Hillsboro needed just one jurisdiction's approval: the city's. Here, Stuart and others needed support from the Vancouver City Council. They never got it.Nor should they have.
If this was such a great deal, then why didn't Vancouver do it on their own? Enslaving an entire county to get something built that would only benefit the downtown Mafia was a doomed exercise from the start. That Hillsboro showed they could do it on their own just proves that Vancouver could also have done it on their own... they just didn't want to.
The city of Vancouver, you see, could have done exactly what Hillsboro did. If I'm not mistaken, that's how they financed the former Columbian Palace - City Hall scam. And with the glowing, albeit science-fictional economic impact statement made up in an obviously delusional haze by CRUDEC, well, you'd think the city would have been all over that.
But they weren't. They just wanted all of the benefits with NONE of the costs... just like, come to think of it, the cancer on our community known as the Columbian. The Columbian, who would have made bank advertising this rip off, damned sure didn't offer THEIR product to be taxed to pay for it... did they? They just wanted all of US to foot the bill, because in their twisted minds, "that's the way a great community becomes even better."
So, the problem, then, wasn't the county, or the debt the county carries, which is probably similar in scale to the debt carried by Hillsboro.
The problem was, essentially, that the whole of Clark County was quite unnecessarily involved and that they were stupidly going to make hundreds of thousands of people pay for a facility that would have benefited roughly 1% of this county's population... while we never set foot in it.... and all in the middle of double-digit unemployment and some small government cutbacks.
An additional fact left out of this editorial is that Hillsboro will be getting 50% MORE stadium (4500 capacity compared to 3000 for the ballpark planned here) for almost half the money.
That goes to confirm, yet again, how badly the Baseball mafia of Stuart, Bomar, the Columbian, the Chamber of Horrors/CRUDEC types were willing to screw the people of Clark County to get what they wanted... all at OUR expense... and all without asking.
The irony of all of this is that a COLLABORATIVE effort MIGHT have made this doable.
Put the stadium out at the fairgrounds where it belonged instead of in the pockets of the downtown special interests, and the infrastructure issues would have been taken care of. Put it to a vote to get bonding, put a realistic surcharge on the tickets to make those actually attending the games to pay for the ballpark instead of trying to screw us... get some return on the investment by taxing the vendors and the team and the newspaper... and this COULD have happened, and likely for the same kind of money that Hillsboro is spending.
But NOOOOOOOO.... we couldn't do THAT, now, could we? The downtown egos wouldn't have stood for THAT, would they?
Congrats, Hillsboro. You deserve this team, you were realistic in pursuing it, and even though they've been a dog for decades and will continue to be one, at least the people who don't go or even live in Hillsboro won't be raped for the cost.
Unlike us if this scam had gone through.
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