Stadium will be hard sell for 49ers

By Mike Young  |   Thursday, January 17, 2008  |  Comments( 4 )

San Francisco 49ers
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The owners of the San Francisco 49ers are asking the city of Santa Clara to pony up $222 million to build a new stadium on what is now parking lot space leased to Cedar Fairs' Great America.

By all accounts, this is a great area for a stadium and the bulk of the 49ers' fan base is nearby. Still, this will be a long road for proponents of the proposed deal.

As a resident of Sacramento, I know what it's like for a professional sports franchise to ask for public funding to help build an arena which would result in overwhelmingly private gain.

Back in 2006, The Maloof family, owners of the Kings, asked the people of Sacramento to approve a quarter-cent sales-tax increase that would have financed an arena in an old rail yard area of downtown at the cost of nearly $500 million.

The new building would have replaced an aging Arco Arena, which has some of the worst luxury suites and concession areas in the NBA.

The measure was soundly rejected by voters, many of whom felt it was unfair for local governments (and therefore people) to finance construction for billionaires.

The situation in Santa Clara sounds familiar: Billionaires asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to replace their aging sports arena with a new facility that will increase their bottom line.

I'm going to make a prediction and say this will go poorly.

Already, the two sides can't agree on how much the city should pledge for the deal.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a feasibility report written by city staffers says Santa Clara can come up with $136 million from money on hand and by taxing future development.

It must be nice to have that much cash lying around.

An additional $35 million could be raised through a hotel tax, but that would still leave the city $51 million short of what the 49ers want.

The team and the city will find a way to close the gap on paper, but the real challenge will be getting the citizens to buy in. No matter how many benefits officials say the stadium will bring, or how much the fans in the area love the team, giving hundreds of millions of dollars to supremely rich people is a hard sell.

Sacramento loves the Kings and a new arena had a chance to revitalize a downtown area that could be a sleeping giant in the Northern California economy, but the word taxes and idea of charity for the rich scared its residents off.

Opposition leaders in Santa Clara - as they did in Sacramento - will list any number of ways the millions being given away by the city could help local education, or the homeless, or to build additional infrastructure, and they will be right.

A huge part of what made Sacramento's proposal at all vital was that the stadium might have taken the city's economy to new heights. The same can't be said for the proposed stadium in Santa Clara. This would basically just be a place for people to come watch football.

That's a good thing; after all, people love football, but if the choice is to give $200 million to a pair of billionaires or continue to drive to San Francisco for the same privilege, the choice seems obvious.
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