McHenry County Blog

McHenry's Steve Stanek is nothing if not persistent. Yesterday, with his permission, McHenry County Blog published an email to Northwest Herald Group Editor Chris Krug.

Today we have another one showing how the weekly Pioneer Press (Algonquin and Cary-Grove Countryside locally) scooped the NW Herald:

Dear Mr. Krug:

At the end of this message I have pasted a copy of today's Algonquin Countryside newspaper article that follows up on last week's article on the MCC expansion proposal. May I trust the Northwest Herald will begin providing similarly balanced and complete coverage to its readers?

May I further trust future Northwest Herald articles on attempts by MCC or McHenry County communities to subsidize minor league baseball will quote independent economic studies that show how foolish such subsidies are? If you'd rather quote persons directly, you are in luck. Two nationally known sports economists work in this area and often speak with reporters: Allen Sanderson at University of Chicago (e-mail: arsx@uchicago.edu or phone 773-834-6672) and Robert Baade at Lake Forest College (e-mail: baade@lakeforest.edu or phone 847-735-5136).

To aid you in this future coverage, here is a link to an excellent summary study of public funding of sports facilities by a Federal Reserve Bank economist.

One key point from this study:

“[W]hen a city chooses to use taxpayer dollars to finance a sports stadium, the city’s leaders must consider not only what the alternative uses of those funds could be – such as schools, police, roads, etc. – but they must also figure what return the city would receive from these other ventures . . . . This adjusted calculation, though, is almost always missing from sports stadium impact studies. Why? Because in just about every case, the adjusted calculation would show that the next-best alternative was actually the better alternative. Has financing sports stadiums ever been the best alternative? Research shows ‘No.’”

Here's how the Boston Globe covered public funding of sports facilities.

The Globe article begins,

"Sports economists agree that cities--and taxpayers--get close to nothing from spending public money on sports teams. What they haven't figured out is why we're still doing it."

Regards,

Steve Stanek

McHenry (Countryside Newspaper article follows)

Review questions MCC projections

The article followed. You can get to it by clicking on the title above.

Labels: Baseball Stadium, MCC, McHenry County College