For one of my classes over Spring Break, I had to do a paper on funding in sports stadiums and over the course of yesterday and today I worked on some of it. It's supposed to be 6 pages, but I wrote up about two page so far and figured I might as well ask for some feedback, and also talk about some of the stuff that I learned. For my topic, I chose Citi Field and had to break down where all of the funding for the stadium comes from and I briefly talked to LK about this.

ANy ideas to improve this would be appreciated.




At the moment, Citi Field is the 2nd most expensive baseball stadium in America, having cost well over 800 million dollars to construct, with roughly 80 percent of that price tag going towards the actual stadium and the remainder going towards the stadiums infrastructure. That's nearly a billion dollars, and that's not an easy amount to come up with, therefore, the team had to use multiple funding sources to make sure that the stadium could open in time.

The majority of the price had been put up by the team itself, roughly half a billion dollars to be exact while the rest came from both the public and the government. At a close look, the majority of funds have come through tax exempt bonds, in January 2009, the team had finished the fiancing of the new stadium by selling just over 82 million dollars in 37 year bonds with an average rate of 6.45 percent. Those weren't the only bonds that the team had sold, just three years before that, more than 600 million dollars in bonds had been sold, Those bonds were all for 40 years with an average rate of 4.57 percent.

Even though the Mets have spent well over 600 million dollars in these bonds, the team itself only actually spent about 134 million dollars out of their own money because of various deals and agreements that involve City funding, State funding, Federal funding, and even funding from the MLB. The original bonds cost a total or about 613 million dollars, but because of various tax savings, the team paid only paid 507 million in these original bonds. The team also paid 83 million in the 2nd series of bonds which had been brought down to only 68 million because of tax savings.

The majority of the bonds have been paid off by City taxes and revenues though, the largest one being Forgone future property taxes, in which the city paid 251 million dollars from the bonds. The city had also paid about 57 million dollars for Forgone parking revenues, 14 million dollars for Rent rebates, 25 million dolars for Forgone rent credits, and 6 million dollars for Capital replacement reserves to cover the cost of the bonds.

The state had also covered 4 million dollars as part of the Capital replacement reserves, which had brought down the teams total spending to about 218 million dollars. MLB had then covered some of the remaining bond values by offering 71 million dollars on Revenue-sharing savings for the original bonds, and an extra 9 million dollars on Revenue-sharing savings for the 2nd bond. The city, State, and MLB have therefore combined to erase 441 million dollars from the teams bond sales. Because of this, the team itself has put up only 134 million dollars out of their own pocket and MLB has put up 81 million dollars.

That only covered the roughly 600 million dollars in bonds, nowhere near the amount of money that was needed, and the rest of the funds have been split between City, State, and Federal funding. There is the land and infrastructur funding which brought in a total of 141 million dollars, 72 million from the city and 69 million from the state. Forgone construction sales tax brought in about 10 million dollars each from the City and State, and Forgone mortgage recording tax brought in 13 million dollars from the city and 9 million dollars from the state.

The rest of the funds were brought in through the Tax-exempt bond subsidies for both the original and 2nd bond. The subsidies from the original bond brought in 121 million dollars. The city and state covered roughly 4 million dollars while federal funding covered 117 million dollars. Subsidies on the 2nd bond brought in 21 million dollars, just over 20 million came from federal funding while the rest were from the city and state.

It may appear as if more money had been spent than it really has, and that is because of maintence savings issued to the city. Through all these different sources, the city has put up 450 million dollars, however through two different maintence savings, the city pulled in 70 million dollars.

In total, roughly 830 million dollars have been spent on the stadium, and the team spent about 134 million dollars out of their own pocket while MLB had covered 81 million dollars. In total, the stadium has recieved 380 million dollars from city funding, 96 million dollars from state funding, and just under 140 million dollars from federal funding to complete the cost of building this magnificent stadium.

So far your writing is merely descriptive; I can't pinpoint your exact opinion of the subject.

If you agree with public funding of stadiums, then simply quote any Keynesian who believe in the multiplier effect of public spending - "if you build it they will come", really.

However if like me you believe that public money for such projects is wasted, then there are plenty of think tanks (Cato, Heritage, Tax Foundation) that can show you, with plenty of examples, that such projects are bound to fail. Indeed, more often than not just huge projects are rife with spending overcost - with the taxpayer paying the bill - and builders don't have many incentives to keep the cost down because they suffer little (if any) consequences.

Fun fact: public stadiums are payed for by the ENTIRE country thanks to a tweak in the federal tax code that exempts from taxes municipal bonds...

janus : I dont understand anything of what you said.

janus : Your first sentence is exactly what I was going to say.

Zanderlex, you're telling us how the money is found and what it is going to.  But I can find all that out by going to Wikipedia and calling it a day.  You could literally, not figuratively, but literally take that information from a website and paste it and turn it in as a paper.

Here's the deal.  It won't do well because you're writing some basic info anyone can find.  Give us something more.  Give us an opinion on the balance of funds from private or public sectors.  Give us a thought that if the public pays for a stadium, that teams should never be subject to blackout on television programming (I'm looking at you, NFL).  Tell us something more or spin the information to make a point, create an argument, or see something from another point of view.

Janus is saying you're giving us the recipe.  I can read about how to cook a steak anywhere.  Describe the sizzle.  Tell me how the marbling makes a steak taste better or worse.  Why do we need fat and not just meat.  I'm grilling and drinking beer right now so that's what's on my mind.

Don't give us just information.  Give us a statement of belief and back it up with information.

warmaker : well I wouldn't really know where to begin, since I'm mainly at that age where I dont care too much, so I just did what was on the rubric.

zanderlex : You're 21 and you don't care where a stadium gets funding from?

I won't sway you one way or the other but I have a few suggestions for you to (hopefully) mindfully examine.

1.  You should know what happens in local and national government and how things work.  An important question to ask whenever new ideas new stadiums, new legislation, etc happens is, "Who's going to pay for this?"  You can see a check go from $200 a week to $150 a week because you didn't bother to educate yourself and vote for or against something.  

2.  School is a wonderful time to learn what you really love.  Ideally, you attack these papers and work, dive into them and see how they fit in your life.  If anything, learn to perform unwanted tasks with pride of your work.  Those of us in the work force with careers know we don't get to do things we like all the time.  However, the things we don't like, we still go and do and do well.  It's a matter of personal pride to perform the best we can.  Try to immerse yourself in some of this stuff and learn that, while you don't like it, you should be destroying everything you have to do with awesomeness.

Instead of just looking up stuff to write a paper, try actually reading a little about it.  Learn about what you're writing about and the paper will be a lot easier to complete.  A little bit of research and history go a long way in getting the final project done.

zanderlex : What is the goal of your essay: say that public funding for stadiums is good or bad? Otherwise it's only an informative composition that takes no position.

And even though you're only 21 you SHOULD care. Government-funded projects are (mostly) "white elephants", i.e. very costly and of very little use. Make a research in the literature and you will find out that it merely buys vote and doesn't have much cause much economic development.

Take the last Super Bowl for example. Glendale (?) spent hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement and in building a new stadium, and yet the taxpayers are still waiting to get their money back on such a colossal endeavor.

janus : Well the goal was to give it in and get a good grade.

zanderlex : That's my point. You clearly said this was an essay, and essays require you (or at least did for me) to take a clear position on a given subject. Considering it's 6 pages long, you WILL need to take a position; there's only so much you can say descriptively on the subject.

If you are allowed to be the devil's advocate, then maybe you could write about both the ups and downs of publicly-funded stadiums.

janus : I never even heard of having to do that before for an essay in any class ever. Maybe for a paper.