buzzy | Now you can get shot from another country while eating a hot dog (I couldn't resist)

I don't usually get into politics in here, so if you're not into that kind of thing, feel free to skip this. This is also local to El Paso, so if you don't care, skip this. I just was thinking about some stuff about what seems to be coming down the pike and this is where I write stuff, so here it is.

It seems El Paso is dead-set on attracting a AAA baseball team here. I don't like baseball, and neither do my parents, and we're all taxpayers in one form or another. The plans the city has so far seem to go like this:

The city woos a team, potentially the Tucson Padres of the Pacific Coast League, and says they'll build a stadium if they promise to play here for 25 years. There's a 25-year non-compete clause in there, so the existing El Paso Diablos team would have to move or fold. I think the Diablos will move to Socorro, which is pretty far for a large chunk of the city.
City Hall moves to somewhere temporary, potentially scattering around the city. The Insights Science Museum (mainly for children, though, hey, everyone likes dinosaurs, right?) closes, moves to New Mexico, or merges with another museum. At any point the city can start building a new City Hall or retrofitting an existing building to the tune of $30-40M.
City Hall and the neighboring Insights Science Museum is demolished at a cost of roughly $2M.
Around this time, the funding measures will go up for voters. Their choices are jacking up the Hotel Occupancy Tax so that it's the highest in the state (i.e., make people from out of town pay for it) and/or raising property taxes. If neither passes, they'll probably find another way to raise property taxes other than a way that requires voter approval. Plus, the work will have already started and the agreements signed, so they'll have to have a stadium built. And a new city hall would be nice too. The Hotel Occupancy Tax is usually used in these cases because citizens get something with other people's money; this happens all over the place, e.g. the Dallas Cowboys' stadium.
The stadium goes up at a cost of roughly $41M (not counting the demolition phase), though the figure being floated around a lot is $50M.
The city finds a place to go, and goes there. This seems to be an afterthought because the taxpayers will pay for the rent wherever they stay in the interim anyway.
When the stadium opens around 2015, the Diablos would have had to find their new home or fold. The place they played, Cohen Stadium, won't be usable for baseball because of the 25-year non-compete clause and would probably wind up blighted.

At that point, the team either does well or doesn't. El Paso has a history of hit or miss attendance. The much ballyhooed boxing match had only around half the predicted attendance. The Diablos' attendance has been a roller coaster, though currently it seems to be on the "up" part of that. When El Paso had pro-hockey, the attendance was great the first few seasons and then it slowly dropped until the team folded. In addition to the baseball stadium, there's also talk of demolishing the Abraham Chavez Theatre and replacing it with some kind of arena that joins with the Convention Center, and building a soccer stadium somewhere else downtown. Our downtown revitalization consists entirely of sports venues? We're demolishing a perfectly usable museum and a performing arts theatre as revitalization? There is just not enough parking to support that many events unless they're all staggered. There's not just the new stadiums to worry about, but everything else that is in the vicinity. I imagine that parking prices will skyrocket all over downtown and some people will be priced out of parking unless they carpool. (Don't count on a Park and Ride and the city bus system, since the bus system stops running before most evening games would finish.) The speed at which this downtown baseball stadium has moved makes it seem as if this was already a foregone conclusion, and now they're going through the formalities to make it so. Influential businessmen are spearheading this, so I'm guessing some campaign contributions (add scare quotes if necessary) fit into things here.

The only reason I bring this up is because my parents are already fed up with the constant increases in property taxes. My parents tax bill goes up even though the value of the house is going down. Why bother investing in improving the house if you get punished for it at tax time? In this case, no matter what the voters say about increasing the Hotel Occupancy Tax or property taxes, their property taxes will still go up. The Occupancy Tax will only raise 70% of the funding, so that 30% has to come from somewhere. This is just wishful thinking, but I think there should be some sort of method of determining whether El Paso will support this baseball team. First, we need to determine the average attendance that the team would have to manage to break even. I doubt that the stadium would have to sell out for every game, so let's call that number x, like we're in Algebra again. (Don't worry, there's not too much math here.) Now, we set up a fund that people pay into for the cost of season tickets. They need to sell enough season tickets for the first, oh, let's say five years, to equal x. If there aren't enough takers, the team can look somewhere else and the city can use the money for something useful, like not making Loop 375 a toll road. If there are, then the people who paid into the fund get their season tickets and the city moves ahead with the building. We might even be able to do the same thing, but replace "break even" with a threshold of "result in a negative cost to taxpayers as a result of the expected tax payments". That hurdle may be impossible to clear.