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I'm not trying to make excuses for George W. Bush and his dealings with the Texas Rangers. I am dismissing some of the reported details as false (when the selloff figure is anywhere between $10 and $50 million dollars, there is a lot of exageration going on). In 3 years or 30 years, the land becomes "private owned". Well, we are long past 3 years since that stadium was built, is it in private hands now?

Civic stadiums are always a questionable deal. I don't understand why the new football stadium reportedly only cost $260+million (somewhere under $300million) yet Reliant Energy paid $300million for the naming rights. Why didn't they just build a stadium? And why does the team owner get paid (on an installment plan) instead of the city that owns the building?

I don't offer this out there as a defense. I'm saying that some of what is rumored is not always true. I also know that the number of privately owned stadiums is virtually nil. Can one partial team owner buck the trend and build a private owned stadium when the team already has a publicly owned stadium? That would be difficult to sell to the investors (especially when they know that they could move the team to another town that would pay to build them a stadium).

TBA will be conveyed to the owners in 2006. Club is paying $5 mil / yr rent & maintenance, and the payments are applied toward the 'purchase price' of $60 mil (some ~$110 mil less than the cost to build). Since the rent & maint payments are SOP, the conveyance will be, in effect, an outright giveaway.

After that, the sales tax bump will still be in effect, and payments on the construction bonds will still need to be made on a property that the public no longer owns.