Miami Residents Likely to be Forced to Spend $199 Million to Renovate Football Stadium - An Outrage

Residents of this region know how powerful rich professional sports team owners are. They were able to garner ill-gotten gain from their government (the people), the public financing of state of the art facilities for the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins.

The Miami region may follow the same flawed path of western Pennsylvania…again.  After building a stadium for baseball’s Miami Marlins, the region is now considering earmarking a staggering $199 million of public money to renovate the Miami Dolphins’ Sun Life Stadium.  In this era of government at all levels nearing insolvency, imagine how much good a sum like that could do if it were devoted to a legitimate purpose, or if the novel idea to let the taxpayers keep it were decided upon.

I would be willing to bet that the Founding Fathers could never in their wildest dreams have concluded that there would someday be an established “right” for rich sports team owners to have facilities built for them by the public.

I love Pirates baseball and attend about thirty games a year at beautiful PNC Park, but I am not a hypocrite on the matter of public funding of the stadium.  There is no legitimate reason that my Allegheny County neighbors should be subsidizing the cost of my Pirates tickets!

I imagine that the taxpaying poor souls of Miami will fall into the same trap that the residents of this region did.  Sports teams seem to have the effect of a steamroller when they demand that they “get theirs.”  It is outrageous.