… via their athletics budgets, we sometimes go outside the realm of the university proper. We go to municipalities like Rapid City, South Dakota, whose mayor helps us understand university presidents who ruin their schools’ budgets by building massive half-empty barely-used football stadiums.
Mayor Kooiker is locked in epic facilities battle with Sioux Falls – just the way ruinous university presidents get themselves locked in facilities battles with rival institutions. A local columnist calls the mayor’s plan to expand the local civic center
a risky gambit for South Dakota’s second-largest city, where concern over losing state high school events to the Denny Sanford Premier Center has spawned a go-for-broke proposal that brings a Wild West audacity to the treatment of public funds.
Building a new arena and refurbishing the existing one within the civic center — creating a multipurpose facility that can be fitted for regulation football and seat as many as 19,000 for concerts — could cost taxpayers as much as $420 million by the time interest on the bonds is paid.
But once you know the deeper motives for the gambit, much becomes clear.
The fear … is that Sioux Falls will lure most major state high school tournaments because it has a state-of-the-art facility, more than double the city population of Rapid City and has consistently produced more revenue than its West River counterpart when hosting events in the past.
That’s a reasonable concern, especially after a South Dakota High School Activities Association survey showed that 52 percent of respondents considered Sioux Falls their first choice for a state tournament site, compared to 15 percent for Rapid City. That was before the Premier Center even opened, meaning the gap could widen.
Kooiker responded by showing up in Pierre to decry recent scrutiny into site selection as a conspiracy to favor the state’s largest city, which was not an original argument but impressive in its inanity nonetheless.
“This is about the closest I’ve seen to an overt effort to simply take all of the tournaments and put them in Sioux Falls,” said the mayor. “I would ask that that not happen.”
Reminded that high school student-athletes were a major part of the survey to gauge their opinion on creating the best possible tournament experience, Kooiker responded that kids “don’t know what they want at that age.”
Once you realize that there’s nothing rational about the gambit, and that the motives are childishness (for Kooiker to insult the “kids” is rich), paranoia, and mindless competitiveness, it’s easier to wrap your mind around the otherwise inexplicable behavior of some university presidents.
February 20th, 2015 at 10:53AM
Just another positional arms race, or perhaps rent-seeking. The city that gets the sports complex, or the university that fields winning teams, gets the big prize. But the value of resources devoted to winning the prize (whether it’s in building facilities or bribing politicians) exceeds the value of the prize.