Using taxpayer money for stadium raises reader’s ire

The Arizona Diamondbacks — a private entity — is closer to getting $500 million in public money via taxes.

Where is the Goldwater Institute? Its usual libertarian drumbeat is noticeably absent from this song. Its own website declares, in part, “From granting illegal subsidies to imposing needless regulations, government frequently oversteps its constitutional authority — wrongfully spending taxpayer dollars…”

Apparently, it’s only wrong when the government’s largess doesn’t benefit one of their own, Randy Kendrick, a Goldwater Institute board member and who’s married to the team’s owner.

Thirty years ago, when the details of the original lease for Maricopa County’s baseball stadium were released, any sane taxpayer realized what a bad deal it was for the county. The team was on the hook to pay about $30 million over the course of the lease, and “The team will pay for nearly all the operations and maintenance.” (Arizona Republic, June 29, 1997, pg. A13).

If the stadium is in such bad shape, the team should be to blame. Maybe the county should sue them for not holding up the lease terms. In any event, while the stadium likely impacted the rebirth of downtown Phoenix, it now has campuses from UofA and ASU that are more impactful than another 30 years of baseball at the expense of taxpayers. You know, those people that the Goldwater Institute professes they are here to protect.

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