Mad World
Embrace The Obvious
By Mark Madden

Sometimes the best solution is the obvious one.

A host of (mostly empty) rhetoric has been exchanged. Plans were submitted, propaganda unleashed, promises made.

Now, as the hour of reckoning draws closer, let's embrace the obvious: The Isle of Capri slots license proposal is what's best for both city and county. Not just what's best for the Penguins. Not just what's best for hockey fans. But what's best for the entire region.

The Isle of Capri plan pays for a $290 million multi-purpose arena. The Harrah's plan provides unspecified, vague givebacks that total less than $30 million. You can wrap up the argument right there. This subject isn't debatable. Logic picks the winner, by a cool margin of more than $260 million.

Money for the arena doesn't come out of slots revenue. Isle of Capri pays for the arena off the top. The arena costs Isle of Capri, not the city or county. Tax money raised by Isle of Capri slots doesn't drop one iota because of the arena. There's no debt service.

Harrah's tells us their casino (with basically the same number of slots as Isle of Capri) would somehow produce nearly twice as much money as other proposed casinos. But Harrah's has grotesquely overestimated revenue in nearly every casino proposal it's made for years. In this case, overestimation = lying. Station Square does not need revitalized. Uptown does.

The Isle of Capri plan isn't too good to be true. It's good, and also true. Yet debate lingers, spurred largely by aging, uninformed contrarians who seek to magically transform money for a new arena into, say, better playgrounds for school kids even though there's no way to connect those dots.

The fact remains that there is no logical way to conclude that the Isle of Capri proposal isn't what's best for the city and county. Those who argue against it speak in vagaries and generalities, often with forked tongue. Nothing concrete is ever attached to Harrah's. The Isle of Capri plan, meanwhile, is continually presented as giving the Penguins something at the expense of something else. What is "something"? What is "something else"? Good questions. If ever a city needed a quality newspaper with incisive reporting, it's this city on this issue.

The two men who could put this into focus, won't.

Mayor Bob O'Connor and County Executive Dan Onorato are, by job description, supposed to do what's best for this region. But, as regards this situation, both prevent themselves from doing so because of their unholy alliance with Gov. Ed Rendell, who has his own little alliance with the Harrah's plan.

Spurred by pangs of guilt-or perhaps criticism from irate voters-O'Connor and Onorato now blather on about "Plan B."

Mario Lemieux is tired of this game. He doesn't want to talk about Plan B. Either give Isle of Capri the slots license, or he sells the Penguins to a buyer who moves them out of town. Mario was told to come up with a plan for private funding. He did. Now it's not good enough.

O'Connor and Onorato need to do the obvious. Do what's best for the region. Publicly and forcefully back the Isle of Capri plan. Put heat on the governor, not act as his puppets. Simply put, they need to do their jobs.

I'm not sure that would guarantee a favorable result, but at least it would be embracing the obvious. That's the only real hope proponents of a new arena have at this point. Eliminate a debate that never should have existed in the first place.

Either that, or settle for being Green Bay.

Mark Madden hosts a sports talk show 3-7 p.m. weekdays on ESPN Radio 1250.