One baseball deal kaput; now RBC looks for a fresh one

ramgrl, i had no intent to post until i read your monstrosity of a text wall. Please discover your ‘enter’ key and apply it next time.

For the tenth time, the “going nowhere” level *is* AAA. It is the holding pen for the veteran minor leaguers who have very short, dim future careers. AA is where all the bright stars are, its their first true test to determine their futures.

...wow, markiemark—

I didn’t realize we were having a formal debate with structured affirmations and denials here.  And kudos for sounding like a buffoon while in the act of trying to sound clever!

In terms of Richmond becoming vibrant again, it is underway almost and exclusively due to the efforts and expansion of VCU’s growth in the downtown area.  One of Richmond’s issues to retain and attract talented people is in fact the cost of living there.  The taxes are the highest in the area on real estate by a substantial margin already without adding more expenses and the business taxes atrocious.  Slimming the government and spending of the city of Richmond needs much more work.  Businesses have routinely fled the city for lower taxes in several nearby areas over the last 20 years as well or settled there instead to begin with.  Those are real issues.  The city is poised to do well and take advantage of its history with modern, targeted approaches.  Baseball could be one of them though jobs and other things for those who live in the new urban environment are important too…just having a reverse commute doesn’t solve all that much, just reverses the commute.  Politics aside, the issues of revitalizing Richmond are not easy but for the first time in 20 years it seems poised to be able to do so.  Something will have to be done about the bloated cost structure and spending of the city as part of it though…hence, the debate:  public or private money to fund baseball which by all indications the clubs want bigger and better facilities for free.  Nothing is for free.

Lance

Consider this when labeling Richmond a town who doesn’t support it’s sports.  The highest attendance among AAA and AA teams is about 9,000 fans per night.  The Richmond Metropolitan Area is 1.2 million people.  Are you telling me that out of 400 people you know, you can’t think of 3 that would watch a ballgame on a given night?  Really?

And anyone who’s either arguing for the Boulevard, or thinking that the surrounding development is publicly financed hasn’t listened, or hasn’t read the information that has been presented.  Put down your torches, quit your ranting, and you’ll hear people trying to make our city better. 

I’m still waiting for citycynic to propose an alternate use for tax dollars that is beneficial to the City and surrounding area.  So far I’ve heard nothing.  It’s really easy to complain about what someone else has come up with.  Not so easy to propose something yourself - so why bother, right?  Cheers to the easy road.

But keep complaining.  While you’re wasting your time whining, we’ll be moving this City forward - out of the 17th century and into the 21st…not forgetting where we’ve been along the way.  Whine some more and you’ll see people finally stop moving 30+ miles out of the City because it’s too darn far and they waste 20% of their days and lives in a car fighting traffic.  And if you grumble again we’ll restore this City to the epicenter of innovation that it once was. 

Keep objecting - you’re only adding fuel to the fire.

Richmond never has and never will be home to any decent sports club. People here do not change willingly and even IF the city had the money (which it doesn’t due to the fact that more than half the city is below the poverty level) why should it be wasted to bring in a new ballclub when we had a perfectly good Triple A (not the going nowhere Double A we’re trying to suck in) and we couldn’t even renovate the decaying staduim they were in. RBC never looked into moving that stadium outside of the city limits because they wanted all of the revenue to stay within the city limits which was stupid considering how easily (and cheap) it could have been done by branching out into an adjacent county. I don’t blame Atlanta for not wanting the players in a stadium that was basically falling apart and which Richmond took no interest in fixing. Let’s face it, Richmond is steadily going downhill. The city doesn’t even care enough about it’s schools to dump money in there, we certainly don’t need to dump taxpayer dollars into a no name ball club. Long gone are the days when a Richmonder could watch a Richmond Braves player rise into the ranks of the major leagues like Chipper Jones. Face it Richmond, decent baseball went out the window with Wilders mind. And yes I plan on bashing him because he was too busy lending a helping hand to VCU officials in order to get former Chief of Police Rodney Monroe a fake degree to even try and drag money out for this (convenient how Wilder has buildings names after him and a nice cushy $150,000 a year job teaching one class at VCU now). The only thing Wilder succeeded in doing during his stints as governor and mayor was make the racial tensions in this city double what they previously were by his insisting that everything he could get his hands on be racially motivated, all the while he lined his pockets and did nothing to help drag this city, or the citizens he claimed to be fighting for, out of the over impoverished living conditions they still face. The city owes the fact that it hasn’t been completely overtaken by crime to one man, Trani.