By Roldo Bartimole
Have you ever seen a bigger con game than the corporate/political/media gang want to play on Cuyahoga County voters?
The Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) really wants to pull a major fast one this time.
Already the news media – from Plain Dealer to every news channel – is ignoring the largest theft of public funds ever in the County’s history.
In 1990 they set a 15-year sin tax to build Gateway. It cost taxpayers $240.5 million. That was to BUILD and equip both the baseball stadium and the basketball arena.
Now they are shooting – presumably to upkeep those facilities – not for a five-year tax renewal, not a ten-year tax, not even, as the original, a 15-year tax.
BUT a 20-YEAR EXTENSION AT THE SAME RATES on cigarettes, wine, liquor and beer. A sales tax that hits the ordinary person hardest. Another regressive tax.
With five extra years, and higher prices of commodities since 1990, they are asking for at least $325 million!
Not to build two sports facilities but for other reasons.
Why do they want an extra $325 million? What are the wealthy owners going to give? Nothing. Only take.
The Browns have already hit the city for a $5.8 million advance for renovations, got Mayor Frank Jackson and that hapless City Council to vote them $30 more million, plus another $12 million from the present 10 year sin tax.
This after a Port Authority tax, a hefty Cleveland school tax, a Metroparks tax, county human service, not to mention a hike in the sales tax to 8 percent from 7.75 percent, which was hiked without a vote by a quarter percent tax for the convention center/med-mart deal.
And our leaders – our politicians – are bending over to get the public to equally bow and take this jab. You know where.
Reform government of the worst kind it turns out. The County Council was supposed to be reform but it turns out worse than the three blind commissioners when it counts.
Reform County Council President C. Ellen Connally will, she says, put forth legislation for a vote, even though she says shockingly that she doesn’t have a position. Why the hell not?
By pushing it for a vote, she certainly does have a position. And it isn’t against another tax.
Indeed, she’s paving the way for a major, major gift to very wealthy individuals.
This is the biggest of many big money gifts to pro sports team owners who are extorting cities for high-stakes welfare going right into their pockets.
How cheesy can you get, pray tell, Connally and her fellow council members?
That goes for County Executive Ed Fitzgerald too.
This is unctuous Tim Hagan all over again. Only a bigger grab.
Why do they want $325 million in public money? What are they going to do with it?
What’s coming? Two Tal Mahals? Three?
Are sports loges going to be turned into luxury apartments as the Gunds did with their free loges when the arena was Gund Arena? (The finally paid for the $600,000 spent for renovations they made to turn loges into living quarters.) Are we going to do this for all the corporate wealthy loge owners?
Will we rebuild another Terrace Club and refit it? When Gateway was built we taxpayers built the largest restaurant in downtown for Dick Jacobs at a cost of $5,155,893. And exempted it from property taxes. The restaurant competes against tax-paying restaurants throughout the county.
Gateway did the same for the Gunds with a $2 million plus luxury restaurant. Also tax free and fully equipped.
All at taxpayer expense.
Are we going to equip each loge with movie screens and other accommodations that owners can use for non-game nights to entertain business guests? Are the Italian marble loge tables insisted by Jacobs going to be gold this time?
What the hell do you do with an extra $325 million? No one in the news media has even questioned this excessive desire. It’s because they don’t think critically about what the Big Boys want. They’re so indoctrinated to take what officials say that they don’t look beyond their noses.
(I’ll give some credit to Paul Orlousky of Ch. 19 for his report showing that the promises Gateway, White and Hagan made in 1990 went unfulfilled. His report is here.)
They promised 28,000 good paying jobs. Even the Cleveland Clinic wouldn’t promise that.
What does it mean to the residents of Cuyahoga County to have $325 million taken out of the economy and given to people like the billionaire Dolan family, the gambling/mortgage creep Dan Gilbert or the chiseler of truckers Jimmy “I didn’t know nothin” Haslam.
How stupid are the people of Cuyahoga County?
Last week I tried to tell the public what the news media refuse to ever tell: Just how much BEYOND the sin tax the county and city have poured into Gateway. Hundreds of millions of dollars of unvoted tax revenue beyond the $240-million voted. And more for the Browns!
Beside these costs, of course, Tim Hagan and Mike White successfully freed these wealthy owners from EVER paying property taxes. The costs, mostly from Cleveland schools, reflect some $900,000 a year for Progressive field; some $700,000 a year for Quicken Arena and some $1.4 million a year for Browns stadium.
There is never enough for these people.
It’s time Cuyahoga and Cleveland voters showed the rest of the nation and the NFL, NBA and MLB that they are no longer charity cases.
They need to pay their own way. Stop this sin tax swindle.
[Photo: Paul M. Walsh]
Roldo Bartimole has been reporting since 1959. He came to Cleveland in 1965 to report for the Plain Dealer where he worked twice in the 1960s, left for the Wall Street Journal in 1967. He started publishing his newsletter Point of View in 1968 and ended it in 2000.
In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]
10 Responses to “ROLDO: Highway Robbery – New Sin Tax More Than Original Amount to Build Stadium & Arena”
Roldo Bartimole
John and everyone else, please take a look at this
to see just how far out of balance our society
has become. It’s the aim in Cleveland for the Greater
Cleveland Partnership (with cooperation of the foundations
and the news media to make it worse:
http://tinyurl.com/bknm654
This will knock your socks off.
Tell your city and county council members just how undeserving they are.
Roldo Bartimole
Carlton: It is always appreciated to hear those kinds of thanks.
Makes it easier to work.
Roldo
Allen Freeman
Roldo, that linked video is something else. I am a conservative supply sider and even I am shocked by the content…
Roldo Bartimole
Yes, Allen, we’ve become so unbalanced
that it is a danger to the nation.
Snarky
Roldo of course you realize that no one can ” reform” , the stripes off a mangy old tiger disguised as Cuyahoga County government.
The vile political nature of regressive taxes , such as the proposed sin tax extension punish the addict instead of providing help towards a cure.
The downtown gang of grifters that provide welfare for corporate interests and have squandered historic tax credits for their own gain do so in the flawed logic of public / private partnership.
Any continued fiscal support for the millionaire sports team owners on the backs of local tax paying citizenry is criminal.
” How stupid are the people of Cuyahoga county?”
Time will tell.
The real question is how do you take the dirty roll of dollars from the snarlin
Snarky
Dogs mouth?
Roldo Bartimole
Snarky: You have seen it at the personal experience level.
And I know it has cost.
The question is – should I continue or should I sit
back and see if there might be someone at the PD
who will actually try to do the leg work, add up
the score and print it?
I’ve been doing it on my own for more than 45 years
and the results aren’t good. Maybe it’s time to really
fold the tent.
Paine Pill
What about the downtown parking tax increase that City Council passed in summer 1996 to help finance the NFL stadium? Is that still in effect forever? Also, good you mentioned the property tax exemption that Mayor White lobbied the Statehouse to pass. Nobody except Polensek ever mentions that giveaway.
Roldo Bartimole
The parking tax of 8 percent was passed in 1995 to raise $7.1 million a year
for 29 years. It was expected to raise at that time $205 million.
A 2 percent increase in the admission tax was to raise $1.2 million for 29
years or $34.8 million. If necessary, Council deemed the then existing 6
percent admission tax should be available to tap if needed. That would have been
at that time $153 million. This addition was to “comfort bondholders.” Uncomfortable
for Cleveland residents because all this money would flow to the general fund.
The Council also added a car rental tax of $2 per rental that was supposed
to bring in another $18 million over 29 years.
Of course, the sin tax also was extended for 10 years to further finance the
stadium.
Of course, the plan now is to extend the sin tax another 20 years making
it a 15-year tax that extended 10 more years for the Browns so 15 plus 10
plus the planned 20 years makes it a 45 year tax that should produce in total
an expected $675 million (It raised $240 the first 15; more than $110 the second 10
years up in 2015; and an expected $325 if extended for another 20 years as the big boys
want.)
We’re talking real money. With regressive taxes that slam ordinary people
harder than they ever think about.
The question is will Polensek or any other council member have the courage
to oppose the 20 more years? At least during the first sin tax fight Mary Rose
Oakar and Lou Stokes opposed it and the city voters said NO but other county
voters in the suburbs vote enough to pass it.
Snarky
Roldo,
Thank you for your reply.
As we know empirically , it is not in the interest of the pd to do the hard work that you have done all these years exposing the downtown gang of grifters that play citizens like bull fiddles.
The pd is in the real estate game , and functions as mouthpiece for the greater cleveland partnership and the other crassly self serving ” public private ” organizations that game the system into providing our taxes for their interests.
It is your continued good graces and lifelong steel and clarity that those of us that care depend upon.
Do not give up the mantle , and as for results , well time will tell.
From my perch I sense an eventual decline and fall of these cheesy convention industry shills shenanigans sooner than later.
Please keep up the sterling work that you have provided us with to date.