49ers' Stadium Subsidies: Putting the Stadium Authority's $1.5M in Perspective

Dear Santa Clarans,


Press coverage in today's Mercury News put quite a bit of ink on what the City Council would be paying itself to sit on the Santa Clara Stadium Authority.  However, that may not be the big story.

The additional $1,440 bucks a year per Councilmember works out to thirty bucks each for 48 meetings - the critical portions of which are likely to be held in secret Closed Session, thereby concealing the true functioning of the Santa Clara Stadium Authority from Santa Clarans.  We should be far angrier about that than about the dollar amount.

Let's set a few more decimal points:

1. From the June 7th City Council meeting, we learned that Santa Clara's subsidy of the San Francisco 49ers' stadium is now likely to be far more than the $444,000,000 we were originally led to believe.
2. Not one but two city agencies, the Stadium Authority as well as the Redevelopment Agency, will now be on the hook for high-interest cash advances from the 49ers themselves.  Can't issue your own bonds at 5.75%?  No sweat - borrow the dough from the 49ers at up to 8.5%.  The 49ers can use that cash flow to pay for the construction cost overruns they promised us they'd cover out of their own pockets.
3. Take the $950,000 that the Stadium Authority will pay to lawyers and accountants in the coming fiscal year, and add it to the $2,800,000 in RDA money that our city has already spent.  It's likely that we'll blow four million on those costs before a single shovel breaks ground.  That's tax increment money, by the way - property taxes essentially unremitted.
4. The $550,000 for City Staff can be added to the $612K in staff expenses we know of so far.  That latter amount is only a partial accounting, so we can probably count on those expenses easily exceeding $1.2 million.

Finally, bear in mind that this Stadium Authority budget is your money.  Recall that the City Council "parked" $4,000,000 in RDA cash with the 49ers Stadium Company while playing that old game of "RDA keepaway" with Governor Brown.  This $1.5 million should be coming back, and in fact, the remaining $2.5M should be put back in the accounts of Agencies our leaders told us were there to protect our interests.

The increased stipend to City Councilmembers should be noted, of course, as well as the cut they took earlier this season - but the costs of subsidizing the San Francisco 49ers are about to balloon for far different reasons.

That's the real news.


Thanks for all of your support,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

-=0=-