Aim that Austin’s soccer stadium deal is $1B giveaway draws red card

It’s an alarming contention: The Austin City Council is poised to “give” more than $1 billion to a private company and receive nothing in return as it seeks to lure a Major League Soccer team here.

The anti-stadium political action committee making the claim of a “$1 billion giveaway” — called Austin for a Better Future — drives home the size of the sum in an internet video by conjuring a wish list of alternative uses for the money.By Wednesday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than 20,000 times.

“Imagine what else we could do with another billion dollars to make our city even better,” intones the video’s narrator. He raises the prospect of using the money to instead fund annual pay raises for Austin school teachers, “full-ride scholarships” to the University of Texas for every local high school graduate or newly built homes “for every single homeless person in the city of Austin.”

Setting aside that no formal proposals exist to spend $1 billion on any of those items, we were curious whether it’s accurate to say the City Council will be handing such an amount to a private company and getting nothing in return if it approves the agreement for the soccer stadium as it currently is formulated?

A representative of the anti-stadium group contacted by PolitiFact Texas said the $1 billion figure is based on simple math and actually is conservative.

But two professors who study publicly funded economic incentives said the group’s analysis

It’s summer. School’s out. The pools are open. And ice cream eaten when the temperature is above 95 has no calories. So raise your hand if you’re ready for even more happy news. (Hey, Mr. Grumpy in Cedar Park, I saw you. Get that hand in the air.)

Sometimes happy news is magnified when it evolves from sad news. Let’s rewind back to last December when I told you about a nice man and great newsman named Jamie Dupree, a radio reporter whom I knew back when I worked with him in at the Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau.

Due to an odd and untreatable malady, Dupree lost ing that employer didn’t.

OK, ready to get happy? Dupree’s back on the air. I’m going to let him explain it as he did in a June 17 blog posting headlined “Pulling back the curtain on Jamie Dupree 2.0.”

“Monday marks the start of a new effort to get my voice back on the radio for the first time in two years, by using a hightech solution, a computer-gen-