No other way to describe voting to buy $19m. worth of Uptown land to hand over to Don Beaver and the Charlotte Knights. Except the deal really is not even that good for taxpayers as the land any future the Knights’ stadium will sit on will not throw off property tax revenue each year.
Because Beaver’s former employee Tim Newman and Uptown capo Michael Smith understood that Beaver could not afford to both pay tax on his stadium land and service debt to build it, an elaborate shell game was constructed which would lease the land to the Knights for $1 a year. Presto, the property tax problem is removed.
The thing that boggles the mind is that Beaver and the Knights could not afford to build a $34m. stadium on their own. That is what kicked off this scheme three years ago. Now the stadium price stands at $62m. and the Knights show no sign of being able to secure funding for the project even though both Bank of America and Wachovia would love to be able to help throw up a baseball park blocks from their offices. Yet Commissioners Roberts, Clarke, Helms, Mitchell, and Ramirez think it is a great idea to get county taxpayers into the speculative real estate biz. Their campaign coffers must be overflowing with Uptown banker cash — or horseshoes, rabbits’ feet, and four-leaf clovers.
Good luck with that.
