The issue at hand involves sports stadium construction legislation that currently allows sports franchise owners to publicly finance professional sports stadiums via eminent domain legislation and tax-exempt private-activity bonds. Such issues also represent a potential violation of antitrust law from the monopoly power of National Football League teams.
The pending federal Bill S.1313 states that ôàthe power of eminent domain shall be available only for public use and that the term æpublic useÆ shall not be construed to include economic developmentö (Current, 2005, p. 1). This proposed law would apply to all exercises of eminent domain on the federal and/or state level. While Congress banned the use of tax-exempt private-activity bonds in 1986, government bonds ôàcan be issued for sports stadiums as long as state and local government issuers do not violate both of the 10% private-use and private-payment limits of the private-activity bond restrictionsö (Bond, 2005, p. 37).
While providing a stadium for a pro team would normally violate the private-use test, issuers have been able to use tax-exempt bonds to finance professional sports stadiums because they structure deals that pass the private-payment test by requiring teams to pay rent representing less than 10% of the debt service on such facilities, (Bond, 2005). A primary example of the application of eminent domain and tax-exempt bond financing of professional sports stadiums comes from Jerry JonesÆ, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, recent efforts to publicly finance a new stadium. Jones cannot use the three reasons primarily used by franchise owners to win support for public financing. He cannot maintain the team needs a state-of-the-art facility to compete, since Texas Stadium has more luxury stadiums than any National Football League stadium and the Cowboys won 3 Super Bowls in the 1990s (McGraw, 2005). He cannot maintain
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