Commissioners in the county that includes Cincinnati say the county can't afford the $43 million the Cincinnati Bengals want for repairs and upgrades at their football stadium over the next decade.
The Cincinnati Enquirer obtained the plan through a public records request. It says the Bengals want four times the amount Hamilton County expected to spend. The county owns the stadium and must pay for improvements under the lease terms.
The team says the total includes $8 million for a new scoreboard within two years. Most of the money would be for maintenance and improvements to keep the decade-old Paul Brown Stadium from deteriorating like the one before it.
And the relatively new Paul Brown stadium is quite nice, but Hamilton County doesn't have $4.3 million a year to fork over to the Bengals. Not anymore. Not without raising revenues. And no lawmaker in the Midwest will win re-election on raising taxes, fees, or levies a dime here in the Tea Party Teens. They'd get run out of town on a rail.
Cincy is no different. So the question is, who's going to pay for the stadium, and what happens if the city doesn't give the Bengals what they are looking for? After all, who's going to build a new stadium to attract a football franchise thee days? Who would be allowed to?
A lot of cities and a lot of franchises are going to be hurting over the next decade. It really wouldn't surprise me at all if at least one of the big four pro sport leagues, the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL went under before 2020.
It's the NFL that will face the next major contract test after next week's big game if there's no agreement by March 3, there may not even be a 2011-2012 season.
A lot of cities are going to want to seriously redo their sports franchise deals over the next several years, and I foresee a number of teams folding altogether. The nexus of sports, economics, and politics is going to be a messy one for dozens of major US cities.
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