As I have testified previously to this City Council, I have been a supporter of local women’s sports since the 1970’s when my sister Rose and her partner played for the historic Columbus Pacesetters Women’s Professional Football Team. I attended Columbus Quest women’s basketball games in the mid-90’s and I was an assistant girls’ softball coach for several years. I am a fan of the WNBA and women’s basketball and women’s sports overall.
It is quite clear that the mayor and this city council have been preparing to the lure a professional women’s soccer team to Columbus for some time now when you consider the amount of taxpayer money you all have expended to the sport recently. $30 million for the 62-acre Kilbourne Run Park in which 35 acres are dedicated to soccer fields. $113.9 million for Lower.Com field. And now you want to give away McCoy Parks, 30 acres of publicly owned park
land to one of the country’s richest professional sports owners, who has an estimated worth between $8- $10 billion to build his “Haslam Sports Group Training Facility” that will serve his National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) franchise.
And make no mistake that your recent proposal for the immediate release of $25 million of taxpayer’s money to the Haslam’s to help pay for this facility and franchise, and then recoup this loss by applying a 2 percent surcharge on ticket sales for all events at the Columbus Crews home stadium is taxpayer theft no matter how you try to sugar coat it with your photo ops and propaganda.
This is not a public-private partnership but a public-private fleecing of much needed taxpayer dollars during such time when you Council President Hardin stated, “2025 was the tightest budget he'd seen in his more than a decade at City Hall, but then he saw the 2026 budget. He said this year's is worse. The city has structural, long-term issues in how it's overspending and budgeting.” If giving away $25 million in taxpayer money to a billionaire sports owner isn’t an example of unnecessary irresponsible overspending, I don’t know what is. But then again, Council President Hardin and Andy Ginther are both tools of the establishment. Which in this case includes the Haslam’s, Nationwide Insurance, and the Edwards family. Telling them no is not an option.
Your attempt to dupe the public into justifying another billionaire-millionaire sports subsidy is comparable to your cockamamie explanations for rationalizing the handouts of hundreds of millions of dollars for 10- and 15-year tax abatements. You claim these greedy tax abatement recipients may someday pay their fair share of property taxes when their abatements expire, but in the meantime, they are defunding public education while forcing Columbus City Schools and other school districts to place levies on the ballot thus raising property taxes and overburdening homeowners (especially seniors and those on fixed incomes) with unaffordable property taxes and higher monthly rents.
This $25 million taxpayer expenditure for the Haslam’s will be a loss of millions of dollars for at least 10 years from funding future city budgets. And doing so at a time when you all know Columbus is facing a shortfall in revenue to pay for social services, homelessness, housing, workforce development, recreation and parks, neighborhood infrastructure and other resident demands. But here we are once again, holding another dog and pony show public hearing when a decision has already been made.