I was shocked and appalled to read the (Nassau) County Executive Edward Mangano has the nerve, in this age of austerity, and with all Nassau’s fiscal problems, to ask his constituents to fund a new stadium for a team’s billionaire owner. We citizens of Nassau County should reject this proposal wholeheartedly on August 1.
Mangano is asking citizens to cough out $350 million for a new home for the Charles Wang-owned Islanders, and $50 million for a minor league ballpark.
Charles Wang is a multi-billionaire who has been threatening for years to pull the Islanders from Long Island unless he gets a taxpayer-financed stadium. Why are taxpayers consistently asked to succumb to team owners’ blackmail, when it’s been proven, over and over again, that stadiums never fulfill their long-term economic benefits. (Readers should check out the work of Andrew Zimbalist, for one, on this subject.) Inevitably, taxpayers wind up holding the bag while owners eventually sell their teams for enormous gains.
Additionally, Mr. Wang, although extremely well-connected, has a huge dark cloud over him from his years as the chief executive officer at Computer Associates. According to an 2007 internal CA report, Wang oversaw an accounting fraud lasting more than a decade, which forced the company to pay over $500 million in fines and internal investigations for shareholder fraud. The only reason Mr. Wang himself was not prosecuted, according to a New York Times (4/14/2007) article, was the expiration of the statute of limitations.
This is the kind of owner to whom Nassau County, which barely pays its own employees, should offer $350 million?
I vote no, and so should the rest of Nassau’s citizens.
Let Mr. Wang pay for his own stadium. He can afford it, not us.
Matt Moshen
Great Neck, NY
