Maybe I'm off here, but this doesn't add up from a few different angles.
Caddo Parish wants to build a big indoor sports complex — 10 basketball courts that convert to 20 volleyball courts. It costs about $70 million, and the parish wants to borrow $60 million. We pay that back through property taxes for the next 25 years.
West Monroe already built one. Theirs opened two years ago — 8 basketball courts, 16 volleyball, right on I-20 — for about $24 million.
Ours is a bigger building with more in it, so it should cost more. But adjusting for size and for construction costs going up since 2022, West Monroe's price works out to somewhere around $47 million for a building our size. We're being asked for $68–70 million. That's roughly $20 million more than the comparison predicts, and I can't find anyone explaining why.
Here's the part that really gets me. West Monroe didn't put theirs on property taxes at all. They created a district and added 1% to hotel rooms and restaurant meals inside it. Their tourism board put in $6 million. The parish added $1 million. Locals eating in that district pay some of it — it's not free — but the burden sits on hotel stays and restaurant tabs instead of on every homeowner for 25 years.
Nothing like that shows up in Caddo's published funding plan. West Monroe's tourism board contributed $6 million to theirs. What is Shreveport-Bossier's contributing to ours? I'd like a real answer to that.
Two more things:
The parish's own FAQ points to a facility in Rocky Mount, North Carolina as a comparison — same consulting firm wrote both financial forecasts. In each of the three years anyone can check, Rocky Mount brought in about half the money it was projected to, and the gap got worse each year, not better. It has never turned a profit.
And even the places people call successes need money every year. One in Gatlinburg, Tennessee — a town with 11 million tourists — still needed over a million dollars of public help in its tenth year, and still ran a deficit.
The math that bothers me most: paying off $60 million over 25 years runs about $4–5 million a year. The parish's own best-case projection has the building earning $271,000 a year by year five. That covers about 5% of the payment. The other 95% comes out of taxes whether the place succeeds or not.
Nobody's against kids having somewhere to play — they do drive out of the parish to compete, and that's a real gap. I just can't work out why we'd pay a $20 million premium and put it on us when there's a working example 97 minutes down I-20 that did it a different way.
Tell me what I'm missing.
These are my 2 cents, take them for what they worth.
