Mecklenburg County commissioner Jim Puckett’s support for the NASCAR Hall of Fame has major hole in it. Puckett says NASCAR celebrates risk and risk takers and that might be, but all the risk in the Hall deal is on the side of the public, not NASCAR or the France family.
As we’ve noted before, NASCAR is risking nothing in this deal — nada, zippy, goose-egg. In the event of poor turnout at the Hall license payments to NASCAR from the city’s convention arm would only be reduced or deferred, not eliminated. In other words, the cash keeps flowing. In addition NASCAR gets city help to build an office building and an option on valuable land across the street, all of this on top of $150 million upfront in public money to build the Hall.
At the very minimum for NASCAR to even begin to carry some of the risk of this scheme the annual license payments should be wiped out if certain projections are not met. But this deal does not have that. This deal does not have that because the city was going to ink a deal with NASCAR no matter what becuase it had to. The city had to because the existing hotel-motel tax of 6 percent cannot fund all the stuff the city has committed to run, dating back date to convention center itself.
Moreover, with the Hall and the new Wachovia arts complex the Uptown crowd is on the cusp of totally reversing its biggest defeat, the new arena and arts package that voters crushed at the polls in June 2001. It was widely remarked upon then that the package went down to defeat due to lack of support from the “NASCAR people.” Accordingly, it has been a longterm goal to draft local NASCAR fans onto the tax-and-spend treadmill that Uptown views as the natural state of all world-class urban destinations. The Hall does just that.
Why Jim Puckett thinks that is positive turn of events is a mystery.
