“You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena!”

I really wish I could find that original Bloom County strip, but I digress.

The plan to build a new stadium for the New York Islanders failed. Overwhelmingly.

(Newsday has a pay wall set up, but the first two paragraphs are really the relevant part. ETA: here’s the NYT coverage.)

Yes, Michele Catalano has another “I”, “I”, “I” post up already.

The voters of Nassau County made it clear. Their partisan politics got in the way of facts and figures and reality and the majority of residents – at least those who bothered to come out and vote – gave the New York Islanders the finger while they cast those votes. They don’t want hockey here. They don’t want the Coliseum. They don’t want to better their community. There’s no other conclusion I can draw for this.

…

We’re all Islanders. Don’t we all want what’s best for our communities? Perhaps not.

Because reasonable disagreement about whether subsidizing a professional sports team is a good idea equates to not “wanting what’s best for our community”.

Edited to add: I didn’t pick up on this right away.

In about two years, I’ll probably be moving from Long Island to Northern California (so, how are those Sharks looking?). I was going to say goodbye to the Islanders and the Coliseum anyway, but on my own terms.

So all along, you’ve been agitating for other people to pay the bills for your hockey team, Catalano, knowing full well that you’d be moving away and not having to deal with the tax burden you wanted to impose on other people in Nassau County? This explains much.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 7:31 am and is filed under Clippings, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to ““You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena!””

Joe D says:

August 2, 2011 at 11:46 am

I keep wondering why, if these stadiums are such a great deal, they can’t get financing on their own for them.
stainles says:

August 2, 2011 at 12:42 pm

I think that’s a pretty good question, Joe.

Field of Schemes has a good discussion going. As one of the commenters points out:

Since 1990, the 40 arenas that have been constructed for NHL or NBA use (or both) have only averaged out to a cost of $258 million (all costs adjusted to 2011 dollars). And that’s the average – which includes some very nice dual-tenant arenas (avg. cost = $330 million) that skew the numbers. In the NHL, the 15 arenas that have been built and aren’t shared with NBA tenants, the average arena cost is $219.5 million – and there are some very nice arenas in that range (Jobing.com Arena = $215 million; Xcel Energy Center = $166 million).

The other takeaway I get from that article is: so Charles Wang decides to move the team. To where?