It is, was and always will be a waste of money to finance and make deals with professional sports teams and companies.. Baseball Village will only last as long as the original leases are signed… Rent is to expensive and just like St. Louis centre, the tax payer will be stuck with the bill… On it’s face value we had to spend tax payer money so baseball players can make a couple extra million a year.. Nothing unique will come of it unless you want to call Applebee’s and TGI fridays unique, cause nobody else is stupid enough to sign those type of leases.. T.I.F. Tax Incremented Fraud.. Now lets start investigating and throwing criminals in jail!

I find it incredibly frustrating that old Busch, a one-of-a-kind landmark, was torn down to be replaced by a retro-styled design, replete with cheap cinder-block internal buildings, lines-of-sight that are hardly better, and less seating! I hate it. I don’t know what the new stadium brings if not some new downtown development, and that is obviously failing. The Kiel Opera House, the Bottle District, Chouteau’s Landing, downtown I-70 lid, riverfront improvements, and Gateway Mall improvements - the leaders must stop talking and start doing. A new casino and a worthless park in front of the Eagleton Courthouse do not get them to a passing grade. In fact, without Ballpark Village, I would say they are beyond regaining our trust.

I am disappointed by the POLL: “Who do you blame for the collapse of the Centene Project” - there should have been another choice in order to blame the Iranians. That way when Heir Bush can use it as a reason to start a thermonuclear war (an idea that’s really popular with the typical “off their meds” Post reader)

The blame should be placed on Centene!! Although details have not come out about HOW this deal fell apart, there are more than enough signs to show that Centene was blowing smoke this entire time. Lets recap: Company comes up with a major development plan containing 2 towers on an entire block of Clayton. Company asks Clayton for incentives and to secure the remaining properties, all of which were of productive use and in good condition (hence the court ruling there was no reason they be condemned!!). Instead of working with Clayton, revising their plan to fit (1 tower apparently wasnt good enough for Clayton but it was for downtown?) they state their intentions to “look at their options”, meaning they were looking for more handouts and subsidies.

The city offers just about everything possible to get them down there and build their tower. During this courting period, their financial performance is called into question. Fast forward to last week. Said property is now put back on the market in Clayton, and Centene coincidentally announces the deal at BPV is off and once again they are “Looking at all their options including other states”. Just where do they get off thinking they have this kind of leverage, especially since I doubt many in STL have even heard of Centene before these announcements? Being a business in a metro area with a stagnant population growth and a fragmented mess of cities willing to fight over tax revenue certainly does have its advantages, doesnt it?

Cordish should not get a free pass, but lets not be so quick to blame Cordish and the Cardinals over a mess that was started and ended by a company that continues to believe it is entitled to be handed its corporate headquarters on a silver platter.

The Kiel Opera House, the Bottle District, Chouteau’s Landing, the “infamous” downtown I-70 lid (to connect d-town), riverfront improvements, and Gateway Mall improvements, the names, the ideas, the lists they go on and on. This city is all talk and zero action. Yes I have been at times very hard on the people of STL due to the perverbial high school question, but somehow, this region needs to function as a metro area with a true identity. When pople come to STL for buisiness they are not thinking Wildwood or Lajew, they are thinking d-town, lights, action, people, pulse. In d-town STL you hear the sound of a flat line.

Slowly this region continues to fall out of relevence and is known basically for that overrated arch with it’s view of..hmmm STL and A-B. Nashville, Louisville, Indy, Cincy…are all surpassing STL in population size (eventually) they have better skylines and density with peole living working and playing d-town, while STL is about Cardinal baseball, cheap A-B products (there is real beer out there people) and then the mad dash on hwy 40 to get home to the burbs so we can brag we were at the game albiet on the cell phone.

Centene will probably leave the area totally, and that would yet again, be another company to say F- STL. Customer service jobs are casuing a brain drain in the area, no way the region prospers with those idiot jobs. I love STL, but it makes me shed a tear watching it crash and burn all while other cities get it and are making it work. Sad, but no city drops the ball when a corporate giant comes knocking. Also, regarding Cordish, don’t always pick the lowest bidder Mr Slay.

Ever consider that West Berlin and East Berlin Reunited after 40+ years of divide and we can’t even get the two sides of Skinker together. Hell, we don’t even have a wall dividing us. Just narrow minded parochialism. Its sad to think that all we do is talk a good game, draw up elaborate plans and then point the fingers when they fail to materialize. Definitely a STL mindset.

What is amazing to me is that some people here are professing such shock and new outrage at this. C’mon, folks — Ball Park Village has been a pipe dream from the first day the fat cats sat down in the back room and cooked up a way to have the St. Louis taxpayers finance their business venture. But we cannot lay this debacle at Francis Slay’s door. The big money all lined up like sheep behind a bunch of slickster cronies that never had St. Louis’ interests in mind and let them extort our cooperation with their implied threat to move our precious Cardinals. All the movers and shakers - and many thousands of Cardinal fans, all kowtowed to the notion that our city would prosper if we built a fancy new sports venue - a notion long disproven in umpteen other cities.

Sorry, folks, but the same folly that leads the majority of our populace to drastically overvalue sports has been brought home one more time, by — you guessed it — us. And For every one of you who voices anger and disgust at Mayor Slay and the Cardinals’ ownership, there are five of you who cheered when you heard the new stadium was going to happen, then saw how fast you could line up to buy season tickets. And now you pay ridiculous amounts of money to watch a bunch of lazy athletes that don’t give the proverbial rat’s patootie about St. Louis go about the business of getting richer.

Congratulations, St. Louis.

When, oh when, will we ever learn?

I’m a native from St. Louis that lives in Houston now for the past ten years and it seems to me that not much has changed back home. When I saw that Baseball Village plan along with the Bottle District and Loft District being planned there I actually became excited. But just like the Kiel Opera House plan seems like St. Louis still won’t be able to compete on an equal scale with other cities and make it the grnad place that it once was over 40 years ago when it was the 10th largest city in the country. In fact I was shocked to see that Amtrak after all these years is finally getting a new station. My late but great buddy Greg Freeman would have been happy about that. Maybe one day the great hole next to new Busch will be something worth looking at if not a parking lot for tail gaters before ball games.

Would you just fill Lake Dewitt with water, put a fountain in the middle, grass around the edges, and forget about Ballpark Village? Something said “we’re never going to build anything on this site” when a so-called temporary parking lot went in on Broadway. I’ve given up yelling “BUILD SOMETHING” when I drive by every day.

Anything will spruce up the area for the All Star Game rather than the giant mud pit we have now. But why get ahead of ourselves? We’ll probably lose that too.

Idiot Cardinal fans grease the Cardinal Machine. They allow themselves and the region to be screwed like this.

So, the Cardinals won the Series in 2006………big deal. I could care less.

People need to quit going to the games and paying their hard earned money to these robber barons.