Bowl game gamble

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The Charleston-area lawmakers who committed $380,000 of the House's recently passed budget to establish a college postseason bowl game have lost perspective of our state's priorities. South Carolina has too many basic needs that will go unmet to spend, over a 15-year period, $5.7 million on the proposed Palmetto Bowl. It's a gamble undeserving of tax revenue that is already too short to cover the costs of putting enough teachers in our classrooms, enough guards in our prisons and enough state troopers on our deadly highways.

Bowl organizers have managed to draw positive interest from ESPN. But the proposed game lacks a suitable facility. Johnson Hagood Stadium, where The Citadel plays its home games, seats just 21,000 fans, or 14,000 seats short of the NCAA standard. The public money would be spent to expand the stadium.

But new bowls have an extraordinarily high failure rate. So a stadium expansion — which The Citadel says it doesn't need — could mean public dollars being spent to lure a bowl that could be history in a couple of years. That's consistently been the fate of bowls played in the days before Christmas, when fans are reluctant to travel.

Lawmakers who favor the bowl characterize it as money well spent on economic development. But that's, at best, a generous characterization. This game doesn't provide direct jobs nor does it possess the clear, concrete benefits this state demands before it starts writing checks to subsidize private business. Little about this game is clear or concrete.

The Senate should exclude this expenditure from its version of the budget. And if it survives and reaches the governor's desk, then Gov. Sanford should veto it.