Monday, June 26, 2006 | Letter-writer Fred Williams “Pay for Team Yourself” inadvertently confirms the fact that it is often the uninformed who emotionally shouts the loudest and thus publicly broadcasts the greatest amount of misinformation.
As it stands, the Chargers new stadium proposal does not require any “money” to be siphoned from the city of San Diego and thus does not impact the city’s ability (or perhaps we should say its evident inability) to address any other quality of life issue facing its citizens.
The facts are that the Chargers have sought fee title and development rights to 60-acres of under-utilized non-tax generating vacant land in exchange for paying for its own stadium, privately funding needed offsite public transportation improvements, and developing and maintaining a 30-acre community park available for use by and at no cost to all citizens. And by the way, lo and behold, once developed the vacant 60 acres turns into a public tax generating private asset and thus becomes a source of public income to the city of San Diego which in turn can be used to fiscally address other needs.
Moreover, the facts are that without the Chargers in Mission Valley, this 60-acres of vacant land and, for that matter the entire 166-acre Qualcomm site, will likely remain a non-tax revenue-producing public asset; indeed directly costing the city of San Diego (and hence taxpayers) a great amount of money annually until the far distant future, if ever, when the city of San Diego has finally learned how to effectively deal with any such fiscal issue of this order.
There is no debate about this; it is simply a fact that the future fiscal benefits derived from exchanging the 60-acres of land will exceed the current fiscal and future opportunity cost of not exchanging it.
If one emotionally hates the Spanos Family that is one thing and I will not question the right of one to do so publicly. But it is entirely another matter to loudly shout and publicly broadcast misinformation in obvious uniformed support of one’s emotional hatred.
In other words…whether uninformed or misinformed, get informed!