The very generous campaign contributions that the developers of the Kincora mixed-use development and Loudoun Baseball Mecca To Be gave to help elect our all-Republican Board of Supervisors is certainly the gift that keeps on giving!
York (right) and poor cash-strapped owner of the non-existent Loudoun Hounds Bob Farren (left), during their county-paid junket to Germany this spring
Our Board may be on recess this month, but when it comes to arranging for still more taxpayer-funded giveaways to help the poor cash-strapped developers of the worst-located most-minor-league baseball stadium in the known world, our hard-working public servants never sleep.
Kincora already had received Community Development Authority loans and a special taxing district even before Loudoun Baseball Visionary Bob Farren and his Virginia Investment Partnership dropped a cool 20 gees on the GOP board candidates last fall. Since then, as you will recall, Farren got to travel with his road-trip buddy Chairman Scott York (R-At Large) on York’s highly official highly successful county economic development junket mission to Germany this spring, though Farren’s presence on the trip was nowhere mentioned in any information released by the county about the trip. (Farren, according to local German newspapers, “explored” future “cooperation” between a German amateur baseball team he visited and his non-existent extremely minor-league Loudoun Hounds.)
Not long after that, York announced (“Huge Win for Loudoun County!”) that you the taxpayers would get to subsidize an $80 million government-backed and guaranteed loan to help the poor cash-strapped developers of Kincora meet their obligations to build a road which they promised as a condition for getting that first special loan and taxing district in the first place.
Now, York has proposed as item 1 of the county’s legislative agenda in Richmond this fall to have the General Assembly pass a special law just for us (and Kincora) that would allow the county to impose a 10 percent tax on minor league baseball stadium admissions, or alternatively to allocate existing sales taxes generated at minor league baseball stadiums, with the revenues collected to be used for a single purpose: “to assist with financing of minor league baseball stadium.”
What a deal! Instead of contributing any tax revenue to the county, like any other commercial enterprise (isn’t that what we keep hearing from our GOP Board as the reason we need to be “business friendly” towards commercial development, to keep our property tax rate down?), Chairman York wants to be so friendly that the county not only turns over the taxes it collects to the stadium owners, but will also charge an extra 10 percent tax . . . to turn over to the stadium owners. It’s certainly convenient to have the county act as your bag man, but why not cut out the middleman, and just suggest that the owners up their admission fee, by oh, say about 10 percent, so they can actually pay their taxes like everyone else, instead of being a freeloader?
Of course the snag in that reasoning is that The Hounds, which will not even be affiliated with any major league team, probably are not going to have any paying attendance in the first place. At that point we no doubt can expect still more diversions of county revenues to support the stadium and its extremely minor league team, a la that $2 million handed over by the Board earlier this year to the Washington Redskins. After all, what can be better for the county’s economic development than a barely-professional minor-league baseball team located 30 miles from two other real minor league baseball teams, the Frederick Keys and the Potomac Nationals? If that is not an example of the deserving poor, what is?
realloudoun 