Carolina Panthers Owner David Tepper wants to replace his 27-year-old stadium.
The National Football League, like Major League Baseball, is going through a stadium-cycle, owners want new or renovated stadiums and in three instances, the owners have gotten lots of public money to either build new stadiums or renovate a present stadium. The Buffalo Bills’ ownership is getting a new Orchard Park facility and hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers, a vast majority of whom will never step into the new stadium. The same holds true in Nashville where the Tennessee Titans’ ownership convinced local and state lawmakers to give them hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies for a new facility and again most of the people putting their tax money into the stadium will never step inside the facility. In Baltimore, Maryland officials are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into renovating the Ravens facility and again the people putting up the money, most of the taxpayers will never step foot in the building.
NFL owners in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Washington are plotting out ways to get public money for new stadiums. An NFL team under the best of circumstances could use a stadium for two pre-season games, nine regular season games and two playoff games or a total of 13 games. There might be some other activities in a stadium such as concerts, college football games or soccer matches but the stadium sits dormant around 320 days a year under the best-case scenario. With all the evidence that building a colossal seldom used stadium does not produce an economic benefit, politicians in Charlotte, in North Carolina and in South Carolina know Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper wants both a new stadium and a new practice facility. Tepper had a taxpayers supported practice facility in South Carolina being built but the project was stopped. Lawmakers know it is time to step up to help David Tepper.
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