A few months back, this blog groused after Reno put itself on the hook for more subsidies to the owner of the Reno Aces baseball team, to help get the second phase of the ballpark district project built:
One thing that’s been missing all along – a methodical, programmatic approach, is just one thing. Another thing is the lack of foresight with the allocation of funding resources to projects. Projects sit in the imagination of some plan or official for 25 years or more, and it’s frequently an emergency, or some stroke of luck which allows them to proceed. […] This is one reason to celebrate that Reno is now committed to truly subsidizing the baseball project, the second phase of which is due to begin construction, the developers tell us, any day now.
I still agree with my line of reason there, as draconian as it sounds. (This is not a particularly sunny subject, it turns out.) Which makes all the more dispiriting the news from the RGJ yesterday that Reno is broke and won’t be able to make its million dollar payment to the owners of the Reno Aces due to declining property values downtown. (Reno Comes Up Short In Payments To Reno Aces Owners, Susan Voyles, January 25, 2010)
When this project has hit on hard times before, this blog has often suggested renegotiating in good faith with the baseball developers. The only renegotiations which have occurred have been the kind of renegotiations that result in more money out of the public coffers for the baseball owners, thus far. Which makes this quote from the article galling:
“We cannot renegotiate,” Jerry Katzoff, a partner in the SK Baseball and Nevada Lands LLC companies that bought the baseball team and built the stadium, said of the property tax share, because that was the basis for a bank loan for the project.
According to another RGJ article, (3 Things That Will Change Reno Entertainment in 2010, Jason Kellner, January 22, 2010), the Aces sold 466,000 tickets last year in the inaugural season. Let’s do the math: $1 million / 466,000 = $2.15. Even if attendance were off by over a quarter this year, the average price per ticket to make the payment would be $3. But let’s go back to the original quoted RGJ article: the city does have $290,000 toward its commitment. $710,000 divided by 400,000 = $1.78.
For a price increase of about 2 bucks per ticket, the ballpark developers can pay the bank, the city can keep its team, and everyone, residents and visitors alike, can enjoy the new attractions currently under construction at the ballpark. Problem solved.
Cautionary note to Carson City: former Reno Redevelopment Director Mark Lewis, architect of most of this deal, is the lead consultant on the Nugget Foundation plan to revitalize downtown Carson City to the tune of a public contribution of $40,000,000 dollars, out of – wait for it – that city’s declining tax revenues. The CC Board of Supervisors would be well advised to take a step back and look north 30 miles and see what is happening with deals like this.