The tenth Super Bowl played in New Orleans, and the first since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, will kickoff in a stadium that has received more than $470 million in public support since the storm, as taxpayers have footed the bill for renovations and upgrades in the face of threats from ownership and the National Football League to move the team to another city.

In the aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans was desperate to keep the Saints from skipping town. The NFL and Saints owner Tom Benson seem to have taken advantage of that desperation, leveraging it into hundreds of millions of dollars in public support — from the city, state, and federal governments — for renovations to the decimated Superdome, which housed Katrina refugees during and after the storm. In 2009, the state committed $85 million more to keep the Saints in town and attempt to woo another Super Bowl, all while signing a lease worth $153 million in a nearby building owned by Benson.

While investors and Benson have profited from the deals, taxpayers haven’t been as lucky, Bloomberg reports:

Talks headed by then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue led to a plan to fix and renovate the Superdome with $121 million from the state, $44 million from the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District, which oversees the facility, $156 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $15 million from the league. Blanco said a rushed bond deal followed.

Ultimately, the financing cost the district more than three times its $44 million commitment, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from state documents and interviews. [...]

In April 2009, Louisiana negotiated a new lease to secure Benson’s promise to keep the team in New Orleans through 2025. The state made $85 million in fresh Superdome improvements, adding luxury seating and moving the press box. A company owned by Benson, Zelia LLC, bought the 26-story tower next to the stadium that had stood mostly vacant since Katrina and renovated it. At the time, Benson put the total cost at about $85 million. The state then signed a $153 million, 20-year lease for office space in the building, which now houses 51 state agencies, according to the Louisiana Administration Division. [...]

“A lot of folks in New York made a ton of money,” [former state Treasurer John] Kennedy said. “Louisiana taxpayers didn’t do so well.”

The Superdome certainly needed renovations following Katrina. But its original construction was financed solely by taxpayers, and Benson, who is worth roughly $1.6 billion, didn’t contribute and repeatedly hinted that the Saints would move to San Antonio, Los Angeles, or another city unless taxpayers ponied up. Kennedy, the state treasurer, told Bloomberg he went into negotiations with the NFL and Benson “with a gun against my head.”

Benson isn’t alone. Minnesota Vikings owner Zygi Wylf used the threat of relocation to help secure public funding for a new stadium, and owners across the NFL are doing the same. Owners of the Miami Dolphins are using the promise of future Super Bowls (even though the event rarely provides the promised economic boost) to lure more money from taxpayers who are already on the hook for the city’s new baseball stadium.

The NFL’s program that provides loans to teams for new facilities is contingent on taxpayer support for at least part of the cost, and only one current NFL facility was built without some sort of public funding.

Taxpayer-financed sports stadiums and arenas cost $10 billion more in 2010 than cities and states originally forecast for the projects, and the overall cost of land, infrastructure, and maintenance is far higher than what the sports industry typically reports, according to a new study from Harvard urban planning professor Judith Grant Long:

The costs of land, infrastructure, operations and lost property taxes add 25 percent to the taxpayer bill for the 121 sports facilities in use during 2010, increasing the average public cost by $89 million to $259 million, up from $170 million commonly reported by the sports industry and media, she writes in the book “Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.” [...]

Long’s analysis added costs such as those for land, infrastructure and lost tax revenue, while subtracting money that flows back to states or cities from revenue or rent payments.

According to Long, three of the 121 sports stadiums and arenas have costs that now exceed 100 percent of their original building price: Lucas Oil Field, home of the Indianapolis Colts, Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals, and Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers. In Cincinnati, public financing of Paul Brown Stadium forced the city to sell off a local hospital to finance its debt.

Baseball and football facilities, at roughly $480 million each, cost the most to build and maintain, Long found. As ThinkProgress has noted, just one of the National Football League’s 31 stadiums was built without any public funding whatsoever. When public-private partnerships are used to build such stadiums, Long found, taxpayers finance more than three-quarters of the investment, with teams and owners picking up just 22 percent of the tab.

Arenas and stadiums rarely live up to the promises teams, owners, and city politicians use to justify their construction. Cities are often left holding unsustainable amounts of debt because the economic development that is promised never shows up, and as a result, other services that provide more benefit to taxpayers are slashed to pay the bills.

Cowboys Stadium costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

And NFL franchises are certainly not the only ones benefiting from taxpayer largesse. According to an analysis by Bloomberg News, taxpayers have spent $4 billion on subsidies for sports structures since 1986 via tax exemptions that come along with the bonds used to finance stadium or arena construction:

Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show.

Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.

These bonds raise money to pay for construction and improvements, enabling wealthy franchise owners to avoid paying for their own stadiums or fancy new upgrades. Individuals who invest in the bonds then receive tax exemptions, lowering government revenue; so the subsidy for stadium construction “comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer.” Using bonds to finance stadium construction is nothing more than a transfer of taxpayer money to wealthy franchise owners whose teams can be worth billions of dollars.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the public money thrown at sports franchises. For instance, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pays no property taxes on Cowboys Stadium, saving his franchise $17 million per year.

Franchises often use the threat of moving to a new city to extort more expensive facilities and ever bigger heaps of tax exemptions from fans and politicians loathe to see the local team disappear. But states and cities should really question whether new stadiums for already wealthy individuals are the best way to spend often scarce taxpayer dollars.

Brooklyn's Barclays Center

Most of the research proving that these deals aren’t friendly to taxpayers, however, has focused on football and baseball facilities and not on basketball arenas, which are more often built with multi-use purposes in mind. But a new study from George Washington University’s Geoffrey Propheter looked exclusively at basketball arenas and found similar results: the arenas generally don’t add economic value to a city, and in certain circumstances, they can actually hurt a city’s economy, as The Atlantic Cities’ Richard Florida writes:

The results suggest that basketball arenas do not add economic value on their own but instead are highly dependent on the local economic, social, and cultural context where they are located. The basic version of the model, covering three decades from 1979 to 2009, found “no statistically significant association between having an NBA arena or an NBA franchise and MSA regional personal income.” [...]

The cities with the newest arenas took the biggest economic hit — a “decline in per capita income of about $2,430, a larger decline than in any other period, according to the study.” Alarmingly, the magnitudes of the income declines in this study “are generally larger than what has previously been observed,” the study finds.

Taxpayer subsidies often wipe out miniscule economic gains some cities do see, and in other instances, economic gains were actually “income transfers from the suburban area around the central city,” meaning the metro area as a whole did not benefit.

Arenas, Propheter concludes, “are not primary catalysts of economic development but are instead economic complements,” more likely an effect of economic development rather than a cause. Still, cities around the country continue to peg their economic hopes on these projects, even as evidence mounts that the returns almost never justify the investment.

As ThinkProgress has reported, several American sports franchises are looking for taxpayer dollars in order to finance new stadiums or renovate existing ones. But the example set by Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals should act as a warning to the cities thinking of acceding to those demands.

According to Sports Radio 810 WHB, the Royals ownership has been spending taxpayer money earmarked for stadium renovations on, among other things, employee salaries, cable tv, and telephone bills. Just 9 percent of the money given to the team has actually been used on its stadium.

Adding insult the injury, the owners even paid some of their payroll tax bill with the subsidies meant for stadium improvements, so “the team literally collected taxpayer money to pay their own taxes“:

The Kansas City Royals have requested nearly $17 million of taxpayer money the past five years from the Kauffman Stadium repair and upkeep fund but spent only 9% of the money received on actual repairs and maintenance to the stadium, according to documents obtained by Sports Radio 810 WHB.

The Royals have received at least $12.7 million from taxpayers that was approved by the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority as part of the RMMO provision of the team’s lease with the county and spent it on full and part time employee salaries, security, cable tv, first aid, utilities, telephones and even payroll taxes. By using the money for payroll taxes, the team literally collected taxpayer money to pay their own taxes.

Owners of sports franchises often claim that stadiums are good investments for taxpayers, but the evidence makes the opposite case. As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron noted, “the stadiums rarely pay for themselves, leaving local economies engulfed in debt while teams come back asking for even newer stadiums before the current facilities are paid off.”

And the Royals aren’t the only Kansas City team using taxpayer dollars to fund general operations. The Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League have received $9 million for stadium maintenance and repairs, but have used just 6 percent on the stadium, with the rest going towards management and operations.

Glendale mulled offering city hall as collateral to pay for the Coyotes.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Arizona Republic reported that the city considered offering both its city hall and its police station as collateral for a loan in order to cover payments to the NHL (and payments related to a baseball spring training stadium in the city):

Glendale officials this week considered offering up City Hall and the main police station as collateral to obtain a $41 million loan to cover sports-related debts.

The city would use the money to cover payments to the National Hockey League and potentially to make payments on Camelback Ranch stadium, the city’s spring-training ballpark.

Glendale officials acknowledged the proposal wouldn’t bring the city any savings. [...]

The City Council on Tuesday decided there were too many unknowns for staffers to proceed with the plan now.

A referendum that would cut the support the city has pledged to the Coyotes could appear on the ballot in November, so the city shelved its plan to offer the buildings as collateral. Meanwhile, Glendale is far from the only city facing a professional sports related budget boondoggle: in five others, teams want taxpayer money to publicly finance stadiums, even though such structures rarely deliver on their economic promise.