Are the Pittsburgh Steelers already jonesing for a brand-new stadium?
As audacious as that sounds, a July dispatch on the Steelers Depot website (which is not affiliated with the franchise) is suggesting that to more than a few observers.
A July 12 post by writer Alex Kozora floats the idea of just that possibility:
“If you thought the change from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium was radical, what about the idea of the Pittsburgh Steelers playing in an entirely different venue” when the team’s 30-year lease is up in 2031?
And while Kozora notes that “team president Art Rooney II struck an optimistic tone about remaining in the team’s current location,” he did not categorically pooh-pooh the notion either.
That narrative came out during the announcement of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar naming rights deal for Acrisure, the specific dollar amount of the 15-year deal still not being made public.
As one wag with whom this scrivener regularly converses – a long-time season-ticket holder — characterized it upon reading the Steelers Depot exchange:
“Putting the seed of doubt out a little early?”
Indeed.
Twenty-five years after taxpayers were hustled into paying for new football and baseball stadiums on the North Side — and that after the electorate expressly rejected using tax dollars to do so — are they only a few years away from being hustled again?
We’d like to say that a suckered public doesn’t have such a short memory. But, then again, there’s a whole new generation of potential suckers for pols to snooker anew.
That would be pols, no matter their iteration, whose stripes seldom change when it comes to scheming how to grant more corporate wealthfare to those who clearly should have no claim to it.
All this said, the fact that a new football stadium is even peripherally a part of this discourse is deeply troubling.
That is, if the Steelers’ ownership is expecting the public to pay any share of the capital costs of yet another new playground — capital costs that should alone be borne by the uber-wealthy sucker fish of professional sports.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
