Public Funding for Stadiums

The funding of sports stadiums has recently been a very hot topic in the sports media. Most of the modernly built stadiums have been publicly funded, which begins a large debate. What rewards does the community receive when a stadium comes to town? Is a sports stadium a positive or negative investment for the community? This debate hits close to home with the city of Cincinnati recently constructing two new stadiums for the local pro teams. When addressing this debate I broke the problem into four main aspects: a complete overview of the numbers, the positive effects of having a stadium and or building a stadium, the vice versa with the negative effects of stadiums in the community, and lastly I concentrated on the stadiums here in Cincinnati and more specifically Paul brown stadium who houses everyone 's favorite team the Cincinnati Bengals. In the last fifteen years no professional stadium has been built in the United States without funding from the public. Since 1990 over seventeen billion dollars have been paid out for construction and renovations of stadiums. Nearly eleven billion of the seventeen has been provided by public funding, which equals out to over sixty percent of total funding. When money is spent on renovations to the stadiums it tends to be especially wasteful since it 's proven to not really spark anything new. Renovations fail to raise ticket sales, or raise money spent at concessions. Most Renovations are for safety and health code reasons. With safety codes always changing many stadiums must do small renovations to stay operational. Construction of new stadiums however does bring new revenue to the community; I will speak about this more when I address the positive effects later on in the paper. Money which is collected for the stadiums is often forced out of the local government. Team owners will often argue that they can move to another city which will bring in more local funding. The team leaving would then stick the

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