From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

OLYMPIA — For the second year running, the Seattle Sonics are pushing for a new publicly financed arena — this time in Bellevue or Renton.

Why is it that multi-million dollar professional sports teams want somebody else to pay for their playgrounds? They already soak the public for the price of tickets, but they always want more. The Sonics want to tax people that don’t even watch basketball for the privilege of having them stay and extort more money from those same people later.

Bellevue or Renton would need authorization from the Legislature to raise local taxes for a new arena; a subsidy Bennett says is necessary to keep the team in the region.

The Sonics’ lease at KeyArena expires in 2010. The team has not said how much a new arena would cost, only that it wants the public to make a “significant contribution” to a new one.

The public already said “NO” in Seattle, with a loud voice.

Before selling the team this year, former owner Howard Schultz pushed lawmakers to approve legislation that would have given Seattle and King County authority to collect taxes to pay for a major renovation at KeyArena.

The negotiations broke off in the closing days of the legislative session. Lawmakers and Gregoire said they were not willing to consider any bill that did not include a public vote on the new taxes. The Sonics had said early on that the condition could be a deal breaker.

A public vote on taxes is a deal breaker? Only because they know that the public has gotten fed up with them. Only because they know that the public would tell them “enough is enough”.

For those who complain that millionaires would end up the being recipients of public dollars:

“Poor people don’t buy teams,” she [Margarita Prentice, head of the Senate Ways and Means Committee] said.

The last statement says it all. How arrogant! How condescending! It’s obvious that Prentice doesn’t give a rip about her constituents. She’s not alone among politicians either. Greg Nickels has said that if public money is used to build an arena for the Sonics in Bellevue or Renton that he’s going to push for public money to subsidize Key Arena.

If that happens, we’ll get taxed twice for the privilege of having spoiled adolescents that never bothered to grow up play basketball at public expense, whether we watch them do it or not. If professional basketball is so good for the region that it will pay for itself, let it. We don’t need another extortionist pulling money out of our pockets.

Let the Sonics move to Oklahoma. As long as they don’t ask us to pay their travel expenses too.

Cross posted at Perri Nelson’s Website.

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