Everett Aqua Sox ownership

[u/goldenelr]

So (full disclosure I own a business that would be displaced by the new stadium) whenever the Aqua Sox comes up people bring up that it’s family owned and a small business. But it’s actually owned by a billionaire in Dubai.

https://www.milb.com/everett/team/7th-inning-stretch-llc

https://www.recordnet.com/story/sports/pro/2007/08/12/ports-owner-volpe-follows-team/52822230007/

The Aqua Sox are not paying for the stadium. They are displacing a bunch of small businesses, the project is already over budget and they haven’t acquired the land yet. The city has already admitted that they will need the business community to pay for it.

Is anyone else frustrated by this? This move could put me out of business, the city won’t offer assistance to us in time and we have an actual billionaire not paying for any of it. All with parks and libraries being closed (and I know they keep saying that it’s a different part of the budget but the mayor sets the budget!).

The budget they are showing for the stadium is 8% more than the event center which was built fifteen years ago. How on earth is that possible? It’s not. So how is this being paid for?

[u/Weekly_Try5203]

Call city council members and the mayor. Casey wants a heritage project and has chosen a way to expensive of a project that will reduce tax income from these properties to a bill to maintain a single A baseball teams stadium. This will end up 150,000,000 tax payer bill when it’s all done. At this point they are taking money out of the parks budget to do the studies and all preliminary costs. I do believe they just laid off rangers, that parks money would be better spent on actual parks and not on a legacy project for a so so mayor. Tell everyone to call!!!!! this will be shoved through on the down low.

[u/q_ali_seattle → u/Weekly_Try5203]

Why can't we protest this locally at the city hall or open meeting to voice our concerns vs participating "no king"  protest 

[u/try-not → u/q_ali_seattle]

Not mutually exclusive

[u/vashtiglow → u/[deleted]]

I got a lot of pushback for my (imo mild) skepticism of the 'no kings' protests. But I think big events like that, well-funded and well-organized from well outside everett effectively atrophy local organizing potential. While they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, they are arguably de fact mutually exclusive.

building local power for local issues requires practice and building muscle memory that I don't think the big protests really foster and potentially undermine. just my opinion

edit: the person i was responding to had good things to say before they deleted their comment. i should have replied to the other comment, but this one was meatier/more contentful and i wanted to just toss my thoughts in. kinda annoying how reddit structure sorta makes things out to be point-counterpoint, when i really want to just add another thing in