Few gain, most lose from more BC tennis courts

The reasons why Bossier City wants to bill taxpayers $1.5 million for six tennis courts (plus parking) are Republican City Councilor David Montgomery wants a little more glory, Department of Parks and Recreation Director Clay Bohanan wants a little more control, and Bossier Tennis Center contractor Todd Killen wants a little more money.

This week, the City Council takes up the request, expanding the center by half. The Council conducted a workshop on the matter last week where it heard mostly from proponents from city government and from Killen, who three months ago had his operating contract renewed to the tune of $36,000 annually for three years.

Which, going by the last three years of statements submitted to councilors, doesn’t bring home much for him. Strictly by these numbers, in the 2019-21 period, all he made including the subsidy was $13,184.05 on $528,656.06 in revenues. In fact, he made have lost money over this interval because the 2020 statement uses curious math, registering prior to accounting fees income of just $1,782.84 and then an accounting charge of $17,000 (much higher than the other two years) but which on the statement instead of subtracting as a cost was shown as additional income. Back that out and he lost in reality $20,815.95.

This begs the question: earlier this year, why did he want to keep the contract in the first place? Accepting the reckoning as presented, he must have spent thousands of hours over the years to make less than minimum wage or even lose money. The answer is twofold: by running the center, he can use the premises to generate off-books revenue not associated with the entity contracted with the city, Killen’s Court LLC (currently not in good standing with the state, by the way) that goes directly into his pocket and as director he can leverage that position into expanding the center to increase both his on- and off-books revenues.

In this task, he’ll get help from Bohanan, who in deliberations about expanding diamond facilities to the tune of $3 million earlier this year explicated a philosophy that the city should generate as much revenue as possible from facilities particularly by attracting non-residents especially through tournaments at the expense of allowing residents to use their own facilities for which they paid, as well as giving special interests exclusive control over use of some fields. His view that parks and recreation represents a profit center rather than provides a subsidized service first and by far foremost for city residents finds perfect expression with the expansion, for Killen spoke glowingly about how with it the possibility of attracting tournaments escalates markedly.

What makes the plan even more outrageous is that it will benefit so few residents. Neither Killen nor Bohanan ever have produced verifiable figures about center usage. In public they have mouthed words about visits (the latest promulgated by Bohanan was 41,000 this year) or paid memberships, but all the anecdotal evidence points to that an incredibly small fraction of city residents use the existing courts and that a significant portion of use comes from non-residents.

The idea behind parks and recreation is to allow residents to pursue popular pastimes at reduced or no cost, subsidized by residents. Yet as an investment of tax dollars it makes sense only if a significant portion of the population can be expected to want to avail themselves of that service, with swimming pools and fields for diamond sports and other team sports undoubted attracting ten thousand or more city residents a year as an example of prudent capital expenditures. Otherwise, it’s merely an exercise in the many subsidizing the desires of a very few – and allowing mandarins like Bohanan to puff out their chests and stroke their own egos by showing off and crowing about this bauble while doing what bureaucrats do best, accumulating more resources and therefore more control.

He wouldn’t be the only one. Montgomery, along with a few others past and present on the Council, has dedicated an entire electoral career to constructing monuments to himself, with the attendant puffery, at enormous citizen expense paid by high, if not entirely needless, taxes and budgetary sacrifice elsewhere: look no further than a city debt approaching $500 million devouring more than $16 million a year of interest payments (which understates a coming deluge as city bond deals typically have both principal amounts repaid and interest rates rising throughout) that prevented permanent pay raises next year for many city employees in the face of raging price inflation triggered by debt-fueled Washington spending that Montgomery has emulated on the capital side back home.

His plea to scoop the money out of the $60 million the city borrowed in 2018, a bond issue for no other purpose than to create a slush fund to spend on whatever scheme caught politicians’ fancy, makes this case particularly egregious. That money carries a 4 to 5 percent interest rate attached through 2034, so even at the lowest rate the true cost of the courts is $2.3 million.

For convenience sake, let’s say the courts’ life is 23 years. That means taxpayers cough up $100,000 a year for 23 years so that a very small group of their own can play more tennis and perhaps bring in more outsiders forking over fees, as well as some sales and occupancy tax bucks from travelers; let’s assume that latter figure (optimistically) comes out to $2,910 a year. In order for the enterprise to break even at the highest rate ($3.50 per hour per person; many pay lower through discounts or memberships) charged, that means all six of the new courts each would have to attract – assuming all other courts are occupied, because otherwise you don’t need the excess capacity – 12 hours and 40 minutes a day of person-hours, each and every day of the year, for 23 straight years just to pay the debt.

In other words, the Killen/Bohanan argument that new courts will allow for greater revenue capture is highly unlikely to offset the debt. Of course, even thinking in terms of the facilities acting as a profit center invites the question about whether the city ought to be in the business in the first place, instead of selling out and letting the private sector handle it. And the Montgomery argument that, as he has pontificated, the city has to do something like this to improve recreational opportunities lies defeated in that it provides such for so few residents yet demands that all pay for it. If he really meant what he claimed, instead of advocating for frittering away more of citizens’ hard-earned dollars he would get on Bohanan to find ways to increase citizen access to ball diamonds.

Not that the people really want this particular thing. No one has presented any evidence of great demand for more tennis courts by the general public. I invited readers, mostly city residents, to opine about whether they wanted $1.5 million spent this way. 22 responded; every single one gave it a thumbs down.

America’s biggest small town has a history of stupid spending, which has accelerated dramatically in the past quarter-century, where the benefits of which vastly disproportionately accrue, whether monetarily or more intangibly, to a handful of insiders. Blowing bucks on more tennis courts follows the sordid tradition, embraced in this instance by Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler. The Council needs to reject his wasteful request.