The Pro Sports-Local Government Boondoggle

From The Atlantic:

In June, the city council of Glendale, Arizona, decided to spend $324 million on the Phoenix Coyotes, an ice hockey team that plays in Glendale's Jobing.com Arena.
The team has been owned by the league itself since its former owner, Jerry Moyes, declared bankruptcy in 2009. For each of the past two seasons, Glendale has paid $25 million to the league to manage the Coyotes, even as the city faced millions of dollars in budget deficits. Now, Greg Jamison, who is also part of the organization that owns the NHL's San Jose Sharks, is making a bid for the team, and would therefore be the beneficiary of the subsidies.
To put the deal in perspective, Glendale's budget gap for 2012 is about $35 million. As the city voted to give a future Coyotes owner hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, it laid off 49 public workers, and even considered putting its city hall and police station up as collateral to obtain a loan, according to the Arizona Republic. (The latter plan was ultimately scrapped.)
Overall, Glendale is not only on the hook for $15 million per year over two decades to a potential Coyotes owner, but also a $12 million annual debt payment for construction of its arena. In return, according to the Republic, the city receives a measly "$2.2 million in annual rent payments, ticket surcharges, sales taxes and other fees." Even if the Coyotes were to dominate the league like no other in recent memory and return to the Stanley Cup Finals year after year, the city would still lose $9 million annually.

What the fuck were they thinking in subsidizing the team like that?  Building stadiums is bad enough, but paying the league $25 million a year to run the team seems ludicrous.  Now that these stadiums are all built (or almost all built), I hope cities have learned their lessons.  The Bengals, and to a lesser extent the Reds, screwed over Hamilton County.  They will pay an outrageous amount by the time the stadiums are paid off.  But at least they aren't paying to operate the teams too.   And the economic benefits of the teams being there won't ever pay for what the County laid out.