NASCAR Driving Circles Around Seattle Taxpayers
We've had a rash of new stadiums in Seattle over the last several years. To many it's like an outbreak of some middle-American fever that's infected one site after another, destroying perfectly healthy stadium cells and replacing them with boils of construction and scarrification in the form of corporate naming rights and public taxes. Sometimes we're in that camp, but we're big on the baseball here at Seattlest and we can't deny that Safeco is among the greatest venues for the game that we've ever experienced nine innings inside, the quality of the home team's play not withstanding. We didn't want it to be built, but we walk out of there after the twenty-seventh out without that useless vote on our minds.
Imagine if we weren't baseball fans, though. How pissed off would we be that we voted against that thing again and again (which we did) and again (still, yes) and the decision was made to build it with some public money anyway. Pretty pissed, you'd imagine. Check yourself: Are you a baseball fan? Did you vote for or against Safeco? And now? Pissed off, right? We feel your pain, of course, in a fake just-talking-you-up kind of way. We're about to feel it in a much more real way, though, after our NASCAR stadium gets built with tax dollars. We're going to feel it and channel it into a ranting crusade against the government and the auto sports masses that will fill our blogs, our public access television show, our neighborhood flyers, our barstool conversations and our civic meeting disruptions. If a NASCAR loop gets built in Seattle with public cash we're going to make sure everyone feels our pain.
Look out - the talkers in Tacoma are already myth/facting us into submission:
Myth: This is just another rich-getting-richer scheme like the Seattle Seahawks’ Qwest Field and the Seattle Mariners’ Safeco Field deals.Fact: The NASCAR deal includes no new taxes, tax increases or lottery games, like those stadium projects did. Much of the costs of the baseball and football stadiums is borne by local fans and taxpayers. Those sports don’t draw a large percentage of fans from outside the area. NASCAR does.
Based on NASCAR’s experience elsewhere, approximately 60 percent of the 83,000 fans that would come to a race in Bremerton would come from out of state. Given that the closest competing track sits 16 hours away by car in Sonoma, Calif., that’s a reasonable assumption.
So when NASCAR put its financing package together, it proposed using only the new revenue generated by that 60 percent out-of-state crowd for the public share of the project.
If only the Mariners and the Seahawks had offered us that deal.
