Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis recently hosted an
NCAA men's basketball regional. AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
This is a very disturbing story on a lot of fronts. One year after opening Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the city and those who control stadium are threatening to close it if new taxes are not levied on the local citizens to offset losses from stadium operations.
It seems the City of Indianapolis, Marion County, and the state of Indiana itself may soon regret the sweetheart deal they gave the Indianapolis Colts for their new stadium.
According to Forbes, the Colts pay just $250,000 a year rent for the facility while the team controls all of the football-related revenue, tickets, parking, concessions, and sponsorships. These revenue streams add nearly $30 million to the Colts' coffers.
For that privilege the state agreed to finance all but $100 million of the stadium construction, which ended up running about $719 million.
The Colts themselves are only on the hook for $66 million of that cost, and their loan agreement says they can take up to 27 years to pay that money back to the city of Indianapolis.
Now The Capital Improvement board that runs stadium operations says it's out of money and additional taxes must be levied to keep Lucas Oil open.
Apparently the Colts and owner Jim Irsay have no clue that this country is in a recession and its taxpayers are already carrying too much of the load. It seems to me the Colts should step up here and do what is right and take on some of the cost of operating their state-of-the-art facility.
It's odd that local voters offered little to no resistance to this sweetheart contract for Irsay and his Colts. Of course, Irsay is the son of the man who moved this team from Baltimore in the middle of the night 25 years ago. I seriously wonder if a threat like that was made, and if it was could the Colts have ended up in Los Angeles late one night?
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