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September 23, 2008
Brodsky: "nothing like professional sports to make public people nutty"
Atlantic Yards Report
Last Thursday, the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, held a hearing called “Gaming the Tax Code: Public Subsidies, Private Profits, and Big League Sports in New York.”
Today's Atlantic Yards Report continues its coverage of the hearing and asks:
Why use public money for professional sports facilities?
What tangible benefits result from this kind of investment?
Where's the integrity of a process that isn't honest and open about the first two questions?
Assemblyman Richard Brodsky testified as to how all logic seems to fly out the window when it comes to public subsidies for professional sports:
"[T]here is nothing like professional sports to make public people nutty," Brodsky declared, aiming to explain why private sports teams get tax breaks and subsidies they don't deserve.
Also included is a quote from New York University law professor Clayton Gillette, who testified that, whether or not a city determines any benefit from building a professional sports venue, local, not federal funding, should be used:
"Congressman, I want to be a little more reluctant than my colleagues on the dais up here and say, it depends on who the ‘we’ is. That is, a particular municipality or municipal officials going through a process that reflects the true preference of their constituents, decides that the absence of economic benefits notwithstanding, the kinds of more ephemeral benefits that Assemblyman Brodsky and Professor Humprheys are referring to, warrant a particular use of public money, then I, a fan of local autonomy, say that’s just fine, but--that public money should be the municipality's public money, if that’s a municipal decision."
"So if you mean by ‘we’ is the municipality actually internalizing all the economic effects of the decision, I have less difficulty, even though I might disagree," he continued. "What I do disagree with is the notion that, simply because a municipality says, we believe that as local residents that this is in our local interest, that that necessarily entails the use of a federal tax exemption so that nonresidents of that municipality are required to subsidize the local decision...."
A change in rules regarding use of Federal funds to subsidize professional sports facilities would drive up the cost of building the proposed Barclays Center arena for developer Bruce Ratner.
Posted by steve at September 23, 2008 6:41 AM