Michael O'Hair

The economics of running a symphony and/or a dance troupe are based, like

bike racing, on one thing: get people to show up in large numbers and pay

for seats. There were a couple of excellent articles last Christmas season

on why Balanchine's Nutcracker has become a "Christmas Tradition" to scores

of symphonies. The reason is that a good run of the Nutcracker pays for the

rest of the season's overhead. Think about that for a moment: One week of

dancing mice pays for fifty-one weeks of Beethoven, Bartok, and all the

rest.



My observation on the "bring major league baseball to Portland movement" is

that the main proponents have a strong personal financial interest in doing

so. If there are any accountants in the crowd, maybe they could explain how

the tax breaks work on professional sports teams. It is my understanding

that you can write off the salary load, all of it, the moment you buy a

team. Quite a few years ago, a group of local businessmen bought the

Portland Beavers. They made all sorts of nifty speechs about "home town

values" and "local control" and when the accountants got done, they sold the

team in a flash. Local control or not, the bottom line, fill the seats, was

not being met.



The bottom line is that bike racing and particularly track bike racing is a

minority sport. Alpenrose, bless its quirky bumpy heart, is a great thing.

If anyone can hustle up the cash to build an indoor track, more power to

you, but I'd prefer to see that energy going into supporting existing racing

programs.



----- Original Message -----

From: <mike.m-@obra.org>

 

A couple of points that come to mind reading Rick's note:







- Drawing an analogy between an indoor velodrome and the Oregon Symphony

is

 a bit of a stretch. Corporate support of symphonies is routine. Although

corporate support for sports is also fairly routine there is not much for

bike racing in general and essentially none for track racing.

fans, etc., is pretty tiny in the grand scheme of things; far lower then

the

 number of people involved with the Symphony. I would bet that tickets

sales

 for a single Oregon Symphony performance are close to the total annual

spectators and racers combined at Alpenrose. It is estimated that there

are

 only around 2-3,000 active track racers in the whole US. Even if we could

aspire to the ticket sales to total cost ratio that the Oregon Symphony

has

 that would only net a budget of around $100,000/year with the current

market

 which is below the projected costs.



- Although there appears to be a lot of support for Major League Baseball

that is a project that has really not yet got off the ground. Support is

not

 enough, money is what is needed.





Mike Murray