Billionaire Ted Lerner and his family don’t seem like awful people, not the kind of wealthy folks who are lobbying on behalf of politicians who want to punish the poor. But they should stop trying to rip off the taxpayers of Washington D.C. The district already financed a stadium for the Nationals baseball team that the Lerners own, which cost locals close to a billion dollars with interest factored in, and now the patriarch is requesting a retractable roof on the stadium to also be paid for by taxpayers. Building sports stadiums for billionaires to improve the economy is a fool’s errand to begin with, but this roof business is even more egregious. This project will create zero permanent jobs and will enhance no one’s financial standing but the Lerners. It’s corporate welfare at its ugliest. If the Lerners want to enhance the value of their holdings, they should invest in them themselves. Thankfully, Mayor Gray is holding firm against this preposterous request. From the Washington Post:
“Mayor Vincent C. Gray said Tuesday that Washington Nationals owner Theodore N. Lerner pitched him earlier this year on a pricey plan to have the city build a retractable roof over Nationals Park — a proposal, Gray said, that he swiftly but politely rejected.
The private one-on-one meeting took place in the John A. Wilson Building in mid-July and lasted about 15 minutes, Gray said.
What Lerner wanted to talk about was the possibility of a roof on Nationals Park,’ the mayor (D) said. ‘That was it. There was no discussion about how much it was going to cost and no further details. I’ve had no further discussions.’
An administration official familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment publicly on it confirmed that there have been no recent talks about improvements of that scope for Nationals Park, which was built with well more than $600 million in taxpayer financing and opened in 2008.
‘The mayor was polite but unequivocal,’ the official said. ‘We are not going to spend taxpayer money to put a roof on the stadium, regardless of the cost.'”