Hank Paulson’s son doesn’t fall far from the taxpayer-mooching tree
I’ve been writing about taxpayer-subsidized stadium boondoggles since I worked for the Seattle Times. The economic development rationale for pouring millions of tax dollars into sports palaces is bogus. These deals are brazen wealth redistribution schemes under the guise of “public interest” investment. Both Republicans and Democrats alike have supported the shakedowns. And now you can add Naked Emperor Hank Paulson’s son to the list:
ntil Merritt Paulson came along, City Commissioner Randy Leonard had never been to Manhattan. Tom Miller, chief of staff to Commissioner Sam Adams, had never been to Kansas City. And the city’s most visible business, the Portland Trail Blazers, had never been receptive to the idea of another major-league sports franchise coming to town.
It’s remarkable what one guy with a rich father and an interesting idea can accomplish.
Just 18 months ago, Paulson, 35, was a midlevel National Basketball Association executive living in New York.
Since then, he’s moved to the Portland area, bought two minor-league sports teams—baseball’s Beavers and soccer’s Timbers—and now has propelled himself into the spotlight with an audacious proposition.
Paulson wants taxpayers to spend $85 million to build a new baseball stadium for his Beavers and renovate PGE Park—just remodeled in 2001 at a cost to taxpayers of $38.5 million—for soccer. In return, he’ll spend $40 million to bring a new Major League Soccer team to this city.
“I’m willing to make a bet on the Portland market—that’s an easy bet to make,” Paulson says.
It’s also, judging from past experience, something of a longshot. Portland has historically disdained financing sports stadiums (billionaire Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen built the Rose Garden with virtually no public money).
“Portland’s an ‘if you build it they will come’ city,” says Brian Berger, a former Blazers employee who hosts the nationally syndicated show Sports Business Radio. “People here don’t want to pay for stadiums.”
Then there’s the dismal economy, which will increase the demand for public services and decrease the resources to pay for them.
And finally, voluminous research undermines the premise that pro sports drive new economic development by creating jobs, revitalizing neighborhoods and generating tourism.
“The projections underlying these deals rarely pan out,” says Chuck Sheketoff, director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy.
Like taxpayer-mooching, over-promising father, like taxpayer-mooching, over-promising son.
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Well we do know that PIGS bear PIGLETS….he will spend 40 million if the taxpayers spend 85 million? and of course that really ends up being 200 million with cost overruns and unions requiring X plus X plus X…..how nice of the PIGLET to cough up 40 million of whose money? Daddy’s and where has Daddy made all that money? on the BACKS OF HARDWORKING AMERICANS that’s where!
OINK, OINK!
Betting with taxpayers’ money? That sounds familiar…
When spending other people’s money, what does price matter? I’m sure there’s a plan in his head to avoid paying his share.
Beat me to it
You know, there’s a reason why Los Angeles hasn’t had an NFL franchise in 14 or so years, and it has a lot to do with taxpayers smacking the hands of team owners and councilmen who tried to pickpocket them for the dough to build a new stadium (because it would apparently be too expensive to renovate the LA Memorial Coliseum). I expect that Portland taxpayers have an equal lack of use for such nonsense.
Merritt
PaulSkunkson appears to be a chip off the old block.Yep. Now if they could pick the pockets of East coasters, I’m sure the libs in those towns would be happy.
Maybe a bailout could help…
It been my understanding that if Beavers needed something built, they build it themselves. Especially if they have Timbers.
ag: Heh. It’s not often I beat others to the punch here.
Don’t fall for it, Portland! Once a tax is created, it likely won’t be going away anytime soon. Let Miller Park serve as an example.
It appears financial irresponsibility with other people’s money doesn’t run in this family it gallops!
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE (mo-lone lah-veh) Translation: Come and take them!
Den of thieves
They pulled that crap here in San Antonio. They just had to have a new stadium to attract an NFL franchise and other major sporting events. Besides, they said, the Spurs will play there too, so we’ll get our money’s worth. Right. After a season or two in the new stadium, the Spurs decided that it just wasn’t a good venue for basketball, and so the taxpayers had to build them a new arena. The NFL franchise is, of course, still an unlikely dream and the NCAA has told the city that the stadium is already too outdated(!) to bring any tournaments here. So by next year the bureaucrats in charge will be back at the taxpayers’ pockets to tear down the “old” stadium so they can build a bigger and better one (read: more luxury boxes).
Yeah, they always find some “pressing local issue” that needs the money. Then when they want to build another stadium, they’ll come through with another bond issue or another 1/4 cent tax increase.
I suggest that the PIGLET give that 40 million to the chiiiilrennnnn! it’s the right thing to do just ask Pelosi!
I see his Dad and Pelosi got something SICK going on and he should just make it a threesome….the more the merrier when spending the people’s money…right?
I am so sick of this crap and let me be clear that THE NEW GOP will be the party of the people…meaning we will GET OUT OF THE WAY and let the people of the United States of America do what they do best….create, innovate and walk their talk….THINGS the PIGS in both parties are not getting. There is class warfare going on and it is the political elite and family members against the rest of US!
Of course, they could ALWAYS renovate a stadium like Chicago did for the Bears at enormous cost, and end up with a place that looks like someone laid an enormous toilet seat on top of an old building. Which they did. It will be interesting to see when these banks that rushed to pay for naming rights have to break the deals due to non-payment. Wait. They’ll use our bailout money to bail out these poor pro sports franchises. Excellent.
Well, well, my home town makes news again.
40 dollars to renovate PGE Park(formerly Multnomah Stadium) would be a waste of money: there hasn’t been a successful team playing there since the SanFran Giants played an exhibition game 20 years ago. Let’s see, Portland averages about 330 rainy days per year, how many baseball games will get rained out in a 5-month season?
Just another pie-in-the-sky scam by another “Professor Harold Hill.”
What’s that old saying?
New stadiums are just what we need when millions of Americans are struggling to pay for basic necessities and the financial markets are crashing all around us. Merritt Paulson must get his financial savvy from his father.
Same sh*t…different flies..
None of this would happen if it were not for the fools who don’t care-they want their stadium and they don’t give a d@#n…of course these same indivuals would go balistic if their ATM fees went 50 cents at their bank…I still remember the Seahawk Stadium project that was minorly backed by Billionare Paul Allen in Seattle, WA. with taxpayers footing the rest of the bill…I went round and round with people trying to point out that if the project were so great, Allen could have funded it all (or with a group of private investors)-all he was trying to do was get taxpayer leverage to his advantage.
Well the stadium for a number of years was a money loser…and probably still is
I do believe that liberal cities like Portland and LA don’t want sports stadiums on principle, but I doubt the principle is public money. I’ll bet that if Paulson was promising to put in a world class ballet troupe or a shiny new art museum the voters would feel differently. Art is to liberals what sports are to conservatives.
Very very true…
Also when I see people flocking to sports events on weeekends to stadium built on tax payer money or to ski resorts funded with tax payer money, I ask myself “Are we really in recession”? C’mon has anyone seen the crowds or long lines at stadiums or ski lift?
Don’t worry – someone will propose that union labor needs to be pouring concrete on “public works” projects like the 1930s, and voila, people like Paulson will have their new stadium. I assume the Oregon arrow company that got a bailout in the Crap Sandwich will get naming rights…
Here in Seattle we recently sent the Sonics packing rather than rebuild Key arena. Amazinging as that sounds.
At some point these spendaholics will see that the American taxpayer has no more money to give to foolish projects.
I am so glad the big-spenders running Virginia failed to get a baseball or footbal stadium here for the Washington Nationals or Redskins! I don’t care if the DC or Maryland government throws away tax dollars but I don’t really feel like giving my tax dollars to billionaires so they can make more money at my expense!
It is bad enough paying $7.50 for a beer at the stadium. Having to pay them to let me buy it would be more than I could take.
We have built several of these Taxpayer Investment in the Future boondoggles in Phoenix area. In Phoenix the tax payers bought a new basketball arena for the Sun’s Colangelo family, a baseball park for the Diamondback’s Colangelo family and Glendale built a football stadium for the Bidwell’s Arizona Cardinals. Somebody bought somebody a hockey rink with taxpayer money but I do not know who or where.
So Arizona and Phoenix SHOULD be rolling in money but Mayor Gordon of Phoenix and Governor J-No are now begging the federal government for bailout money. Show me the money?
But it has been a boon to Sports agents, arbitrators, parole officers, drug counselors and assorted hangers on who do but take and produce nothing. Hank Paulson’s son will fit right in.
Seattle, Portland and the rest of the Left Coast could use a big tsunami.
—
Is NOW the time for the Second American Revolution?
Con man, through and through.
Why do we think of them as whores?
Why spend mine when I can spend yours?
The good ole boys in Pittsburgh thought they needed to replace Three Rivers Stadium a few years back and added a bond referendum to the ballot. It failed. What did the city fathers do? Said they knew better and built it anyway.
BTW…I thought Portland was a liberal area…or are they conservative fiscally and liberal in social issues? If so, then I should add it to my list of good cities worth of relocating!!
I stay away from stadiums. It isn’t worth it anymore. Once, it was pretty cheap to go to any game. Now it takes a small fortune to take a family. Even if you don’t go, you end up paying for it anyway, through taxes. There’s a line outside my front door, with people, one at a time, marching through my living room, telling me to pay up or go to jail. Lord knows if there’s any money left to take care of myself and my family. To the government people, in line, that’s immaterial and irrelevant.
At least you should buy your car there – no sales tax.
You should actually move to Vancouver, Wa., across the river. Washington has no state income tax, and Portland has no sales tax. A lot of retirees live in Vancouver, Longview, Kelso, or Kalama (no, it’s not Hawaiian) and do all their shopping in Oregon. It’s not like you have to pass through customs.
The hockey arena is in Glendale–right across the street from the retractable-roof football stadium. It’s so far on the west side of the city that I wouldn’t expect many spectators from the east side of the city on weeknight games.
Of course, the NHL team had to get its own arena because Colangelo’s NBA arena wasn’t built to accommodate an NHL ice surface. The Coyotes played there when they moved from Winnipeg, but the resulting ice surface put one of the blue lines under the center scoreboard.
But “build-it-and-they-will-come” will keep returning to Phoenix as Maricopa county brings more baseball spring training (Dodgers, Indians and Reds) with tickets that cost the same as regular season games. We’ll have to see if those proposed amusement parks in Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties ever actually get anywhere. (I mean, who doesn’t want to visit an amusement park in the middle the open desert during the summer when it’s 115° in the sun?)
… A view from a local…
Although the existing park is rather small – seating-wise – what makes this doofus think that just having a larger stadium is necessarily going to attract [1] more fan? The existing stadium, is old, but maintained fairly well. In fact, I like – and even, prefer – the place.
I order de-Merritts for you Mr. Son-of-a-Bailout Master! Feel free to leave anytime you wish. I, for one, won’t stop you.
Hey, don’t blame me!
I find it highly suspect that this kid suddenly has jillions of dollars.
Obama can raise over 600 million to become president. He can raise 50 million for his inauguration party. Why not send him out there for a couple of days to hang out. I’m sure he can raise enough for a new stadium in 2 to 3 days.
That is truly remarkable. I can’t believe that people are still actually talking about public money for pro sports arenas.
This guy bought the team and should either rent an available facility or finance a new facility himself. Pro sports teams are not the governments’ responsibility. It is a luxury that is not necessary – especially if it can’t be done without other people’s money.
Why is it EVERY TIME I see one of these Elitist open thier mouth, or a Politician… I ACTUALLY hear my Toilet Flush? Is that strange? lol
Well I hope Portland voters are smarter than DC voters. In DC the Mayor convienced the voters the stadium wouldn’t cost them anything. They would put a special tax on business to pay for it. Business just raised their prices to compensate for the Stadium Tax.
Of course then there is the cost of running the stadium. It all gets paid for by the the residents. But they don’t believe it.