Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale has been the home of the New York Islanders since it opened in 1972 for the team's first season.
Quebec Islanders?
Don’t worry, I am sure Bob McDonnell and either the Norfolk or Virginia Beach mayor would love to go behind the voters’ backs buy you a new stadium here in Virginia that nobody will attend. All you have to do is launder them a few thousand dollars.
Long Islanders pay some of the heaviest property taxes in the nation. In fact, that was the main reason I had to leave.
When I discuss the situation with liberals I know, I always mention that, and they always seem a little shocked. They never think of the situation in those terms, that people actually have to sell their house, pick up, and leave the area totally because they have no other choice.
It’s very hard to find a house there with taxes less than 9K a year.
the place is a dump and tough to get too (little to nill mass transit)...what is happening recently though is groups (Jonas Bros/Katie Perry, etc) are finding it too expensive to play at Madison Square Garden in NYC (primarily because of the union, ha-ha) so they play in Jersey at the Izod arena then in Long Island at the coliseum and skip the garden...
i understand why the voted nixed the improvements but they could screw themselves if they are too short sighted...
We did the same here in Pittsburgh when funding for PNC Park and Heinz Field was on the ballot. Lost 60-40 in close to town, and went down by 4:1 and 5:1 in some of the outlying counties.
Did not matter. The politicians went and built them anyway.
We voted yesterday afternoon...there was quite a bit of activity for a single issue vote....I knew that this meant defeat...happily.
The owner of a business such as a professional team should provide the forum from the proceeds...........this will allow salaries to come down into the realm of reality. There is no earthly reason the taxpayers should provide multimillionaires with these forums......
I don’t know for certain, but I suspect NYC is looting a lot of Long Island’s taxes to support their million$/day habit of
payouts to welfare/lazy cases to keep their voting base paid off.
I bet LI could handily put out some cash if they spent the load they extort from taxpayers wisely.
I lived 3/4 of a mile away when the Coliseum was built, and we used to go inside the unfinished structure after the workers quit for the day.
My local sports arena is now Fenway Park, built in 1911, which will still be hosting Red Sox games after I’m gone.
The MOST amazing thing about these taxpayer-funded sports arenas is how they become “obsolete” or “outdated” before they’re even paid for. Not to mention the costs of demolition, and then sticking the taxpayers with a NEW new arena.
Good for the Nassau County voters! Maybe they will start wising up about all their other bad choices.
Translation: We put it in front of the voters and they made the "wrong" decision, so we will just ignore the will of the voters and go about it in a round about process that allows us to raise taxes and pay for it without needing voter approval.
The NHL can afford to rebuild the stadium.
The get more than enough income from the TV-Networks who get their share from the advertisers during NHL games.
Maybe the NHL has to lower player-salary expectations. Maybe the NHL and team owners have to lower their “take-home” revenue expectations. Maybe the NHL has to bargain for more revenue from the TV networks.
However, in terms of borrowing on the open market to rebuild the stadium, the NHL DOES have the revenue stream to pay for bonds for that effort themselves.
Of course what crony-capitalist enterprise would not prefer to get the taxpayers to pay for it instead?? And to that end they extort the funds they need from the taxpayers with political threats to move a team.
Let them.
Not a single tax-payer sponsored sports stadium has produced the financial returns or revenue to the locality where it is sited in amounts that it was projected for it when the project was “sold” to the taxpayers.
What we need is an urban pact that quits paying the ransom on the threats to take a team away, until every sports stadium in service is 100% the result of the private enterprise of the profitable sports leagues.