Pit Stops Of Folly
As attendance projections for the vaunted NASCAR Hall of Fame crash and burn from original estimates, falling some 35 percent off the mark, none other than the Wall Street Journal picks up on the massive debt Charlotte has absorbed from the racing venture, lumping it in with a load of other pricey boondoggles from around the country that have left cities reeling.
The money graphs from the WSJ piece:
Cities now also use taxpayer-financed debt to engage in fierce bidding wars that benefit private enterprises. Charlotte, N.C., for instance, won the bidding for the new Nascar all of Fame with a $154 million offer, funded by a new hotel tax dedicated to servicing bonds for constructing the hall. But the venue employs only about 115 people—and an economic development study estimated the increased annual tourism from the venture won’t even equal what a single Nascar race generates.
Why did politicians offer the deal? For the dubious and hard-to-quantify purpose of “branding” the city with a major attraction, according to the Charlotte Observer.
World Class publicity, for certain, but likely not in the image the Queen City’s uptown lunch bunch and Center City cheerleaders had envisioned.
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