MAPS For Millionaires

Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays are getting a new stadium. Owners will pay half the cost of the $1.3 billion price tag.

The NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder may get a new arena. Owners – such as Clay Bennett, Jeff Records, Everett Dodson and other men of great substance – will pay about 5% of the $900 million price tag.

Oklahoma City taxpayers will cover the other 95%.

Makes perfect sense. OKC, allegedly on an explosive growth pattern to becoming a charming capital of a southern/midwestern state, will have to pony up $850 million to build a new sports home for Thunder basketball. After all, we have to keep up with the Jones's, as in the Cowboys' Jerry, as well as, LA, Brooklyn, Denver, Chicago and other major cities scattered across the fruited plain.

Obviously for OKC Mayor David Holt, a thoughtful and wise public servant, to lead the effort on this major community investment, I must surmise other needs have surely already been met like education, health care and infrastructure.

Well, I surmise wrong. Even with massive capital infusion of school construction in the recent past, OKC public schools need better paid teachers, more counselors, psychologists, speech pathologists, resource officers, support personnel in cafeterias, maintenance and transportation.

Note I didn't say football stadiums or basketball courts. I also didn't claim Oklahoma's second largest school district needs the entire $850 million that will go, instead, into the pockets of 18 superb athletes, their coaches and eventually owners when they sell the franchise in the future because that is where the really, really big money is.

I love sports, especially the dribbling kind, but I love a well-educated populace even more. Thunder owners, especially Bennett, deserve credit for prying the former Sonics out of Seattle, no small victory. But someday, he and other monetarily-endowed OKC dandies will be offered a ton of money by even wealthier big wigs in other cities for their team and it will be hard to refuse.

Such is professional sports, and with student athletes now eligible to get rich even quicker, competition for top talent will spiral through the roof of new sporting arenas. Keep that in mind voters as city mothers and fathers ask you to support the extension of MAPS for Millionaires, although it won't be called that.

Nope, it's economic development so that the 31st largest city in America can compete with those larger, richer and more attractive cities several times our size, like Houston, which is now flush with a myriad of professional sports outlets, but the state of Texas has now taken over its massively failing public school system.

Ah, America at its finest. Box seats for billionaires. Janitorial jobs cleaning up after them for dead-ender students.