Sitting down with the Blue Jackets
June 2nd, 2009
This is what Nationwide Arena and the surrounding Arena district can look like on an event night; alive and vital. The arena has helped to turn a blighted part of downtown into an economic powerhouse and boon to surrounding areas. The Short North may have come back on its own but the Arena District has magnified even the Short North’s success.
Tonite I, along with a few other bloggers, were invited to have a talk with Columbus Blue Jacket Senior VP Greg Kirstein and PR VP Todd Sharrock about the struggles facing both the team and the district in light of the apparently failed attempt to use a sin tax to support the arena itself.
I wasn’t surprised to find out that private arenas are nearly non-existant in the US for NHL and NBA teams – for that matter there are almost no top ranking professional sports teams playing in stadiums, parks, arenas etc. that are privately owned. Here in town we have Crew Stadium which I believe is subsidized, the new Hunington Park which is a Public/Private partnership and Nationwide Arena which up until now is Privately owned but must somehow be subsidized as well. According to Greg Kirstein, even selling out the arena all next season (that’s every game and scheduled event) the arena would still lose money.
This fact makes many people jump to the conclusion that if a business can’t support its space then the business shouldn’t exist. I think this pure market ideal is severely misguided and I hope that the community of Franklin County sees this as well.
The arena district as a whole, due to the anchor building – Nationwide Arena – generates thousands of jobs and millions of dollars that otherwise wouldn’t exist. In this instance we must look at the Blue Jackets and other events at the Arena as catalyst businesses which should be allowed to succeed on thier own without the burdon of property management, per se. The arena must be looked at as a vessel for a neighborhood and as such we should all be willing to invest in that neighborhood; to invest in our community.
If you still aren’t getting it then think of it this way. How many businesses would be able to do the work they do if they had to pay to build all of their own personal roads instead of sharing the cost and privelege of use with the larger community? In fact you could reference the recent announcement of 1500 new jobs at Chase that Columbus secured through a set of tax breaks and other enticements.
In this economy we especially need to look for opportunities to make public/private collaborations to maintain (or gain) employement opportunities and community opportunities.
There’s no answer as to how this will be reworked but the financial bleeding must be stopped. I’d recommend contacting the County Commissioners as well as the City of Columbus Mayor’s Office and City Council if you’d like to see an answer brought forward.
I snapped this photo on my way out and I would hate to think this could be the fate of Nationwide Arena on a day-in day-out basis. What about you???
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:01 am
nice article
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
The Columbus Crew Stadium was completely privately financed!
From the Columbus Dispatch:
Lamar Hunt’s most tangible impact in central Ohio, though, was with the Crew. He helped the MLS get off the ground and put a team in Columbus, and when voters twice rejected a proposal to build a soccer-only facility with public funds, Hunt spent $28.5 million to build Crew Stadium, the first soccer-specific stadium in the United States. It opened in 1999, and in the years since a handful of cities have built soccer-only stadiums.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I have a question, and I’m not trying to be snarky. Does the Arena really generate thousands of jobs? Is there data on those numbers somewhere?
Nice article. It is hard to wrap our heads around a business so large, and so clearly for-profit that needs public funding.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Matt,
I don’t know if it’s ‘Thousands’, but between the bars, the restaurants, the offices, arena staff, CBJ front office staff…yeah, it’s certainly quite a few hundreds. If they’re saying 1500-2500, I think I could believe that.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 pm
No, I don’t think you’re being snarky as I think it is a really valid question. I wasn’t quoted that number I was drawing it from the average number of workers employed by all of the businesses surrounding the arena (not counting AEP, Nationwide or BWC since they all existed before the “arena district”). I mean, think about the average restaurant in the district. They’ve got about 15-20 people working a shift which works out to be 50+ employees. So if you consider the 15 or so restaurants that is about 750 employees alone. Now consider all of the offices that have relocated there, the actual arena employees, the fact that the baseball park is there now, etc. etc. I think it is fair to say that there are thousands of employees in the arena district now and they are located there because the arena makes the area desirable.
I’m not looking to “bail-out” the Blue Jackets but I think that these types of properties have to be looked at for more than the dollar amount directly associated with them.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Naturally, I agree with Mr. Matt that these aggregated claims of jobs leave much to be imagined. Within one blog we go from thousands of jobs to 750 and then a claim that many were “created” when businesses moved to the Arena District. The businesses that moved did just that. They moved from Huntington Center (Schottenstein,
Zox, Dunn and URS) to the District at a distress to other areas of the city. The net impact, as has been proven by studies completed by scholars from the University of Washington and Princeton, is negative. We rob Peter to pay Paul and everyone pretends to be Paul. Six areas of the inner city lose jobs and income, the Arena district gains, (based on subsidies provided by various public/private enterprises) and some claim a revitalization that refuses to accept the areas affected. Let’s measure the results of the move of the Columbus Clippers from the West Side. It’s a net gain if you ignore the loss of revenues from the near West Side, the increased cost to the consumer,the infrastructure costs to the ticket holders and taxpayers, and the long term debt service of the facilty. While I enjoy the venue, the look, the feel, the effect, and the shopping experience…I only ask what did it really cost me as a taxpayer. Unfortunately that answer is never readily available so we can measure the actual results.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Well, actually I would say that you might want to re-read what I said. I used 750 as a number based on the restaraunts in the area alone. I was showing how, using a sample of an industry, I was showing how many people are now likely working in the area. In regards to robbing peter to pay paul I would ask you to show how the revitalization has had such a negative impact on the city at large. Downtown Columbus is doing better now than it has in the past few decades, the Arena district, the Short North, Grandview, OSU and Clintonville. German Village and the Brewery District, these areas are all gaining population and bringing in more and more commercial business and out of town visitors. This is the rebuilding of the heart of a city which spreads.
How many dollars were being spent at the businesses near the old Clippers Stadium? I would venture that it wasn’t many because people parked right there at the stadium, went in and enjoyed the game and then got back in their cars and left. There are hardly any amenities near the old stadium. While my gut feeling would suggest that the financial reward of the Arena district and the new Hunington Park is (and will be) substantial I know you want a hard figure. The funny thing is that all of the things you mentioned are what I look for in a community. I don’t want to live in a community that I don’t want to walk and enjoy. I want a vibrant community. I want, as you said, a community that I enjoy “the look, the feel, the effect and the…experience” because that is worth my money (and more important to me, my time).
I understand that financial sustainability is important but I feel very sorry for anyone who believes that being penny wise is the only way to live. Rigidly quantifying every investment by how it singularly performs instead of looking at how it performs overall is in fact being dollar foolish.
June 16th, 2009 at 9:29 am
I agree that anyone that lives to be penny wise can miss out on many of life’s experiences. Likewise, I too enjoy the “look, feel, effect and experience” as I stated in my opening comments. Since my investments of time, talent, and treasury have saved residents of Franklin County over $100,000,000 in reduced costs and tax savings I would fall into the class of being pound wise vs the penny foolish. The penny foolish being those that make claims that massive tax increases only represent “pennies a day” or “a pizza a month” when in reality those incremental increases have caused many of our taxes to grow exponentially (for clarification I use the term exponential for any program that has grown at more than twice the rate of inflation) of which there are many. My central question, still unanswered, is how much of our tax dollars are being used up in these programs to “revitalize” areas of the city. Likewise, the large professional firms that did move from the Huntington Center and other venues to the Arena District did leave behind empty space and those buildings in the heart of the city are feeling the pinch. Again, nothing against public/private partnernships and cooperation but too often the true cost to the taxpayer is hidden behind psuedo government entities where it is difficult to get accountability. It is an interesting choice of words to describe a desire to know how much tax money is involved in various projects and providing some quantified measure can be labled as “rigidly quantifying…instead of looking at how it performs overall..” The data of the individual project is measureable and has been provided on various projects. There has been no quantified measurement on how it performs overall. The only measurement I’ve read is unsubstantiated claims on job creation, and how the project makes someone feel. Perhaps we can work together to quantify those feelings and apply a dollar value to them so we can compare the two columns.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Great blog post. Adding you to my list. Thanks!