Because nobody seems to know any better: Sarasota County agrees to continue negotiations with the Atlanta Braves in regards to building a brand spanking new exclusive Spring Training facility estimated at $75-80 million dollars
Naturally the Braves are hoping to contribute nothing but $Free.99 towards this grandiose and unnecessary expenditure, while the (mostly) innocent public picks up the rest of the tab. And as 100% of sporting venues have proven, the initial estimate is always incorrect, and the safe rule of thumb is to double the estimate, and that’s closer to the end result than originally intended. It’s a whole lot less disappointing when they actually fail to exceed an estimate, albeit revised and deliberately inflated one.
Best part is? If this stupid and pointless project actually takes off and the Braves get their new Spring Training complex, with public funds doing most (all) of the lifting, the Braves might not even have to make the financial records public. This is often being called something along the lines of the “Pitbull clause,” since apparently rapper Pitbull found some loophole that allowed for him to privatize the financial records to a some tourism event or whatever, but the bottom line is that because Pitbull did it, it leans to believe that the Atlanta Braves might be able to do it as well. And what’s more trustworthy than taking measures to eliminate transparency and hiding records that should be public, if being paid by the public?
Whatever though. Sarasota is doing this to themselves, and the Braves are going to fleece yet another gullible city into believing that they need professional sports to grace their town. When the promises of increased economic stimulation and jobs that aren’t solely minimum wage stadium workers and maintenance employees fail to delivery, they can bitch and moan all they want while the Atlanta Braves organization and all their co-conspirators sit back, laugh and count their hard-fleeced tax dollars.
Oh, and it doesn’t warrant its own post, since I figure it’s easy to consolidate “Braves screwing others” into a singular post, but with Opening Day less than two months away, and the park and only the park barely only the thing that will be open for it, the Braves are crying poor and demanding that Cobb County give them $14 million more dollars to help build roads, because it’s not like the entire fucking planet wasn’t warning them of the transportation pitfalls that awaited them if they were going to build where they did.
And they’ll get the money, because the Braves and all other professional sports teams always get what they want because rich people are greedy and stupid and screwing over taxpayers is practically its own sport in itself.
If only there was a way to make if official? Make a sport of screwing over taxpayers? Who are we kidding though, if it were a sport, then it too would warrant its own venues, and then shit’s going to get real Inception-like meta up in here as long as the pursuit of dollars continues to increase layer by layer.
