bonwich

Here's another dirty little secret: The true "leadership" in the metro area is by and large invisible to the general public. The RFT just posted an interesting set of research on the makeup of the football ownership group. http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2017/03/30/st-louis-stadium-ownership-group-has-big-money-and-no-city-residency Go a step beyond that. There's a private group in town that consists of roughly 25 CEOs of the largest corporations in the area. Do you ever see or read anything about them? Who's on this group? Do they report to the public? This kind of stuff feeds off of the local civic and governmental fragmentation, because no single municipality or regional government entity has any real political capital, and, as I said earlier, when megaprojects are being negotiated, the smartest people at the table aren't representing the taxpayers.

St. Louis MSA total had most recent annual GDP numbers of $150B. So for eight months, that would be $100B. That doesn't really wash with sales of $1.35B in a single ZIP code.

The whole article is pretty loose with numbers. "The Swedish retailer’s 63110 ZIP code saw a 40 percent spike in state sales tax revenue from October 2015 through June 2016 compared with the prior-year period, according to the latest available data from the Missouri Department of Revenue. The period with Ikea generated $277 million in state sales tax revenue versus $197 million in the prior-year period without Ikea." OK, so round the state sales tax up to 5% for back-of-envelope purposes. This appears to say that from 10/15 to 6/16, there were total sales of $1.35 billion just in 63110. Sounds a bit high to me.

Dirty little secret: "The $8.5 million raised yearly by the city’s hotel-motel tax, for instance, does not cover debt payments on the Dome, Payne wrote, as the new stadium attorneys have alleged in court. It’s instead pledged to the $17.7 million annual debt payments for the nearly 25-year-old south wing of the city’s convention center." As I said earlier in the thread, whenever these elaborate deals are made, the smartest people at the table are not the ones representing the taxpayers' best interests.

Makes me long for the good old days with Morris Henderson and Onion Horton.

I believe this is false. "Right now the State pays $12 million a year, the City of St Louis $6 million, and St Louis County $6 Million to pay off the bonds sold to build and maintain the dome. The bond pay off is over a 30 year period. $129 million is still owed in bond payments that won't be paid off till the year 2021."

Laverne and Shirley reference. Game over.

So, did you just change your mind? The words "sports," "football" and "soccer" appear nowhere in the article about growth in startups. Ironically, however, the word "sports" does appear in a reference to another article at the bottom of the page: "State and local governments aren’t the only ones that spend public dollars to build private sports stadiums — the federal government does, too. And it’s every bit as bad an idea as it sounds, according to new research from Ted Gayer, Austin J. Drukker and Alexander K. Gold of the Brookings Institution."

I would submit that Cortex and the Danforth Center will keep more people staying and coming here than any football team ever did or would.

Just call it a "handling fee" and everyone who's ever been to a concert won't think twice about it.

Yeah, and Donald Trump read somewhere that Obama had tapped his phones. I'd bet that the "reports" you've read were written by or on behalf of or financed by stadium proponents. There are also reams of studies from people with no dog in the fight that conclude otherwise. For example: Publicly Financed Sports Stadiums Are A Game That Taxpayers Lose

The issue isn't whether St. Louis would support an MLS team. We will. Strongly support. The issue is whether public funds should be used to support sports venues in general, and private businesses specifically. I say they shouldn't, and I'm not alone. There's a lot of "it's different this time" being bandied about in this thread, but it isn't. At some point St. Louis needs to wean itself from its addiction to tax subsidies for already-very-wealthy people and stop trying to engineer growth. You can bet that when deals are negotiated for this kind of stuff, the smartest person at the table will not be representing the best interests of the taxpayer or the common citizen.

Repeat after me: Most college sports programs lose money. Most college sports programs lose money. Most college sports programs lose money. Even the biggest ones. I can probably find you a few dozen articles like this one if you'd like.

I don't know if that was the last eligible hockey game, but the date fits the bill. Those coupons, BTW, were absolutely brilliant. For five bucks apiece (when top-priced tix were $15, I think), you could turn them in day of the game and get the best remaining available seat. (You had to buy them in books, 10 or 20 I think). They'd be utterly perfect for today, which is why we don't have them.

Until fairly recently, the best-attended college hockey game of all time was SLU at the Arena -- 15,348 vs. Ohio State, Feb. 17, 1974. I was still in high school, but I could also walk from my high school to the Arena, so I rarely missed a game. God, those days were fun.

FDJT

FDJT.

Hmmm. Tenet. For-profit hospitals. Staffing a medical school. Didn't leave until 2015. Hmmm. And whose idea was it to sell a teaching hospital to a for-profit parent?

I have three lovely Montmorency trees in my yard. Make the best pies in the world. You'll have to wait about six weeks, but the results of picking them are much more beneficial. http://offices.depaul.edu/enrollment-management-marketing/enrollment-summary/Documents/EMM Enrollment Summary2016_FINAL.pdf http://www.marquette.edu/oira/enrl-dash.shtml

What do I win? An apprenticeship next season with The Wiz? (It's interesting to peruse the predictions. Congrats to the quite a few people who called for 12 wins, which seemed to be just about the mean prediction. But although I haven't closely looked through all the entries, I think I'm the only one that hit it on the head by calling for 11-20 in the regular season and 1-1 in the tournament, which I think was the only feasible way to hit this number.)

Well, see, you've somewhat established yourself as completely unreliable, so I thought I might actually go listen to exactly who said what before I made an idiot out of myself quoting some MBM. And Tom Irwin said squat about police salaries. You can go listen for yourself if you'd like: http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/audio/charlie-brennan-show/ at 20:47 of the 9 o'clock hour on February 24. It's really amazing what you can find on the interwebs with even a soupçon of intelligence. Anyway, Charlie made the inaccurate statement about seeing "an article somewhere" that no one in the Boston P-D made under $100K. Thing is, when you show Charlie actual data, he corrects himself. You ought to try that sometime. And as for showing him the data, he's usually doing stuff with Beth and the kids right now, but I just left him the information on his private email. He may not see it before tomorrow's show, but I'd give you some pretty strong Wiz odds that he sets the record straight on the air soon. Do try to listen exactly and not toss out any incorrect attributions when he does.

Wait, what's this? Could it be THE ACTUAL FOUOKING SALARIES OF THE BOSTON P-D. Well, how about that! The salaries of public workers are almost always published online! And it took me all of about two minutes to find this. https://data.cityofboston.gov/dataset/Employee-Earnings-Report-2016/sx2i-td3j/data (Let me help, since you're obviously a little slow with research. The dataset is sortable on title, and a bunch of the titles of police officers [and captains, and even boat-based cops and the bomb squad] are found under the letter "P." The members of the police department who make more than $100,000 will have six numbers in their salaries. The rest of the research is left to the reader.) Oh, and extrapolating (that means drawing a general conclusion from a subset of the data), the starting salary for a "Police Officer" in Boston is $66,000. But far be it from me to question Tom Irwin.

And, if you have a million dollar salary plus another mill in options, you don't pay anything on the options when you exercise them thanks to the incoming mayor.

Wait, what? Handsome Harley is opening a wrestling school? Someone should show him some of the excess ballroom space at the Chase. I'm sure the nostalgia value would sway him immediately.

Well played, Mr. Hicks. But it could have simply been an accidental double-entendre, since anyone who knows the fine father knows he would never turn down a good meal.