Government in business

I left the District of Columbia right after the DC government voted to build the new ballpark for the Washington Nationals. Then-Mayor Tony Williams promised to finance it all with municipal bonds. He said taxpayers wouldn’t get saddled with the expense. I left the District because I knew eventually, taxpayers would indeed get hit for the expenses. Well, they haven’t yet, but it’s getting close.

According to the Washington Post, the Nationals have stopped paying their rent to the District, so the District is going to raise the sales tax in the stadium to recoup some of their losses;

 Fed up with the Nationals’ failure to pay $3.5 million in rent, eight D.C. Council members proposed legislation this week to capture more revenue another way: increasing the sales tax by 5 percent for most items sold at the new ballpark in Southeast Washington.

The city charges a 10 percent sales tax. Council members said the money raised from the tax increase would help make up for tax revenue lost because of lower-than-projected ballpark attendance.

And they said it would bring money into the city’s coffers while the Nationals continue to hold off on paying rent on the ballpark. The team contends that the ballpark, up and running since March, is not complete.

Besides withholding rent, the team is demanding $100,000 a day in damages dating to March 1, a move that is galling to some D.C. officials, who are quick to point out that the District put up more than $611 million in public money to build the stadium complex along the Anacostia River.

So when people buy less at the stadium, and attendance falls off even more, who is going to end up paying off those bonds? Anthony Williams? Nope. The city government? Yep, but with taxpayer dollars.

Do the Nationals or the city government think they can force people to attend the baseball games? Do they think they force people to pay higher prices for stupid hats and hot dogs? When the Nationals get fed up with the corrupt and inept District government and walk away from the stadium, it’ll end up being just another eyesore on the Anacostia River that DC residents will have to clean up.

Governments don’t know how to run profitable businesses – except in China where they use prison and slave workforces and the army runs the businesses. I could see this coming from miles away, but everyone wanted so much to believe that Tony Williams wouldn’t screw them – he was just another grifter wearing a bowtie.

Category: Politics