heavily-subsidized Lucas Oil Stadium discussed in Reason

From Radley Balko in Reason...

You can forgive football fans in Indianapolis for dropping their nachos when they learned about a glitch in the shiny new Lucas Oil Stadium the city built for the Indianapolis Colts: The facility isn’t waterproof. That came as a surprise, because Colts owner Jim Irsay insisted his new stadium include one of those fancy retractable roofs...The roof added another $15.7 million to the price tag, which had already grown from $500 million when initially sold to the public to more than $720 million...

The city hadn’t even finished paying for the Colts’ prior home, the tax-funded RCA Dome...

To build the new stadium however, the city had to break its lease with the Colts to tear down the old one. Incredibly, the Colts then exercised a clause in the lease penalizing the city $48 million for breaking the earlier contract...The Colts naturally applied the lease termination penalty as part of their “contribution” to the new stadium. In the end, central Indiana taxpayers footed about 90 percent of the bill....