SoFi Stadium Deal Sweetens Rams Win – Orange County Register

From the perspective of a Southern California sports fan, this year’s Super Bowl is equally spectacular. The Los Angeles Rams have claimed victory in an unconventional thriller, following a string of gruesome playoffs. The Rams are only the second team to win at their home ground. And the energetic mid-show featured a host of Los Angeles celebrities.

However, we were equally impressed by the setting – at the newly built SoFi Stadium, the modern venue was built on the site of the old Hollywood Park Circuit. We were amazed not only by the facility’s appropriately Southern California glamor and by an impressive array of adjacent developments, but also by the way Rams owner Stan Kroenke funded the project.

Besides the less than ideal infrastructure-related tax incentives, Kroenke built the $5 billion stadium — the most expensive stadium in NFL history — with his own money. “SoFi Stadium is possibly one of the most important stadiums in American history – a venue for a future where billionaires who love sports, instead of paying taxes, serve as guardians. support professional athletics rather than renters,” wrote Eric Boehm of Reason.

Let’s hope he’s right. Most professional sports team owners exploit the pride of their citizens – and the fear of transferring a beloved sports franchise to another city – to convince local governments to open up. Treasury. Understandably, Boehm is upset over the ongoing bidding war between Maryland, Washington, DC and Virginia to form the renamed Washington Commanders football team.

That’s how these deals usually go. These editorials detailed Anaheim officials making a shrewd deal to sell, at a discounted price, the city-owned Anaheim Stadium and surrounding 150-acre property for an investment group controlled by the owners of Angels. That transaction is tied up in a lawsuit alleging that city officials violated state open assembly laws by doing so.

Cities should not own stadiums, nor should they provide large tax funding. The subsidies often fail to prevent teams from moving, typically due to the poor negotiating skills of locally elected officials. According to a recent report in the San Jose Mercury News, the city of Oakland and Alameda County provided the NFL’s Raiders with $189 million in grants to keep the team in Oakland, but they moved to Las Vegas anyway.

Practically speaking, stadiums and sports arenas are bad investments for taxpayers. “They mostly sit empty and useless, coming to life for a few hours on game day and then falling back into darkness and silence. This makes them virtually worthless from an economic development or job creation standpoint,” explains the Center for Economic Accountability.