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For It Before They Were Against It

Monday, January 21st, 2008

In an effort to get out of a stadium lease so they can skip town, the NBA’s Seattle Supersonics are arguing in court motions that the team has no economic and little social impact on the city. Odd, since the team argued precisely the opposite when it was trying to get the city to foot the bill for a new stadium. Now that they want to leave, everything’s topsy-turvey.

The team and league are also making the opposite argument in Oklahoma City, where they’re pushing a $100 million tax package to move the Sonics from the Northwest.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 11:05 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “For It Before They Were Against It”

  1. #1 |  divadab |  January 21st, 2008 at 11:09 am

    Despite the new ownership’s lies, it was clear from the beginning that they intended to move the team to Oklahoma City. Let them pay the balance of the lease, then. Fucking liars.

    This is GW Bush’s America – where greed and deceit rule. And disrespect for law. Disrespect for anything other than money, really. Make the fuckers pay.

  2. #2 |  Howlin' Hobbit |  January 21st, 2008 at 11:37 am

    It would be really good if, when they leave, they take the other two teams with them.

    Oh yeah, and pay back all the money for the two new stadia we’ve already built. Especially the baseball one that we voted down three times before the gov’t just ignored us, tacked on more to our sales tax, and built it anyway.

  3. #3 |  Bernard |  January 21st, 2008 at 11:41 am

    Without more info it’s hard to tell if they’re being disingenuous or not. When they originally argued for subsidies based on their impact to Seattle and its economy did they get them?

    If they didn’t, that may well be a good sign that their argument at that time was wrong and changing tack when you realise you’ve got something wrong is, of course, common sense.

    It would also then not be unreasonable to argue for a move to a city where there would be an impact, given that no two cities are exactly alike.

    Of course, it may be that they got a subsidy and are still trying to argue that. In that case the corruption is pretty evident and deserves whatever ridicule it gets.

  4. #4 |  TC |  January 21st, 2008 at 4:27 pm

    If these teams stuff is so hot, they should pay for their own facilities! GAWD knows the local fans will provide it back over time not to mention the massive TV money they will get.

    Coyote has a pretty good thread on it here; http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2008/01/admission-that.html

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