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It seems pretty clear that the A’s and their allies are up to some nonsense in their quest for a taxpayer-funded ballpark, and not just because every taxpayer-funded ballpark is some level of nonsense. They didn’t just submit a bill on a Friday before a holiday weekend because the current Las Vegas legislative session ends in early June: they were also doing what everyone does when it comes time to try to push through something unsavory, and attempting to hide it by limiting the audience for it.
Luckily, Neil deMause wrote up the various issues with the bill over at Field of Schemes on Saturday, the most pressing of which is that the $375 million in tax dollars (paid out in various forms, which deMause broke down) is most assuredly a lie, while the $380 million “cap” is just a cap on the kind of tax dollars they’re publicly disclosing. There’s room to go well over $500 million here, and both the stadium and the land it’s on will be exempt from property tax. And, as discussed before by deMause, the tax increment financing for the stadium will create new taxes even if those taxes aren’t directly being handed to the A’s:
Continue reading “A’s, pro-A’s Vegas politicians try to Friday News dump a bad stadium bill”