Two salient points:
1. Stadium construction is not a substitute for urban policy.
2. Municipalization of sports teams is how it should be, as in the case of the Green Bay Packers (w00t!). “They’re not the Steinbrenner Yankees, they’re the New York Yankees.” It would be easy for New Orleans’s football team to be the Los Angeles Saints, if left to Benson. The onus is on our city to demand that we be remunerated for the luxury of that team operating within our city limits using our taxpayer money. Profits should be put back into schools, roads, public works …
The Green Bay Packers aren’t “municipalized,” in the sense of being owned by a chartered city government (a “municipality” is a political entity, not a city per se). They are operated by a publicly traded corporation, with a board of directors (and limits on the amount of shares that one person can own). What makes it unique is that it contributes profits to a foundation set by seed money from the Packers organization, and much of that money goes back into the community. But it’s not associated with a government.
I don’t see how you’re supposed to get Tom Benson to agree to handing over control to taxpayers, however. The citizenry would have to start its own team, attempt a hostile takeover, whatever. Until then, this is intellectual ma … you know.
Talk about this sort of thing could be given more depth, meanwhile, by some historical perspective. In the late 19th Century, one of the primary interests–if not the primary interest–of unions was forming cooperative factories. They rarely got these to work, however. The dream died, and unions thereafter focused more on collective bargaining. Why did they fail? Bad timing? Too many cooks spoiling the broth? And what did Green Bay’s organization do right by comparison?
I wrote this earlier, but it didn’t work or perhaps you didn’t agree? I dunno, but it’s a point worth making again: The Green Bay team is not “municipalized,” for that would imply government control. A municipality is a political entity. The Packers are a publicly traded company, an organization, many of whose proceeds are given to a foundation, which subsequently transfers them to local schools, county govt., various charities and community programs, etc.
Meanwhile, Benson owns the team. How would you get him to hand over control to a publicly traded company, much less one with limited share ownership rules like Green Bay’s? You’d have to start your own group. (Green Bay did this in the 1950s, before there was even so much as Super Bowl.)
Well, not so much that you didn’t agree with it as maybe I was too obscure? What I tried to say earlier: The idea of a community owned team reminds me of the fact that early unions in America really were focused on cooperatives, and focused more fully on collective bargaining only later, in the 20th Century. Only then, their leaders thought, would people have more of a stake in things, in political community affairs, and more of a sense of independence. It’s an interesting history there. Yet the cooperative factories failed.
However, we still have a number of cooperatives around (e.g., credit unions), and people tout them for similar reasons. Now, a publicly-trade company is not the same thing. But limitations on share ownership make Green Bay an interesting case study. It’s sort of like a cooperative, but not quite, and is certainly not operated by local government. And why does it work? The company and foundation structure (limitations on ownership, but with a controlling board of directors), the sheer devotion of the fans, or some combination thereof?