On Monday, we made the case (yet again) that the Pittsburgh Steelers should (as should the Pittsburgh Pirates) be forced to take over ownership of the largely taxpayer-built stadiums.
It’s a quite simple premise. As we showed with the Steelers, the venerable NFL franchise, piggybacking off taxpayer subsidies to build a brand-new North Shore stadium two decades ago, have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars and consistently increased the empire’s value.
We didn’t even mention the multi-multimillion-dollar contracts the team has been inking. All in all, this very wealthy franchise clearly has the financial and operational wherewithal to pay its own stadium way, so to speak.
And that notion was quickly reinforced with a new, and laboriously detailed, Monday story in the Post-Gazette about how the Steelers’ offshoot affiliate, PSSI Stadium LLC, and the city-county Sports & Exhibition Authority (SEA) continue to squabble over the cost of improvements – who pays how much — made several years ago to the giant Heinz Field (now Acrisure Stadium) scoreboard.
The SEA and PSSI have traded legal barbs in the dispute for the past four or so years with the SEA even accusing PSSI of hooking and crooking the money it seeks to a threshold that keeps the matter in arbitration and out of the public courts.
PSSI, meanwhile, chides the SEA for spending money to defend its position. That would be, at least in the SEA’s view, the taxpayers’ position.
Principles? What principles? Pshaw! “We want ‘our’ money!” the franchise is arguing.
And while all the niggling details and word semantics of the case certainly are important in a court of law (or, in this case, in arbitration), we won’t glaze your eyes over re-reciting it all.
But, in a nutshell, the Steelers want a taxpayer-subsidized bigger scoreboard (and reap all the benefits of more advertising) for which it most likely is not contractually allowed.
However, we must stress that this mess would not even exist had the Steelers been forced to take over and be solely responsible for anything and everything connected with maintaining and/or upgrading the taxpayer-funded home from which it has profited so handsomely.
And just think of the legal costs of this dispute, to both taxpayers (the SEA is a public authority) and the team. It’s all a waste of time, energy and money that could have been avoided from the get-go.
But it’s a waste of time, energy and money that can be avoided when the Steelers’ Acrisure Stadium lease is up in a few years by conveying the facility to the team, placing the facility back on the tax-paying rolls and removing it from the taxpayer teat.
Of course, the Steelers will balk over such a proposal. If you had the public kitty held taut on such a string dripping with public gravy, you would too.
And the Steelers might very well rattle the cage and say they’ll bolt for far greener suckers, er, pastures when its current lease expires in 2030. After all, they’ll likely argue, Acrisure will be “old” and “decrepit” and unable to compete with new stadiums with the latest bells and whistles (and team profit potentials) to end all bells and whistles, the public be damned.
Let ‘em rattle. And let ‘em go. For it is long past time for taxpayers to still be held hostage by the barons of sport and longer still past time for taxpayers to put their feet down – again, as they did in 1997’s “Regional Renaissance Initiative” vote – and state without equivocation that they won’t negotiate with the hostage-takers of sport.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
