The Missouri Development Finance Board has approved its “share” (according to reports, $5 million) in bond purchases to help fund the first phase of construction of Ballpark Village, the development project located next to Busch Stadium in Saint Louis. That aid might be good news for the Cardinals, but it is bad news for taxpayers. The subsidies to Ballpark Village are just the latest example of the use of public money to help some of our wealthiest citizens - sports team owners —with little or no economic benefit for the city, region, or state
Since the early 1990s, Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County and the state of Missouri have joined together in paying a total of $24 million a year ($12 million from the state and $6 million each from the city and county) to retire the debt incurred from building the Edward Jones Dome in downtown Saint Louis. Incredibly, the owners of the Dome obtained private financing for only a tiny portion of the stadium's cost (less than 10 percent) and even now are getting ready to seek a whole new set of subsidies to finance a major renovation of the Dome that could cost as much as $700 million.
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