Fayetteville’s Crown Coliseum receives an annual operating subsidy from taxpayers, as do most but not all government-owned coliseums in North Carolina. But Crown is on the dole for only about 11 percent of its yearly budget, far lower than in many comparable cities.
Good news? Not according to local politicians, who want to raise the subsidy starting next year.
Thanks to some crackerjack reporting by Andrew Barksdale of The Fayetteville Observer, we can now get a better sense of how far North Carolina’s indulgence of sport-welfare recipients has progressed. Virtually every major venue in the state built over the past couple of decades has been financed by government bonds paid off by restaurant and hotel taxes. That’s bad enough, frankly. Why should some businesses but not others get access to tax-advantaged debt, paid off by people other than the businesses’ customers? You can’t argue that sports arenas deserve a construction subsidy simply because they generate “economic impact” beyond their extensive, and subsidized, parking lots. So do lots of other commercial infrastructure, such as shopping centers and malls.
Still, if you’re looking for at least a tiny outcropping into which you can dig your heels as you slide down the slippery slope, at least limiting the governmental largesse to constructing sports facilities can be distinguished from pumping tax dollars into the programming of the facilities — into the operations that bring spectators the games, concerts, tractor pulls, circuses, and other entertainment. Surely those who actually attend these events should be paying their own way, in the same way that others do when they choose to spend their entertainment dollars on movies, clubs, computer games, music, dining, and travel?
Surely not, according to leaders in most big North Carolina cities. Barksdale found that with the exception of the Charlotte Coliseum, soon to be supplanted, and the RBC Center in Raleigh, where yearly deficits are being swallowed by the professional hockey team (for now), other NC arenas are getting annual payouts from government to cover a significant share of their operating cost.
The worst offender is the Dean E. Smith Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, where state taxpayers are coerced into financing more than 40 percent of the $2.6 million annual cost. Remember that next time the university’s lobbyists come poor-mouthing to the state. Almost as egregious is the 37 percent annual subsidy for the Asheville Civic Center, though at least Asheville concert-goers aren’t forcing Chapel Hill residents to help pay their favorite bands to perform. Unfortunately, tax money actually does flow the other direction.
So the 11 percent received by the Fayetteville and Greensboro coliseums is, as I noted earlier, relatively low if still objectionable. Naturally, politicians feel as though they must fix this “problem.” In Fayetteville, officials are proposing to increase the annual welfare check to the Crown facility from $540,000 to nearly $1 million, pushing its subsidy percentage close to the 20 percent cover by taxpayers at Winston-Salem’s Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
Interesting, Winston-Salem’s experience is cited as a justification for the increase. Apparently, it is no longer enough to build a facility with tax dollars so that you can charge out-of-town acts a reduced rent to appear there. Now, one official told Barksdale, a city-owned facility must have enough money to make promotion deals with the traveling acts. “If we don’t do this, we don’t see the shows,” said Bucky Dame, director of Winston-Salem’s coliseum complex. “That’s the way the industry is today.”
What do you mean “we,” if I may ask? Those who are seeing the shows ought to pay for the privilege. By definition, government subsidies of arena operations force people who will never see the show to surrender their money to help cajole other people into seeing the show.
Just add this little example to the ever-lengthening list of examples of just how far afield governments have strayed from their core and important responsibilities. Taxpayers should never be forced to shell out more of their hard-earned money so that aging hair bands and B-list wrestlemaniacs can find an audience.
And contrary to popular belief, here is no natural right to see “Disney on Ice” in your hometown — even if you wish upon a star.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
