March 19, 2008
Green Stadiums
Here's review of the environmental technologies used in the new Washington Nationals stadium. They've greatly reduced water and electricity use, as well as cleaning up a polluted area of the city.
Posted by David Pinto at
08:24 AM
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Stadiums
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Gee, and only at a taxpayer cost of $673,000,000! What a bargain!
Actually Rusty, unless you're head honcho at a lobbying firm in the K Street Canyon, you probably haven't paid one red cent toward the stadium construction costs. But feel free to round up some friends and dump tea into the Anacostia River. It can only be an improvement.
Any money that comes out of the firm where I work for this taxpayer boondoggle is money that is not going to my salary or my bonuses.
Furthermore, no matter whom it's being taken from, $673,000,000 of public money is unprecedented. That's over $100M over the second most expensive taxpayer funded stadium (SafeCo). That money could go to stopping the pollution of the Anacostia, more social services to help assauge the high unemployment rate here, or any other program that would help DC citizens instead of the owners of the Nats.
Unprecedented? Like the $675,000,000 price tag on Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis? Oops.
The Indy stadium, along with other more expensive stadiums (like the baseball stadiums in NYC), will have some private contributions. For Lucas Oil, the Colts are spending $100M.
The Lerners have put a whopping $3M into Taxpayer Stadium.
Sorry, but you're just not getting a lot of sympathy from me. The cost of living difference between Indy and DC is ~60%. The $575m my fellow residents of Indy are ponying up is worth $956m the residents of DC are.
Plus in addition to that, you're still getting a terrible area of town regentrified and a great deal of pollution cleaned up, things that Indy is not benefiting from. I've seen comparison prices between building green in the housing market, and if you compare your green price tag to our normal price in Indy, it's a significant discount.
I almost used the word "bargain" there, but I do recognize the staggering number that it represents. I'm not trying to minimize the argument against building brand new stadiums like this, but there are plenty of arguments that minimize the negatives (the increased revenue from building up a run-down area of town alone will see very longterm benefits).
