I'm saying NO to a Sioux Falls Sportpalast

Last July Sioux Falls Mayor Mike Huether hosted a special briefing for community and business leaders to fill us in on the proposed $115 million dollar Events Center which we get to vote on in a couple weeks. Unless you've been in a cave somewhere you are aware this has been a major matter of conversation and controversy in our community for a few years and so I won't rehash the particulars here. I will say I very much appreciated the briefing and got excited about the potential. Even so, I was the only one in the room of 100 or so who stood up during the Q&A to voice my concerns.

Basically I referenced Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn who hammered Obama just a day or so before. In no uncertain terms he said he's not building anything right now, nor is he hiring anyone….

“the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States…. I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States…. And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I could prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right, a President that seems — that keeps using that word redistribution. …And until he is gone, everybody is going to be sitting on their thumbs."

You get the idea.

And so I agreed with the Mayor that so far Sioux Falls and South Dakota have been pretty sheltered from the economic shaking out there but my point was that if a guy like Wynn — who knows a lot more than we do about building Event Centers - - if a guy like Steve Wynn is sitting on his hands right now, maybe this ought to give us some serious pause.  And then I shared my firm conviction that there is big economic storm coming and it's like everyone else in the nation is boarding up their windows to get ready and here we are talking about heading out in a new gazillion dollar sailboat (I wanted to say Love Boat). I agree with Joel Rosenthal, this is not the right time. No doubt there would be jobs created to build it, but taxpayers are being asked to pay for it and the full story there is being minimized - the jobs last two years, paying for it takes twenty. No thanks, not in this economy.

After the Q&A, former District 9 Senator Tom Dempster reminded me the Events Center sits right in the heart of my legislative district - District 9! Of course I'm well aware of that and you'd think I'd be all for a big project like this right in the middle of my legislative district. However for two simple reasons I'm not. First, the cost to taxpayers is not $115 million, it's $172 million. Second, I'm not as optimistic that there is a demand for such a facility here. We've heard all the promises before of how this will pay for itself and be an incredible boost to the local economy,,, hotels, etc.  Frankly, I can picture it half full of people and I'm not hearing the public asking for it.

Here's what I do hear… I get constituent emails with questions like this: "Have any projections been put together on what the “average” homeowner will pay in additional real estate taxes to retire the bonds on the proposed Events Center?"

The most interesting email came from a Sioux Falls attorney who compared this whole thing to the Berlin Sportpalast where Josef Goebbels delivered his “Total War” speech in 1943. I thought you'd enjoy chewing on it as much as I did:

If the Sportpalast would have been built in a Nazi Germany in the present era, it would feature the “naming rights” of Krupps, I.G. Farben, Bayer, etc. No question about that. Corporatism leads to fascism (“it’s all about jobs and the economy stupid”). They have this blinding attachment to the “god-given right to make a profit” at the expense of others and externalize their costs of doing business onto the public and the poor.

Obviously he's voting no to a Sioux Falls Sportpalast. Me too.

Far better for a local company right now to sponsor special programs and staff in our underfunded schools than to drop five or six digits just to get their name on a scoreboard. That would be a real win for our community and future.