I personally appreciate your thoughts on this. Seems like reasonable reasons and analysis. You also don’t seem to think is it crazy that people are questioning this use of money. Which is mostly what people questioning the money just want to hear . To sum up my position, a stadium and downtown south would be great. I think the $300,000,000 over 30 years is to much and to long. But,I would be cool with $50,000,000 over 10 years. I like that because we would finish paying before the stadium gets old enough to request more funds (anyone think a 20 year old stadium isn’t going to come back to the well for a drink?), and it leaves funds for other future stuff we don’t even know we want yet. I wonder if that comes off and just trying to kill this thing, but that is not my intention.
One of the strongest arguments for giving them the money IMO has been the sort of depressing fact that Raleigh has not seemed to be able to come up with lots of things to request the hotel/restaurant tax money for. Are we really that uninteresting as a city? Should be like 50 requests right now? Does anyone else feel that way or is it just me?
This next part is not in response to you @OberlinSouth just my rambling opinion.
Some things that don’t appeal to me as much are the arguments about falling behind other cities. Seems very “cargo cult” to me and kind of like thinking that you need designer clothes then the cool kids will like me. I hear things like “Charlotte is going to get ahead of us and that will be very bad!” and don’t give a crap about that. I am from Atlanta and always thought of Charlotte as a want to be ATL. I feel like Raleigh is cooler than Charlotte even thought Charlotte is bigger and has the NFL. Why would I care about them? I would also point out that Cincinnati has a MLS team. Is anyone afraid of falling behind Cincinnati? Focusing on some crotch measuring competition with other cities seems like taking our eye off the ball of focusing on what makes us in particular great. If people moved to cities for sports teams we would be afraid of Buffalo. People move here form Buffalo right now. Based on this I am still cooling giving some money and it would be cool, but I get more turned off to the idea that we have to do whatever it takes to make this happen.
Last thing in this ramble is that I think this “division” of thoughts is less complicated than @daviddonovan is thinking (I wouldn’t pull the I love warehouse old buildings stuff into this, I think that is a stretch).I don’t think people fall into one of two categories and make all decisions based on their “group”. The same people who want to protect warehouses may very well not want to give money for the stadium. I think most people on here want to see the city grow and get better. But, there is a let’s just allow that to actually happen and use the tax money from that growth to build things we want and increase quality of life perception (I fall into that camp). And then there is more of a “I want to be in an awesome city”, so lets do things that awesome cities do! More awesome all around me strategy. I am biased so simplifying this take. I think both thoughts come together in allowing great things to be built. There is just a division on this stadium money because it feels like instead of fixing the problem of not allowing things we are now paying someone to do something (build a downtown south) that we should just be allowing to happen all over the place.
Wow! Lots of pseudo babble by bored “geniuses”. Either you support tax dollars being used to build a proposed soccer stadium in order to get a promise of 1.9 billion dollars in building/entertainment investment on the south side of downtown (including a decent chance to get an MLS franchise) or you do not.
Maybe one person on this thread mentioned Charlotte.
You can actually Ctrl-F Charlotte to see how many times it has come up in this thread. It is a lot!
@ADUsSomeday Oh, for sure. I definitely wasn’t trying to suggest that all, or even most, people fall neatly into one category or the other. There are certainly plenty of people who fall into different camps on different issues. Our Good Friend on Twitter, for instance, will often tweet about how light rail is a boondoggle, but is absolutely convinced that sports stadiums generate ROI for the cities that invest in them. My epiphany was simply that the instances where I personally have gotten involved in lengthy debates about stuff have almost always broken down along those lines. (Although maybe I was stretching for that last one.)
Looking back over the thread, I actually can see a shift in the pro-project argument. You’re seeing a lot fewer arguments that soccer stadiums per se are good investments, possibly because people have been pointing out that economic studies overwhelmingly show exactly the opposite.
So more and more, the focus has been on how the other stuff that Kane is promising to build would be good for Raleigh. The negotiating tactic of conflating the two together has definitely been an effective tactic! And I have said from my very first post that all of that other stuff would indeed be great. But under current law, you’re literally not allowed to use interlocal funds to subsidize the construction of housing, office buildings or hotels anyway.
Yes, technically speaking the interlocal funds would ONLY go to the stadium but to try to separate the larger project from the discussion and isolate your ‘anti-sports stadium funding’ argument just highlights your bias. To try and pretend the larger project is not part of the mathematical equation to generate an ROI back to taxpayers is laughable.
This baseball fan supports the proposed soccer stadium . We may never get this opportunity
again . Two years ago , I would not have believe, no way Hosea , that we have the chance to
have two sports stadiums in our downtown area .
It really is true that I am “biased” against the stadium project in the sense that I am against it, but to the extent that having an opinion on this project constitutes a “bias,” I don’t think there is any difference between you and I in this regard other than that we just happen to have different opinion about it, and I have managed to express these opinions without using language like “morons” and “stupid” to describe people whose opinions differ from mine.
If the larger project is an indispensable part of project, though, then it’s not a legal use of interlocal funds.
I support the soccer stadium too. I don’t think that support has changed for it here, it’s just that a lot of us are only deciding not to post about it any longer.
What are peoples upper limits? If they asked for $100,000,000 a year for 30 years would that be to much? Would love to hear where people think it stops becoming a great deal.
a upper limit can be terrifying. To me $300 million sounds like to much. But when you think about it as $10 mil a year sounds reasonable, something that is doable and still leave money for the other projects. Particularly if DoToSo hotels and restaurants really add to the pool of tax money being collected.
I guess so, there is part of stretching something over 30 years that has a bad side of it too. Like if in 20 years the stadium needs something new you are double paying.
How about $50,000,000 a year for 30 years? Is that worth it? Where does the number happen for people? I would assume $1,000,000,000 a year for 30 years is to much for most people. So where does the line get crossed?
I think there is both an over-inflated view of Penmarc as a stand alone development site, and an assumption that Kane wants to build Downtown South with or without a stadium.
For all it’s proximity to Downtown, I-40 and the BRT, Penmarc is not without it’s problems. It’s not North Hills located in proximity to Raleigh’s “elites.” It does have significant environmental features to deal with. It’s currently surrounded by industrial sites and derelict properties. It’s currently disconnected from downtown geographically and from a pedestrian and bike standpoint. The site needs a catalyst to make it worth the investment required for a transformational project. We talk about an “anchor tenant” being necessary to kick off buildings all the time in other threads. It was Pendo for 300H. For Kane and Penmarc, NCFC and the stadium should be looked at as the anchor tenant for the entire site. Trying to separate it out is like saying that Pendo’s signing had nothing to do with the rest of 300H getting built. When developers tell you they’re waiting on an anchor tenant to sign, that’s a real thing. It may not be necessary for the financing, but it could easily be necessary for his own comfort level at developing an entirely new district of the city.
I think another fact that’s been lost is that this would be a partnership between the city/county and the NCFC owners. The cost of MLS is $475M. That’s an estimated $225M for a stadium and a $250M franchise fee. Malik and whatever ownership group he assembles has plenty of risk with the MLS proposal, particularly if he has to pay the franchise fee before the stadium is built.
Permarc in development parlance is somewhere between North Hills (on the positive outcome) and closer to Triangle Town Center (on the negative). That is the rub with the public funds. I get the positives of ‘stretching’ DTR but it’s arguable they execute around this ask. I get the negatives of over investing taxpayer funds and their ask for support. Understand also the precedent this sets for all next phases of ‘ground breaking’ proposals. I don’t get the pie in the sky folks that don’t have a pause button around the questions surrounding usage, activation and gravitational pull of development. I totally get the excitement around a ‘Kane Prime corridor’ from SoDo to NoHi, but I’m not inhaling as many vapors as most.
Puff Puff Give people. Take a breath and see if the product withstands the pitch.
Anyone remember when Tom Fetzer successfully ran a campaign for mayor mostly based on the city spending $51,000 for the Light+Time Tower?
Boy have times changed.
Yes. And if I’m not mistaken, that eyesore is still there and looks like a small cell phone tower. It was before it’s time to say the least. Also, if I’m not mistaken, Fetzer was the one that finally drew the line on how much the city was willing to invest in the PNC arena overages. I believe he wanted it in SoDo but his council overrode him. Right or wrong, I agreed that it should be in SoDo with the information I had at the time. But, the “hole had been dug”. Literally.
I’m curious what this is for. The wife and I did The Camino last August/September, which was 800km at 20-30km per day (12-18 miles per day). I can’t imagine 60.
We’ve talked about and plan to do that trek as well () but we are doing the training walks to prepare for the 60-mile breast cancer events we participate in annually. Note the following link is for donations but I am not soliciting for donations. There’s a story of why we walk there as well. Obviously off topic but just answering @ScrantonUSC.
And yes, I used to wear pink dreads for the events.
Wow. Never knew about this tower, but after checking it out I can’t believe I’ve driven past it thousands of times and never suspected that it was art…
Art is in the eye of beholder, I got threatened with with being kicked out an art museum once for bumping a pile of 2x4’s that seems was someones idea of art.
The artist died mid-commission.
not sure if those panels are adjusted to what he intended. They clearly look like they pivot from their connection to the main tower. I think that the tower belongs somewhere else, and not in a Capital Blvd median. You can see the tower interact with light when traveling north in the morning and south in the evening. Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of most commuters’ travel.
Maybe it can be moved to DoSo or Dix in the future?
. To sum up my position, a stadium and downtown south would be great. I think the $300,000,000 over 30 years is to much and to long. But,I would be cool with $50,000,000 over 10 years. I like that because we would finish paying before the stadium gets old enough to request more funds (anyone think a 20 year old stadium isn’t going to come back to the well for a drink?), and it leaves funds for other future stuff we don’t even know we want yet. I wonder if that comes off and just trying to kill this thing, but that is not my intention.
) but we are doing the training walks to prepare for the 60-mile breast cancer events we participate in annually. Note the following link is for donations but I am not soliciting for donations. There’s a story of why we walk there as well. Obviously off topic but just answering 