Fresh from an annals of “dog bites man”, we get the news that the 2012 Super Bowl costs Indianapolis a lot of money.
Of course it cost the city money. These things always do.
The organizations that put these major events on – the NFL, the International Olympic Committee – always promise that the tax and business benefits of these mega special events are so enormous that cities willingly bid – and overbid – in order to get them.
Inevitably, it turns out that, gosh darn it, the planners underestimated the costs and forgot that, gosh darn it, the locals wouldn’t be spending money while the event was in town so the incremental effects weren’t as great as expected. Ooops!
In Chicago, the former mayor’s plan for economic growth and covering up his colossal financial mismanagement was to bring the Olympics here in 2016. I’m glad it didn’t happen. There was more than enough corruption and cost overage in the bid that city taxpayers weren’t feeling warm and fuzzy about the prospects of hosting the games.
One of the many reasons that Greece went into debt was to pay for the 2004 Athens games. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off their Olympic debt.
The NFL is a consortium of for-profit companies. The International Olympic Committee is a consortium of for-profit corporate sponsors. If they want to put on their own events, great. But they should stop expecting the public to pay for them.
City leaders need to get past their starry-eyed images of brushes with celebrity and refuse to sponsor these games. If the city leaders of Indianapolis really wanted to improve the city’s economy, they would have spent the $1.1 million on education instead of the Super Bowl.
