I don’t like any arrangements that use public money to provide facilities for the benefit of private concerns unless there’s a complete payback. Ergo, saving GM and keeping even a nest of complete bastards like AIG from going totally down the crapper were OK because a much more important public good was served in both cases, and in both cases public finds were either completely paid back (in GM’s case with a hefty profit) or are in the process of being paid back.

The stadium is another story. I’m a huge sports fan but when your school system is imploding, your infrastructure is either deteriorating (our sewers and water conduits are in very bad shape) or lagging hugely behind population growth and development, sorry, it’s just a matter of priorities.

Like “2 think good” below, I’ve been a Macondo area resident for most of my life – since I was a child, in fact. I also have fond memories of the Orange Bowl and, as a former lecturer at the University of Miami, more than my share of personal investment in the Hurricanes. I certainly want to keep the Feesh in town. The Hurricanes, of course, weren’t going anywhere.

However, the fiction that a stadium has long term economic upside for a community as a whole has been repeatedly exposed as an urban legend of the grossest sort. In Baltimore, the two new stadiums did indeed appear to spark a renaissance of the southwest side of the harbor but the planning for redeveloping the entire area was comprehensive – urban renewal, tax grants, development grants, modernization of rapid transit, extensive infrastructure construction – they didn’t just plant two playpens there and then let them “work their magic.” Attributing the redevelopment to the stadiums was a myth.

The bed tax money was designated for development of tourism, which is the economic engine that drives Macondo. The idea that enough tourists are going to attend baseball games at Banana Massacre Field to justify its cost is too idiotic to contemplate seriously. Improving the port and access to it, sure. Developing modern mass transit from the airport to the port or to the beaches, definitely. Improving roadway access to and along the beaches, sure. And if you can’t use all the money for the designated purposes, well, our representatives wrote the charter – it wasn’t handed down from Sinai on a couple of tablets – and despite all appearances they’re not too stupid to rewrite it a bit to make unspent bed tax money available for, oh, hiring a few more teachers to get class sizes down below Favela flophouse density. But to raid that fund well into the foreseeable future to build a stadium for a corrupt, lying shyster like Scrooge McLoria strikes me as an obscenity.

In connection with Macondo Banana Massacre Field, MLB should have been invited to quit parasitizing metropolitan areas with more pressing needs than baseball stadiums and to raise a fund for new stadium construction itself. Tax abatements and development incentives are fine – we gave them to cruise operators and airlines; I have no problem extending them to MLB as well. I also have no problem with the municipality and state pitching in on infrastructure, like street widening, traffic signal reprogramming, water, sewer and electric service to the new facility. However, as Craig noted last year when I took him to see the stadium in its then extent of development, there wasn’t any work being done on widening or improving the adjacent highway access and there’s still no meaningful vision for mass transit that won’t use the same old narrow streets around the ballpark that the few buses that serve the neighborhood have always used. There’s certainly no broader plan for the neighborhood proper. The stadium will create employment in a construction industry that has imploded with the private home, office building and condo market over the last decade but it will do nothing, repeat, nothing to sustain those jobs due to the utter lack of vision attendant on getting this one structure put up and nothing more.

Our unutterably corrupt so-called public servants really shirked their responsibility by green-lighting this project before all of its ramifications had been studied – or, more than likely, if they had studied them, they did a fine job of sitting on the reports if not deleting them altogether.

So, did I make myself clear?

The Orange Bowl site was available because the Orange Bowl stadium was allowed to deteriorate without significant improvements for many years. Targeted and expiring sales tax [1 cent] proposals were rejected on various occasions by local voters. Norman Braman led the campaign against those improvements on more than one occasion. Joe Robbie was the villain then.

Robbie’s frustration with those failed proposals led him to build a stadium using private funds. The financing of the stadium proved to be a disaster for the Robbie family and cost them ownership of the Dolphins. The Miami Dolphins left in 1987 and the Miami Hurricanes followed 11 years later.

So you’ll forgive us Miami residents who are sports fans if we don’t look at the “Tourist and Convention Development Taxes on Transient Rentals (bed taxes)” and see an opportunity to make a stand against the [corporate] welfare state. We see an opportunity to ensure Major League Baseball remains in the area.

In a city lacking tradition, attending sporting events at the Orange Bowl site is something Miami residents will have in common from 1938 to at least 2038, with an unfortunate hiatus from 2008 to 2011. To do so, we just had to find a way around the transient mindset of some residents [ex-New Yorkers?] who refuse to invest in our city.

Incidentally, along with Alvarez, a county commissioner thought to be the moving force behind the raises they awarded themselves, one truly repulsive bovine blowhard named Natacha Seijas, about as close as morbid obesity gets to fielding a Wicked Witch of the North (in this case Hialeah), got bounced as well. And when she hit the ground, local seismologists tracing the shock waves discerned a fault system between Macondo and Fort Lauderdale which indicates that within a few million years, Macondo will have rotated clockwise into the northern coast of South America, making geological reality of what has pretty much been political reality for the last three or four decades anyway.