Super Bowl tax break legislation sent to Deal

Bill that satisfies an NFL demand includes a sales tax holiday.

Georgia back-to-school shoppers will again get a sales tax break, as will Super Bowl attendees if Atlanta gets picked to host the big game, under legislation given final approval by the Senate on Tuesday.

The measure, House Bill 951, now heads to Gov. Nathan Deal for his signature.

The legislation passed the Senate 38-14, but not before critics in both parties raised questions about taxpayers footing the bill to attract the Super Bowl to Atlanta. They used words and phrases such as “extortion” and “crony capitalism” to describe the National Football League’s demand for a sales tax break on tickets, estimated to cost

Georgia about $10 million.

“This is not for hardworking Georgians, this isn’t about our fellow citizens helping mom and pop businesses,” said state Sen. Harold Jones, D-Augusta. “This is about a multibillion-dollar industry saying it needs an extra $10 million.”

But the governor’s Senate floor leader, state Sen. Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, called it “good for economic development, good for Atlanta, good for Georgia.”

The NFL sent the Metro Atlanta Chamber an email in January saying the league requires host cities to exempt sales taxes on Super Bowl tickets.

Miller said hosting a Super Bowl would bring $400 million or more in economic benefits from spending by visitors on hotels, meals and other things. That, Miller said, would more than pay the state and city back for lost sales tax revenue on tickets.

Miller said other onetime sporting events, such as college basketball’s Final Four, could also qualify for the break on tickets.

The Atlanta Sports Council — along with Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed — backed the ticket bill in hopes of persuading the National Football League to bring the Super Bowl to Atlanta to showcase the Falcons stadium now under construction.

But anything involving tax breaks that help bigmoney sporting events, and team owners, is sure to spark debate. Particularly in Atlanta, where the city has put big money into the new Falcons stadium and the state has borrowed more than $40 million to build a parking deck for the facility.

Atlanta has already committed $200 million in bonds backed by hotelmotel taxes for construction of the nearly $1.5 billion stadium.

State Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, said most estimates of the economic impact of attracting Super Bowls are funded by cities wanting to justify bidding for the game.

“How much (tax) money has been sacrificed at the altar of bringing the Super Bowl to Atlanta?” McKoon asked. “The point is we should not be creating winners and losers in our tax policy. We should not have a tax policy that favors these kind of sporting events over other events.”

State Sen. Mike Crane, R-Newnan, called it “extortion” and questioned why the state needed to give a tax break on tickets that cost thousands of dollars. The average ticket to this year’s Super Bowl cost more than $4,000.

“We do not have to bow at the altar of economic interests ... bow at the knee of the NFL,” he said.

State Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, described it as the “greedy getting richer.”

“We are getting black- mailed voluntarily,” he said. “When is enough going to be enough?”

But state Sen. Jeff Mullis, R-Chickamauga, said the entire state would benefit from fans coming to Atlanta for the Super Bowl, both through increased tax money from nonticket sales — an estimated $30 million in extra sales taxes — as well as from income earned by hotels, restaurants, gas stations and other businesses.

While the Super Bowl tax break produced about an hour’s worth of debate in the Senate, few mentioned the sales tax holiday, which the state has held off and on for more than a decade.

If signed into law, the back-to-school sales tax holiday will be July 3031. A similar tax break for energy-efficient products will be held Sept. 30Oct. 2. Estimates are that the sales tax holiday costs state and local governments — and saves shoppers — about $70 million a year.