Slog

i know it's a typo, and it sucks being a journo and getting reminded of mistakes, especially on a blog, but i think this is no mistake: public + bilking = pubilking. You've invented a new word and i'm going to use it all over the fucking place.

I know it's just a detail that only policy technoids care about, but what King County voters rejected was not the ballpark per se but rather the particular taxing package chosen for them to fund it. After the rejection, the Legislature came up with a substantially better funding plan which the KC Council adopted without a public vote. I voted against the tax package too, but had no objection to the second and better plan.

Yes, animosity lingers and all should have known that the issue would get simplified (Eymanized?) to the point where it is today.

Well, gee, maybe that's because of the "without a public vote" part.

And R the stadium failed by a very narrow margin. If memory serves it was substantially less then 1%. I want to say around 1000 votes out of 500k.

Government often invests in things that benefit a minority of the populous. Most people do not visit national parks, ride metro, go to the zoo, visit Seattle Center, go to an art museum, see an opera, etc etc etc. A smartly financed well attended arena benefits the community.

Giffy -

The key difference is that there isn't a private business owner getting rich off national parks, metro, the zoo, art museums or the opera.

Now if we're talking about a public-owned sport team then you're talking a different story.

giffy@4

A smartly financed well attended arena benefits the community.

And how does it do this? Seriously, there is no net economic benefit to having the Mariners in town, there isn't, study after study has shown that publicly funded sports stadiums are at best a wash and at worst money pits. In addition to the fact that these facilities are a wash there's also the fact that their funding mechanism is incredibly regressive, you tax the poor and middle class so that wealthy team owners don't have to raise the money to build their own facilities, so that wealthy players don't have to take a pay cut, which they surely would if the owners had to raise their own money to build facilities and so that wealthy corporations can get a price break on their luxury boxes, which would be more expensive and less luxurious if the owners weren't bilking the public for money.

All of this is sold on the premise that if you don't have a bunch of semi-literate morons who are good at smacking balls with sticks in your city then your city won't be world class, but the fact remains that sports fans in Seattle are welfare sucking shitbags. And anyone who calls themselves a progressive and goes to a Mariners game can basically go fuck themselves, being in favor of pro sports is about as "progressive" as giving Dick Cheney a rim job after he went ass to mouth on you.

R on Beacon Hill, that's my pet peeve too. People whining "but we voted down a stadium and we got one anywaaaaaay..." No. We did not vote down a stadium. We voted down a tax plan for one. Period. One particular tax plan. Now, some people voted no because they don't want a stadium, ever. But some people voted no because they didn't like the tax plan, but are perfectly fine with a stadium paid for in a different way. There is no way to tell those two kinds of Nos apart.

People frequently interpret election results in this stupid simplistic way. "The monorail lost the last election so we can never have a monorail again! The people have said no!" (What about a monorail or sky train plan that isn't broken or mismanaged?) "Both viaduct options failed so we must have a surface-transit plan!" (Wonder what would have happened if that had actually been on the ballot?)

Also, I wonder how many of the folks who complain about the stadium tax overwhelmingly affecting the poor and middle class actually know what is currently included in the tax after all. (Hint: the straight-up sales tax did NOT pass and that's not what was used to pay for Safeco Field.)

"And anyone who calls themselves a progressive and goes to a Mariners game can basically go fuck themselves, being in favor of pro sports is about as "progressive" as giving Dick Cheney a rim job after he went ass to mouth on you."

You kiss your mother with that mouth?

R on Beacon Hill, that's my pet peeve too. People whining "but we voted down a stadium and we got one anywaaaaaay..." No. We did not vote down a stadium. We voted down a tax plan for one. Period. One particular tax plan. Now, some people voted no because they don't want a stadium, ever. But some people voted no because they didn't like the tax plan, but are perfectly fine with a stadium paid for in a different way. There is no way to tell those two kinds of Nos apart.

People frequently interpret election results in this stupid simplistic way. "The monorail lost the last election so we can never have a monorail again! The people have said no!" (What about a monorail or sky train plan that isn't broken or mismanaged?) "Both viaduct options failed so we must have a surface-transit plan!" (Wonder what would have happened if that had actually been on the ballot?)

Also, I wonder how many of the folks who complain about the stadium tax overwhelmingly affecting the poor and middle class actually know what is currently included in the tax after all. (Hint: the straight-up sales tax did NOT pass and that's not what was used to pay for Safeco Field.)

"And anyone who calls themselves a progressive and goes to a Mariners game can basically go fuck themselves, being in favor of pro sports is about as "progressive" as giving Dick Cheney a rim job after he went ass to mouth on you."

You kiss your mother with that mouth?

Dammit, how did that double-post happen?

If you took a poll today, a majority of Seattle would retrospectively support the decision to build SafeCo field. The same would be true if we had built the Commons, the tunnel, and a new basketball arena.

Seattle needs leadership that can sidestep Seattle's cheap, short-sighted, self-defeating voting tendencies.

Seriously, guys, people voted down the stadium. When you vote down a funding plan for a stadium, you are voting down the stadium. Okay, maybe TECHNICALLY people are voting down a tax package, but if you do not see that as voting down the stadium, then I don't know what to tell you.

However, as much as people complain about the stadiums, not one politician lost their job because of it. (In fact, one of them became Mayor.)

Sean @ 10 - really? I still would vote against SafeCo field (I mean, "the tax plan for the stadium"), the tunnel, and the basketball stadium. I don't think I know anyone who would reverse their position on either stadium or the tunnel.

If I'd known then what would happen to South Lake Union I might have changed my vote on the Commons. But only maybe.

"Okay, maybe TECHNICALLY people are voting down a tax package, but if you do not see that as voting down the stadium, then I don't know what to tell you."

But I have known people who specifically stated that they supported a stadium, but not the tax plan we were offered in that election. So they voted no. That disproves what you just said, unless you have some way to be certain that the overwhelming majority of folks voting "no" were "no stadium ever" votes. And there is no way to know that -- especially since it was such a close election. It was close enough that it was completely reasonable for folks to say "OK, that was close, so if we make this plan slightly less objectionable, it would pass." And they did that.

Now, you can fault them for not putting the second plan up for an election, but that's a matter of opinion. We shouldn't have to put absolutely everything up for a vote -- we pay legislators to represent us. (If we put everything up to a vote, the light rail would be dead. If we put fewer things up to a vote, we might still have a monorail project scheduled to begin running in TWO YEARS. This tells me that our ridiculous way of having an election for every possible project is not helping us do what we need to do.)

I didn't support the initial stadium package because it was a straight up sales tax increase which I felt was too regressive. the package passed by the legislature was an appropriate one that I did support.

litlnemo@8

"And anyone who calls themselves a progressive and goes to a Mariners game can basically go fuck themselves, being in favor of pro sports is about as "progressive" as giving Dick Cheney a rim job after he went ass to mouth on you." You kiss your mother with that mouth?

No, I kiss yours, but not after any of that hot ass to mouth action that she's so good at. I've heard this argument about what we voted down being a funding mechanism and it's total shit. Really, it's shit. The ballot title was not "We're going to build a new stadium for a bunch of millionaires, what funding mechanism should we use to do this?" As far as the contention, made by yourself and other stupid people of "we elect legislators to make decisions for us" fine, we do, we delegate our power to them. However if that is the case then why is it that the legislature punted this to the taxpayers in the first place, it's because they were scared shitless, so they punted to the taxpayers and the taxpayers said "no". At that point the issue should have been over. The legislature also corrupted the legislative process by invoking the state constitution's emergency clause, which the Supreme Court went along with, because, you know, having a bunch of millionaires swat balls with sticks is "... necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety, support of the state government and its existing public institutions" thus making it more difficult to challenge the funding package via citizen's referendum. Basically the whole corrupt Safeco field deal and the deal that Paul Allen got two years later are nothing more than the State of Washington transferring money from the poor and middle class to the ultra wealthy. These are de facto regressive policies as bad as anything the Bush administration has ever implemented. Calling yourself a progressive and being a fan of professional sports is like calling yourself an environmentalist while driving your SUV to a Monster truck rally.

There's also a bit if irony here. We keep hearing about how wonderful and popular these stadiums are and how no one lost their jobs because of them, true enough. On the other hand would Tim Eyman have been able to get as much traction as he had with his initiatives, most notably I-695 had the state government not passed these laws and signed these deals? Seriously, it was amusing to listen to all of the L. Ron Sims, Gary Locke and all of the other Democrats who supported the Safeco/Qwest deals bitching about I-695 and Eyman's other initiatives, but on the other hand how do you go to the voters and make the case for them paying more and higher taxes for state and local government when they see those state and local governments taking the money and building new sports stadia?

But the issue that none of the idiots who are in favor of these deals addresses is why professional sports teams are special and need massive government subsidies to keep operating? Seriously, why can't professional sports teams function without massive subsidies? Why can't they build their own stadiums. There are plenty of other businesses that manage to build their own facilities without government handouts, why can't they? Come on stadium fans, answer this question for me: why can't the incredibly wealthy white men who own all of our pro sports teams dig into their pockets to build their own stadiums?

litlnemo says "There is no way to tell those two kinds of Nos apart."

Oh, really? No way? No way at all? You can't think of any possible way to find out what the voters think? Hmm, fascinating. That tells me all I need to know about your grasp of democracy.

No direct way, Fnarf. Sure, there is polling. And there was a lot of polling done at the time of the election, I imagine. But polls can be flawed. I don't remember what any polls said at that particular time.

Seriously, what else are you suggesting? Having another election? Well, DUH, of course we could do that. But do you really want to have an election on every possible iteration of something? (We need more streetlights on Blah St NW! Election! Should we hire 5 more policemen? Election! OK, that failed, what about 4? Election!) We had a taste of that with the monorail, and it was fucking ridiculous. Yes, hear the people's voice, but we have a representative government for a reason. And in theory, we should be electing reps with the balls to do things right. (Ay, there's the rub.)

Really, the only thing any election tells us is what people thought of the specific thing listed on the ballot. Not any peripheral possibilities that might have influenced the vote. You can poll and get some ideas but the actual results are pretty black and white.

In the 2004 election (for example), you can look at the results and say that Bush got more votes than Kerry. But you can't say that because of that, every Bush policy is supported by the same margin, or that another Democrat might not have won the election. Those questions weren't asked. And acting as if they were -- in that election or any other -- is shortsighted and lazy, in my opinion.

The Paul Allen deal mentioned above -- do you mean Qwest Field or something about South Lake Union? Because Qwest Field won a public election. (I've heard a lot of people who say "we voted down a baseball stadium and a football stadium, and we got them anyway" -- I don't know how that meme started, but the football stadium won its election.)

It is interesting to see the thread above about "Gregoire Caves on Family Leave", with people upset that she's punting to the voters, while people are in here telling me that we should punt to the voters more often.

Can people just admit that they only complain when they don't get the results they wanted all along?

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