urbanSTL

chaifetz10 wrote:^Have you seen all the empty parking lots downtown? Hell the Bottle district is immediately north of here and is a giant empty parking lot. There is no reason to tear any building down downtown.

Those lots weren't going to be touched as long as football was at the dome and tailgating was needed. Now we can set edge of Downtown north of Cole now and develop on those lots. Not having a giant dome and convention center there would only make it more attractive.

Isn't that McKee's land now anyway?

Turn the dome into a SSS (my 1st preference), or tear it down.

dbInSouthCity wrote:^ stadium was going to cost the City $150M .....this $500m.

Why would the City willingly carry the burden alone on this one? No time crunch this time.

dweebe wrote:Ray Hartmann rubs our nose in it.

http://www.stlmag.com/news/think-again/ ... o-chamber/

Ray comes off as sanctimonious, condescending, and obnoxious at times in that piece (as he does in virtually every piece he pens), but he also makes good points there, and he was dead-on about how this would play out from the beginning, so he deserves to dish out some crow.

I just get frustrated with Donnybrook when they seem to be reminding us that this is St Louis and hence we obviously will fail. They said Metrolink would fail because, unlike NY and Washington, folks had to walk across the tracks. They just seem to look at any attempt to elevate St Louis to the level of similar size cities as foolishness. I don't recall folks in Oklahoma City or Tulsa taking pride in how cynical they can be toward any local development plans when I lived in Oklahoma.

We could name it the Joyce Meyer dome. Maybe that Joel Osteen guy would buy it. Could we wedge a second baseball team in there? Rock & Roll HOF permanent concert venue? The Chuck Berry Dome? Cosmopolitan Club? A giant enclosed stadium at the population center of the US should have a national function.

Tear it down and revamp for more conventions.

20 minutes about Kroenke, the Inglewood Rams project, and Trader Joes and "gentrification". Fascinating.

http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/ ... e-for-sale

With regard to City Budget discussions:

"The city's top three elected officials on Tuesday approved a proposed spending plan for fiscal year 2017, which starts July 1. The $1.04 billion budget is about 2.5 percent bigger than last year, but revenue growth is projected at only 1 percent, driven mostly by hits to the sales and amusement taxes.

""The revenue impact from the location of the Rams NFL franchise from the city, though small in proportion to the budget, can be expected to be a drag on revenue growth in the coming fiscal year,"" budget director Paul Payne wrote in a summary.

This has created a gap in the city's discretionary spending, which has led budget officials to propose reducing the amount of money available for building demolition and for capital projects in individual wards. There are also proposed cuts to the Affordable Housing Commission. The $1.04 billion includes all federal and restricted funds."

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/fir ... et-process

According to Joe Miller of the Show-Me institute, Ryan Silvey - KC side state legislator, Rob Schaaf - KC side state legislator, and economists from SLU and UMSL, there should be no drop-off at all in the amusement tax revenue, due to "substitution". According to their economists, we Rams fans will divert our discretionary Rams dollars to other entertainment such as more movies and restaurant spending. So tax revenue to the city and state will be unchanged.

It should be pointed out that building the new stadium would have created a structural budget hole, for the next 35 years.

At this point, it doesn't matter who was right and wrong, the Rams were never staying, that much is obvious. I'm personally more interested in what politicians propose to replace and exceed that lost revenue. My hope is they do so in a way that doesn't sell the budgetary farm just for some shiny new toys.

andrewarkills wrote:It should be pointed out that building the new stadium would have created a structural budget hole, for the next 35 years.

At this point, it doesn't matter who was right and wrong, the Rams were never staying, that much is obvious. I'm personally more interested in what politicians propose to replace and exceed that lost revenue. My hope is they do so in a way that doesn't sell the budgetary farm just for some shiny new toys.

Yep. But that's why we had to weight the depth of the hole with the Rams and and the depth of the hole without the Rams. The economists misrepresented the without hole case saying there would be no hole. The Post still gets letters-to-the-editor (including one today) about how we should now spend all that money that we were going to spend on a new stadium. There is no money. The goal was to get a $400M investment from the NFL, which was never going to happen, as it turns out. But we didn't know that then. So it was legitimate then to believe it was worth spending some money to try to keep the Rams, ideally in the dome, to avoid the hole altogether.

And a city needs a few shiny toys, or the city is no fun, and millennials may seek to live first in cities that have a few.

gary kreie wrote: And a city needs a few shiny toys, or the city is no fun, and millennials may seek to live first in cities that have a few.

We have many shiny toys. There are also ways to build more without incentivizing them to the point where providing services to them costs more than the taxes produced by their presence.
Millennials choose to live places for a number of reasons; speaking for myself, shiny toys have very little to do with it.

Just thought I'd throw this out there. It's an article explaining how the folks in Arlington, Texas, are getting fleeced on a deal to build a new $1 Billion stadium for the Rangers (replacing one that's only 22 years old).

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-l ... EEc2VjA3Ny

Thought the PD article about Jerry Jones blessing a Las Vegas Raiders move interesting and one of poster comments about it being just as much as San Antonio. I'm for one convinced you will see San Diego approve a new stadium for Charger, the Raiders in Las Vegas, and we already know about the Rams.

Maybe in a couple of years you will hear NFL talk league expansion and conference shuffle if it hasn't gotten past its prime. Outside of San Antonio/Austin and St Louis not sure what metro areas in the US would fit as well as have billionaire owner. Portland maybe? Another Florida team?

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football ... 0c4f3.html

When Jones speaks, the rest of the NFL listens. That holds true even for commissioner Roger Goodell, and particularly the 31 other team owners. Jones wasn't named the most powerful figure in the NFL for nothing last month by USA Today. (Goodell was No. 2.)

St. Louis knows this first hand, having painfully (and angrily) watched Jones play a major role in steering the Rams to Los Angeles. Now, any stadium deal still has to be right in Vegas. And the league must be convinced that the market will support a team.

But if Jerry Jones says it's OK to have a franchise in Las Vegas, well, precedence says the league eventually will go along. And that's music to the ears of Raiders owner Mark Davis.