Downtown Wichita arena as a public good

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The streets and highways, and certainly the public parks, are examples of public goods. Public goods are characterized by two things: nonexcludability, meaning that non-payers can’t be excluded from enjoying and using the good, and nonrivalrous consumption, meaning that consumption of the good by one person doesn’t reduce the availability of the good to others. Neither applies to an arena.

Roads and highways, to a large extent, are paid for by those who use them. As far as I know, I paid for the entire cost of street in front of my house through special tax assessments. It is reasonable that I pay for that street, as I use it extensively. In the broader case, a large source of funding for roads and highways is the gasoline tax, which is an attempt to ask those who use and benefit from the resource to pay for it.

Some roads, such as toll roads, require their users, and potentially only their users, to pay for them.

The proposed downtown Wichita arena or Kansas Coliseum benefits only those who actually attend events. This is especially so in the case of the Coliseum, as downtown arena supporters readily point out that there has been no development surrounding it. We can easily identify those who benefit from an arena or stadium because they rent the facility or buy tickets to attend events. So it is very easy to ask them, and no one else, to pay.

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