What Is The Impact Of Public Funding On The Community

Public Funding: The Great Impact On the Community
Supersized digital displays, retractable roofs, luxurious suits and seats, brand new state of the art technology, all things that are publicly financed by taxpayers and host cities of professional sports teams for their stadiums. Public subsidization is a policy that needs to stay around. Public funding of sports stadiums will boost the economy of not only the city, but the region around the city as well. When cities are willing to bring in and subsidize major sports teams stadiums, they are creating jobs, creating economic opportunity in the region, and attracting other tourists into the city. When a new sports stadium is being brought into a city, it brings more than just the attraction
Some major cities really rally behind the team that is based in their cities, and some areas have multiple teams from different sports participating, just adding on to the amount of money being brought in. An example of this would be the city of New York. New York is home to many different sports teams, the Yankees, the Mets, the Jets, the Giants, the Knicks, the Rangers, the Nets, the Islanders, and many more. In this specific example, Elaine Povich, an author for PBS NewsHour, talks about the New York Mets and their new stadium that opened up in 2009. Povich goes on to talk about later in the article that the Mets stadium costed around $850 million, “with the help of $616 million in public subsidies.” Much of this $616 million came from the year before when the Mets went on their postseason run. More games and the attraction of the MLB postseason brought more and more fans from around the country into the city to spend money on the team and the businesses in the community around it. We also see some of the prices from around sports, some of which that seem absolutely ridiculous, but people still will spend their money on it. Jeff Cockrell, deputy editor for the Chicago Booth Review, presents some of the prices from around the sports world. The average ticket price for an NFL game in 2016 costed about $92.98, a beer and a hot dog run
Getting rid of public funding for sports stadiums also has some benefits. However keeping public financing around opens up so much more and produces so many more opportunities for jobs and for economic opportunity in the areas of the new sports stadiums. A negative to keeping public funding however is that some citizens may be unhappy to where their tax money is going to. These citizens may not be fan of sports and not being a fan can be the reasoning behind being upset with where their money is going. They are going to pose the question, “Well if I do not care about sports, then why should my tax money be going towards these new stadiums for the teams?” Which is a very good question, only if the money was just going towards the teams. Although, as stated earlier, public funding for the stadiums is not just supporting and affect the teams, it affects the entire community around the stadium in a positive manner. If public funding for sports stadiums was eliminated totally and owners of the teams had to privately pay for the stadiums themselves instead of having state and city governments help out, this plan also has some positives and negatives. Some positives would be that the state and city governments can focus more of their tax dollars on infrastructure and more public parks. However, these things do not create as many jobs and will not bring in as many people from around the country to pay money and benefit the local