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June 11, 2012
Glendale arena lease approved; next up, lawsuits!
Friday's Phoenix Coyotes lease vote denouement: The Goldwater Institute's attempt at a temporary restraining order failed, the council voted 4-2 to approve a 20-year lease including $224 million in new public subsidies, and Goldwater promised again to sue the bejeebus out of everybody involved. And there's also talk of putting a referendum on the deal on the November ballot, though it's unclear whether that could retroactively block it.
In other words, just about as expected. Plus, would-be owner Greg Jamison may still be having trouble raising money to buy the team, even with Glendale offering more in subsidies than he'd be paying in purchase price. They have not yet begun to brawl.
This is really good news. On principle I dislike seeing government bailouts of struggling businesses (that's what companies like Bain Capital are for), but sometimes the effect of a business closing or moving would be so harsh that it's best to help out the entrenched.
I'm going to avoid arguing yet again why I disagree with Neil's assessment that this is a $224 million public subsidy, but I will add that a major point of importance to both this and any prospective future arenas is to gauge correctly whether concerts and other non-anchor tenant events are actually going to come. Apparently this arena is only getting about 30 non-Coyotes events per year. If Glendale would have avoided being caught up in the crazy concert boom of the go-go 00's, they may have avoided this mess entirely.
Posted by Ben Miller on June 11, 2012 12:27 PM
Someone will always be negatively effected if a business closes up or moves away. I don't think the free market works where business aren't allowed to fail. Or some aren't but others are.
By that rationale everyone from your local convenience store that's struggling to pay inflated power bills to Microsoft who never saw competition from Apple producing a relevant product again getting bailouts.
Asinine.
Posted by Andrew T on June 12, 2012 12:50 AM