Citizens For More Important Things

"As Sonics Pack to Leave Town, Seattle Shrugs"
Jessica Kowal

Empowered by a wave of venture capital, a hiring boom and pride in its homegrown billionaires, this city has decided it no longer needs a mediocre professional basketball team to feel good about itself.

On Election Day, residents rebuffed their once-beloved Seattle SuperSonics, voting overwhelmingly for a ballot measure ending public subsidies for professional sports teams.

The owners, who bought the Sonics in October for $350 million from Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, had warned that the team would leave unless the city provided a new arena.

The vote delighted Citizens for More Important Things, a group that, with the help of a statewide health care union, spent $60,000 to sponsor the initiative. Other cities "may be so desperate to lure tourists there that they have to overpay for an N.B.A. team," said Chris Van Dyk, a founder of the group. "Seattle doesn't have to lure anybody."

Mr. Van Dyk's priorities are schools, transportation projects and health care, and he openly disdains wealthy people who buy professional teams, pay huge salaries to players and then demand handouts. Owners who threaten to take their teams elsewhere, Mr. Van Dyk said, are no better than "the neighborhood crack cocaine dealer."

Told of Mr. Van Dyk's comments, Clayton I. Bennett of Oklahoma City, chairman of the group that owns the Sonics, sighed.

Seattle "turned its back on the N.B.A.," Mr. Bennett said in a telephone interview, and gave up its chance to build a "multipurpose" arena suitable for basketball, hockey and conventions.

"I'm not saying it's the most important thing or the only thing, but I think professional sports are an important component to the overall economy and quality of life in any marketplace," Mr. Bennett said. "It's about flying the flag of the city nationally and globally."

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Owners of professional teams have long argued that arenas and stadiums increase economic development, jobs and tourism. With some economists challenging that view, the owners have developed a new argument: that a team enhances a city's social status, said David J. Olson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Washington.

Seattle is not buying it.

"Citizens in Seattle look around and see Microsoft and Boeing doing fabulously, the Port of Seattle is booming and trade with China is going to define this city's existence for the next 50 years," Professor Olson said. "Seattle has said, We can be a big-league city, we can be an international city, without kowtowing to professional sports franchises."

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To many Sonics fans, the rejection of sports financing proves that old, laid-back Seattle has been crushed by elitist Prius-driving do-gooders.

To say there is "no cultural value" in the Sonics is "ludicrous," said Paul Merrill, a 34-year-old stand-up comedian who was 7 when the Sonics won the championship. Yet even Mr. Merrill, who helps run Supersonicsoul, "the Sonics blog for the Sonics people," finds it hard to justify public spending on a new arena, an attitude reflected in a joke he tells in his comedy routine.

As a big basketball fan, Mr. Merrill says, he should come up with 200 million reasons why the city should pay for a $200 million arena: Where else can he buy a $7 pretzel? And, sure, that money could build housing for the homeless, but can homeless people dunk?