These slides from the city web site show us the cost of selling bonds instead of saving up our money and paying cash:
So far we have sold two types of bonds to finance the ball park. We sold 30 year taxable bonds totaling $15,660,000 and 25 year tax exempt bonds totaling $45,125,000.
That comes to $60,785,000.
What will it cost us by the time we have paid them off? The number comes to $137,286,965.10.
That means that we will actually pay more than 2.25 times what we financed.
Why can’t our governments develop a pay as we go strategy? We would get at least twice as much for our money.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
The Big Lie we tell ourselves here is that development pays for itself. That is why we need a QoL bond issue every 10 years: to catch up on the things development failed to pay for.
I do admit that big one time things like a stadium are an exception, if only we could vote for them.
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Pay-as-you-go financing requires buy-in from the voters. Obviously, we did not get that with the ballpark. How easy for one city council to make an enormous commitment on the behalf of we, the voters and taxpayers. Then those politicians are long gone when the bill comes due.
Peggy Noonan says it this way: “There’s an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think the voters work for them.” The recent column this quote comes from is at this link. It’s worth reading.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304603704579325090935491388
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Sorry, the WSJ link to the Noonan article doesn’t show the entire column. It will appear on Noonan’s website in a few days.
http://www.peggynoonan.com/
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City management and council conveniently left out financing costs — the total costs — when discussing the construction of the ballpark. That was intentional on their part.
One of the fatal flaws in the ballpark financing is that the tenant is not paying a reasonable amount of rent. Their rent doesn’t come close to covering our costs. Ask Paul Foster or Woody Hunt if you can rent one of their buildings for less than their carrying costs.
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