If you want to have any hope of understanding what the Powers That Be are doing to get an Uptown baseball stadium, go read last week’s Rhino Times story on the proposal. Not only is a $35 million subsidy to a baseball team in the mix, so is a knock-down drag out legal battle over using bond money on the project.
The Times notes that the 2004 vote which authorized the bonds explicitly forbade the use of the proceeds on a baseball stadium. Instead, $24 million of the $69 million total was to go towards a Third Ward park. Yet the county is now arguing that because Knights owner Don Beaver will build his own stadium on land leased to him by the county for $1 a year, the bond money is not actually building a baseball stadium. Got that?
Even though this proposal keeps the land in county hands, and thus allows Beaver to avoid paying property taxes on it, and effectively makes the county Beaver’s mortgage holder in the project, the bond language is not actually being broken — so the county says.
But the Times also reports that legal eagle Bill Diehl in on the case, on behalf of unknown plantiffs, who could be just about any landowner in the area.
“Any action by Mecklenburg County, the City of Charlotte or any private entity authorizing a transaction to place a baseball stadium on the Third Ward West Park site will be challenged in a court of law,” a letter Diehl transmitted to the county and city warns.
So we are down to this: Are public funds actually going to be spent on defending in a court of law a public subsidy to a baseball team?
Batter up!
Bonus: Here’s the actual ballot language from the 2004 question —
Shall the order authorizing $69,000,000 of bonds secured by a pledged of faith and credit of the County of Mecklenburg to pay capital costs of providing park and recreation facilities (other than a stadium for professional baseball) including the acquisition and construction of new park and recreation facilities, the improvement and expansion of existing park and recreation facilities and the acquisition and installation of interests in real property required therefore, and a tax to be levied for the payment thereof, be approved?
