San Bernardino County is a red county.  While it was not always the case historically, this sprawling Inland-Empire County has become a bastion of conservatism.  This is evidenced by the significant partisan advantage that Republicans have in terms of the delegations to Washington, D.C., and to the State Capitol.  But nowhere is this GOP influence felt more than on the local Board of Supervisors.  On that board, you not only have a dominant Republican Super-Majority, but Bill Postmus, the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors is also Chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors.  Postmus has been a friend for many years, and his Chief of Staff, Brad Mitzelfelt, is the San Bernardino Correspondent for the FlashReport!  So I was quite surprised to read in the newspaper a scheme that doesn’t sound very conservative at all…

I cannot tell you how disturbed I was to read an article in the San Bernardino County Sun newspaper that, if accurate, makes it sound like the Republican County Board of Supervisors is seriously considering spending the better part of a million taxpayer dollars to become a ‘major sponsor’ of a local NASCAR California Speedway.  In return for giving this private for-profit speedway a public subsidy, the ‘taxpayers’ would get back in return various promotional goodies such as ‘naming rights’ to a food and entertainment venue within the speedway, there will be advertisements for the county on broadcasts, and — the best part – the logo of the county will be cut right into the grass at the speedway!  There is also a transaction taking place where 1,000 or so tickets are made ‘available’ to the county at the speedway (I guess we will need a new county commission to determine which taxpayers in the county get these tickets, which hopefully are very good at roughly $700 a piece).
 
All of these enticements may be great for a private company that would make such an investment with their limited resources, to market their products or services.  Of course a private company would have to decide whether it was a good expenditure of funds as the roughly $700,000 cost of the sponsorship would cause them to have to raise the price of their products, or perhaps cut into the bottom line for the owners of the company.
 
But we are talking about public officials voting to use public money to subsidize a private venture, in return for "PR value" for — county government? 
 
It is my hope that all of the Supervisors in San Bernardino County will pause before casting this vote, and ask themselves about the proper role for government, and whether taking tax dollars and using them to pay a for-profit racetrack in return for PR value for county government is a legitimate use for tax dollars.
 
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.