I read this story* about a local man in-College Park, Georgia-who heroically cockblocked the issuance of bonds on a technicality and successfully stalled the procedures that would have begun the motion of a sporting arena being built, so that the Atlanta Hawks could have a local developmental team.
In College Park, Georgia. One of the most dangerous cities in the entire state.
*This is unfortunately behind the AJC’s pitiful paywall, but frankly you can just hit the stop button as soon as the page opens to dead stop the script that tries to tell you that it’s paid content, and usually the essential text has already loaded by then
As much as I admire the moxie of this individual, he’s unfortunately simply prolonging the inevitable, and delaying yet another sporting venue that the city doesn’t need, because Atlanta is obsessed with sporting facilities and will stop at nothing to have arenas soon for cricket, eSports, and another popular local activity, urban ATV riders running from the police.
But he did buy some time in which even the dimwits at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution could even think that maybe, just maybe, building an arena in College Park, for the Atlanta Hawks, just might not be the best idea in the world. Or at least putting into words the very obvious revelation that stadiums and monstrous convention centers are not at all profitable and ultimately end up hurting the people they’re built near, but obviously not the investors and corporations who came up with the ideas to build them in the first place.
There’s really not much to the linked article other than a bunch of numbers thrown around, and the typical rhetoric about how the estimated costs of building a D-League arena are far lower than what they’d actually be, but that’s alright, because the taxpayers will be forced to pick up any slack, to which there will be gargantuan amounts of. And that stuff like arenas and convention centers have more or less been proven to be terrible investments that so seldom actually make back what they cost to build, but that doesn’t matter, because they bring jobs, JOBS (most of which are typically minimum, unlivable to sustain on wage), and that’s the key to the hearts of the sheep.
Undoubtedly, the Hawks and those in bed with them don’t give two shits about College Park as much as they see an opportunity to build something to put their names all over, and where they can be the last money in and the first money out. A D-League team is not going to make the Hawks any better than they are, especially in the today’s NBA, where it’s six super teams vs. the rest, and the Hawks most certainly aren’t one of them.
But then again, whoever said that the Hawks’ goal was ever a championship? They’re a business first and foremost, and they’re in it for the $$$ above all else, including winning and fans.
As much as I admire this guy for doing what he did, it’s only a matter of time in which the Hawks and all their cronies manage to push past him and get the ball rolling for a new arena in College Park, where the D-League Hawks will continue on Georgia tradition, and get smoked at home, until the people are too numb to even care, and then become a husk of a building that nobody gives a shit about.
