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Poll Results Regarding Kroenke’s Purchase Of The Rams

September 8, 2010 Downtown 9 Comments

Last week I should have provided one additional answer in the poll:

Q: What does Stan Kroenke buying the rest of the St. Louis Rams mean for St. Louis, the Rams and the Edward Jones Dome?

1) He’ll be able to get big money to renovate or replace the dome 32 (28.32%)
2) Very little 24 (21.24%)
3) The Rams are more likely to stay in St. Louis 24 (21.24%)
4) Unsure/no opinion 20 (17.7%)
5) Other answer… 13 (11.5%)

The additional answer I should have included was that the team might leave the St. Louis region. Readers used the “other” to provide that answer.

- Winning is all that can save the “St Louis” Rams and the dome
- He’ll move the team back to CA
- Easier to move the team, or blackmail the region for a new stadium
- relocate to LA
- He will move them back to LA
- blahblahblah, sport get too much money blahblahblah
- let ‘em move away
- Rams more likely to move out of STL
- Rams will stay and get new site, I also can see him later buying the Cardinals.
- The Rams are a net loss for St. Louis. The dome was built as a convention site.
- Don’t let he door hit you on the way out . . .
- What, you want that I should write a book about? What a ridiculous question.
- Rams move back to L.A.

One other answer is way off, saying the dome was built for conventions. The fact is St. Louis was so devastated in the late 80s when the Cardinals NFL team moved to Arizona that we started to build the dome as a way to attract a team and then to get an expansion franchise. The dome was built for football with use as convention space being secondary.

Note: I’m still out of town, daily posts will resume on Sunday.

- Steve Patterson

samizdat

“Don’t let he door hit you on the way out . . .” I'm down with that one. What do I care about the super-rich and their playthings? The super-rich and corporations are sitting on approximately 1.8Trillion USD. They don't need any more Public money. And now that douche turncoat Obama is talking trash about keeping the Bush tax cuts in place. Brilliant. Go to hell, Stan Kroenke, and take your friends with you. Please.
JZ71

The New York Times has a prescient article today, “AS Stadiums Vanish, Their Debt Lives On” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/sports/08stadium.html?ref=sports

I'm not a big sports fan, so I really don't care which team stays, goes or comes. I do have serious reservations about the taxpayers funding any specific private business, which is exactly what most stadium “deals” have devolved down to over the last couple of decades. Whether it's stadia or shopping malls, any time you use public tax dollars, you're simply transferring the wealth of the many into the pockets of the few, aka, corporate welfare. Why should the wealthy owners and players in the NFL or MLB expect to receive taxpayer subsidies to produce entertainment, when other forms, like rock concerts, theme parks and ski areas, are essentially self-funded?!
http://urbanreviewstl.com/ Steve Patterson

Excellent article, thanks for the link. Excessive debt is the downfall to otherwise good projects.
samizdat

Addendum: I believe I may have been incorrect–or misinformed with regards to the Bush tax cut issue (damn you, NPRz!). For now. I think this is what I may have heard: http://robertreich.org/post/1079916360/why-obama-is-proposing-whopping-corporate-tax-cuts-and. Still, I'm not so certain that he won't roll over on the Bush cuts before the election.
samizdat

Yeah, I saw that. Ouch! Paying debt on something which doesn't even exist anymore. I've heard some crazy s***, but DAAAAYUM! So, would someone please explain to me why corporations and their water carriers in state and federal legislative bodies aren't utterly corrupted? That's rhetorical, BTW.
JZ71

And today's Wall Street Journal has an article where the Rams rank dead last in fan popularity, behind those football powerhouse, Tampa and Jacksonville. (no surprise, Dallas is #1.)
Iluvmydugtuffy

If I remember correctly:

While the dome may not have been built as a convention center, the line at the time it was conceived was that even without a football team (there was no guarantee…see Purple Stallions) that the dome, because of its dual purpose, would be beneficial to the region either way. Everyone knew that that was a lie, but that is how the tax money for a potentially empty dome in the middle of downtown was justified.

Now we have a big dome in the middle of downtown that has awful dimensions for the size of most of the conventions that St. Louis attracts, while at the same time taking on the feel of a giant upside down swimming pool filled with people for football games.
Eon_blue_38

When a team dwells in the basement of the standings for the better part of a decade, it follows that they dwell in the bottom of a fan popularity poll.

There's not many good reasons to finance stadiums once you actually look at the numbers. As a sports fan, this is a tough reality to cope with. Fortunately for St. Louis, Busch Stadium was privately financed, so it could be worse for the city than it is.

The only way I, as a fan, can rationalize the public financing of stadiums is by looking at it as a way of getting payment from people who derive enjoyment from watching that team but never willingly spend a dime on it. It's not bullet proof, or even solid, but fandom is hardly rational anyways.
JZ71

While I'm no big fan of spending public money on these facilities, I do get that they are important to the fans, much like how things like transit are important to me. But what really gets to me is the argument that, after 20 or 30 years, they're not “good enough”. Using that logic, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Lambeau (sp?) Field should all have been replaced years ago.

There probably is some public duty to provide a safe, functional facility for certain public gatherings; there is NO public duty to maximize its/their tenant's profits. And the likely “need” to replace the existing facility has nothing to do with either safety or capacity, it has everything to do with spending public money to increase revenues for the Rams.

I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be simpler and more honest just channel any new tax directly to the Rams? Skip building anything, just put it directly in their pockets? They wouldn't have to sell a bunch of new luxury suites, and they might be able to afford to buy the competetive talent they apparently need . . .

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