Columbia Mayor Wants Minor League Baseball

The Columbia Mayor (Steve Benjamin) wants to bring a minor league baseball team to Columbia and spend millions on a stadium. Where do these idiots get the idea that this kind of stuff helps the economy of a city?

Study after study shows that it does nothing but saddle the cities and local areas with debt. But it gives the pols a good shot at crony corruption so they continue to be built. If a team doesn't want to pay for it's own stadium, they can go elsewhere. This is such an epically bad idea.

Robert A. Baade of the Heartland Institute, a research group in Chicago that promotes free markets, examined 48 cities over a 30-year period and found “no factual basis” for the argument that professional-sports stadiums and teams have a significant impact on economic growth. A study by Judith Grant Long, an associate professor of urban planning at Harvard University, found that public subsidies for stadiums are typically 40 percent more expensive for taxpayers than initially advertised.

Do you know anyone in Columbia that desperately wants to attend a minor league baseball game? Building a minor league stadium with public money is a massive boondoggle that can only be a giveaway. Ask Detroit how all those big downtown stadiums are doing for the economy.

I love sports more than the average guy, but this is a really bad idea. Unfortunately, the City of Columbia excels at doing stupid things, so I'm sure that it will happen.