The first thing that comes to mind when Knight Ridder racin’ writer David Poole jumps to the defense of Brian “Food Stamp” France and NASCAR’s welfare payment from the city of Charlotte is that Poole has no choice. Poole has to label the welfare-for-billionaires observation “junk” or the folks who run NASCAR will cut off his access faster than you can say restrictor plate. But then we move on the merits of Poole’s argument. Whoops! Turns out there are not any.
NASCAR is not paying for its Hall of Fame because it does not have to, Poole reports. No kidding. But that was not the question at hand. The question is simple and two fold: Is NASCAR getting a government handout? Yes, use of a $150 million building up front and anywhere from $1 to $2 million in licensing payments each year until 2038, plus city help in building an office complex, plus an option to buy valuable Uptown land across the street from the Hall. Does NASCAR need this? No. NASCAR and the France family could finance $150 million in an afternoon.
However, Poole does stumble into the absolute backstop of why the NASCAR Hall is a horrible deal for the city. “[The Hall is] an investment, and any investment has risks,” Poole writes. Yes, but NASCAR is assuming no risk at all in this project. All NASCAR has to do is sit back and collect checks. All the risk is on the city, its taxpayers, and the local economy. One tiny way to try to even the score up a little would be not just defer license payments to NASCAR in the event of low performance at the Hall, but eliminate them.
That’s right. If the pie-in-the-sky attendance figures do not quite work out, let NASCAR share some of the pain. The payments should not be carried forward like some company-store arrangement that the city can never quite work off, that’s how we got in this mess with the bad deals for the convention center, the Westin, and the Uptown arena.
Those are the details and that’s the reality. Now back to fantasyland — brought to you by NASCAR.
