned stadiums from all those parents who think their little Johnny is going to be the next Payton Manning.
I live in the Houston metro area. Our (suburban) school district built a 73 million dollar stadium, arena, and conference center. I’m helping pay for it in property taxes. I remember when I first moved here and soon realized all the high schools had these large artificial turf football stadiums. I couldn’t believe these were high schools and not universities. There is no question that money from property owners is limited and after a while they will and do vote down funding for important education related projects. So whether property owners in the area approved it or not, it can’t help but ultimately limit money that would be available for worthwhile projects. That pot of money is limited.
Any average is just that an average. If you live in the suburban areas of the massive metros of Texas like Houston, and Dallas, you realize that many if not most of the fans of these high schools that build these monstrosities don’t skew poor. There is LOT of money in many of the surrounding neighborhoods and rich suburbanites love their football in Texas and Florida and I assume a lot of other places. If you don’t see it you sometimes have a hard time believing the cars you see in the parking lots of some of these high schools. At least that was the case 15 years ago when I would drop off and pick up my daughter. Judging from the new subdivisions going up out here I assume it is even worse now.
qwints @ #7
Thank you. I win my bet at #22. I will be richly rewarded for this astounding insight.
A Masked Avenger @ #19
Why so it is, and has been for such a very long time. The Romans were very fond of stadium building. And when they weren’t building stadiums, they were building temples.
$60M? Is that all?
The New South Wales government has announced plans to spend $1B on arenas. Building a new one and rejuvenating another 2 I think.
That’s about $730 million US dollars. On sports fields.
nathanloudon — Well, that’s $60 million for a town’s high school team. Even Texas isn’t quite ready to spend a billion on a high school sportsball field. However, as suggested up-thread, there are $$billion stadium projects in the US for professional teams. The new Levi Stadium for the SF 49ers is said to have cost around $1.3 billion, a figure that I bet does not include ancillary costs such as roads.
Incidentally, the new Levi stadium is already proving to be problematic. Some call it a “dud.” The team and the city of Santa Clara are about to start the law suits. Lawyer up. We’re filing.
Fortuitous timing from The New Yorker — “This Is Your Brain on Sports”, on what sports does to our brains and why the Sports Bubble might be about to pop.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/the-professional-sports-bubble
Cathy F @3 — As a Temple student who is receiving next to no financial aid and hearing horror stories of how little university staff are paid, the sight of school officials proclaiming the need for a $100m stadium sickens me. Unless it weasels its way into one of the power conferences, Temple football will remain an irrelevance and a money pit.
I don’t really. I just find it interesting that, on a blog that’s famous for disrespecting people’s most cherished spiritual beliefs, written by someone who is well-known for stunts like desecrating a communion wafer and burning a copy of the Koran, people are suddenly getting sniffy that insufficient respect is being shown to the Holy Name of Sports.
The dominance of sports in US educational establishments is just fucking weird from an international perspective. Universities, let alone schools, don’t operate stadia in the UK. They have sports teams, and many have sports facilities that are used as sources of income, but none have facilities for major spectator events. The only University sporting event that anyone outside of the circles of the participants and their coaching teams gives the slightest shit about is the Boat Race, held annually between Oxford and Cambridge on the Thames. The fact that college sports is televised over there seems beyond bizarre.
What, if anything, is the ROI on these structures? Do they actually start paying for themselves in a reasonable timeframe, or are they just status symbols?
There are absolutely class markers to making fun of sports and sports fans. That was the whole punchline of the movie Talladega Nights, for goodness’ sake. I’d say it’s more of an educational divide than a solid class divide, though – the most derision for sports and sports fans I’ve ever seen is in academia. (and googling “sports fans are” gives me “stupid” as the primary result; doing the same in bing gives me “idiots” as top result, with “morons”, “dumb”, and “less intelligent” as other options)
Keep in mind that, in Texas football is a religion.
@DrMarcusHill
High school football is big business in Texas and in many areas across the southern part of the US. Here is an article talking a little bit about the phenomenon: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100001024. Quote from the article:
I can confirm this anecdotally. I used to live in a smallish town in Texas about a quarter mile from the high school football stadium. My entire street – including my driveway at times – was filled with cars on Friday nights. When I asked neighbours how many people attended games I heard the number 10,000 thrown around. The high school football team in Allen, TX draws between 16,000 and 18,000 people a game: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/10/texas-high-school-to-build-628-million-football-stadium.html.
To put these numbers in perspective, the average attendance for the Cleveland Indians, a professional baseball team, is 17,361: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2015-misc.shtml. And to be fair, the Indians play 81 home games a year, not the handful of games played in Allen.
But given the popularity of high school football in TX, these stadiums could pay for themselves. If ticket prices for a home football game are $10, each game will bring in $160,000-$180,000 in revenue, more when you count concessions. A high estimate might be a total of $250,000 per game (assuming the average spectator spends $5 on concessions). That’s $1.2 million a year just from football alone (more if they make the playoffs). If that were the only source of income, it would take 50 years to pay off the price of the stadium. But there are many other sources of revenue to include other varsity sports, renting the facility out to other local sports leagues/teams, events, etc. It’s doubtful they’ll lose much money over the long run.
I’m not surprised PZ doesn’t fully grasp the phenomenon. High school football isn’t very big in rural Minnesota, but high school hockey is. Over 135,000 people attended last year’s MN high school hockey tournament: (http://krocam.com/attendance-record-set-at-mn-high-school-boys-hockey-tournament/).
The bigger flaw in the thinking here is the idea that football is somehow wasteful or detrimental to a high school education. Nothing could be further from the truth. Players learn about hard work and discipline and teamwork and a whole host of other life skills that are either missing or underrepresented in the curriculum.
Also interesting in the comments is this strain of thought:
Bringing this ’round to politics…in a socialist country, or even one run by Hillary Clinton, are these types of crooked public/private arrangements more or less likely? If you’re worried about the looting of the public coffers – and you should be – the most effective way of dealing with it is to minimize the amount available in the public coffers.
Like
blind obedience to dubious authority
grovelling deference to people who are more important™ than you
how to treat yourself as a commodity
transient
Um, what? Look, the problem with looting public coffers isn’t just that some people get rich doing so – it’s that that money was needed for something else. Education in the US isn’t so wonderfully well funded that it can afford to lose millions of dollars to vanity projects. There are schools with unsafe buildings, overcrowded classrooms and insufficient textbooks. Paying for everyone to get an actual education should take precedence over horribly wasteful projects like this.
And as for the wonderful things the players supposedly gain – they go to only a very small proportion of the school’s students, and even then they seem to get head injuries and a sense of entitlement as much as they get dedication and teamwork.
You really care about using sports for the good of teenagers? Why not focus on facilities that focus on participation by the whole student body and on developing healthy habits, rather than commercialised competitiveness for a small minority?
If hard work, discipline and teamwork are missing or under-represented in your curriculum, you have serious problems with your curriculum.
Similarly, if you’re worried about being robbed, the most effective way of dealing with it is to not have any money or possessions.
Since our taxes are already paying for the public education system, of which this is supposed to be a useful part, why would tickets cost anything?
And if the funding for the stadium was secured by stadium revenues instead of tax dollars, then there wouldn’t be a problem.
Graft at the local level is a bipartisan issue. It’s not even exclusively a government problem – lots of private companies have analogous problems. This is just one example of the principal-agent problem. City councils tend to be particularly bad because the principals (i.e. residents) are so often completely uninvolved.
@42 in regards to high school hockey
I call bullshit. Did you play HS hockey in Minnesota? I did. The coaches try to make hockey consume your life, particularly with a selectively enforced “no girlfriends” rule. There was no hard work going on with my team.
I learned more about slapping people’s genitals (what was charmingly referred to as “crumpling”) and how fucked up an in-group can be to its own members. Oh, and dick-shaming. And racism. And not to trust other males. For years I would reflexively crouch any time someone made a quick arm movement at waist level. And that’s for a cis- hetero- guy. I can only imagine how awful it would be to anyone else.
Well, now that I’ve relived that I need to go scrub my brain.
transient wrote:
So, this magic building requires no maintenance over its lifetime, no one is paid a salary for any service rendered, and the concessions are all essentially free. Of course, that is not true because the team’s coach does take a salary and it’s a healthy $109,657/yr (actual teachers in Allen start at a mere $49,000/yr and stop out at $65,221 after 33 years experience in case you weren’t wondering), and I’m sure he has a lot of support staff that are also paid every year. Maintenance and utilities alone could easily cost millions per anum. I’m betting nothing (except bills) makes it back to the school.
Ahh, yes. The conservative doctrine of “Starve the Beast” always works so well. Remove tax money from the public coffers, and “unnecessary” (FYI: this is pronounced “unpopular”) programs like music and art and girls’ sports will get the axe, teachers will be laid off and school supplies will be carefully rationed. The thing that won’t happen is cutting back on the high school football programme. Don’t believe me? All the Bush II tax cuts did nothing to curb the constantly ballooning military budget, but instead the program cuts to pay for this budget starvation came from other “unnecessary” programmes.
Okay so you are assuming that they weren’t already getting ANY revenue from ticket sales? You are assuming these new mega stadiums will not have ANY incremental operating or maintenance costs? There are serious flaws in your reasoning. What you really need to know is how much incremental revenue will be brought in as a result of the new stadium and then subtract the incremental operating and maintenance costs (which are substantial). It is far from clear without actual numbers that this number would even be above a big fat ZERO.
Well Texas high school players especially the good ones or stars seem to learn that being a high school football player means getting a free pass on just about everything related to school. What universe do you live in?
Brain damage is always detrimental to education.
Also, the construction project either requires no borrowing to finance it, or is financed at zero percent interest. Oh, and there’s no such thing as “depreciation of capital assets”.