Sports vs Courts | Being Good Stewards of Taxpayers’ Money

North Carolina court funding and Charlotte sports stadium subsidies reveal a familiar pattern in local and state government spending. When a wealthy team owner has enough leverage, public officials find a funding mechanism, whether the decision is made at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center or on Jones Street in Raleigh. Charlotte has been my permanent home for more than forty-three years. For more than thirty-four of those years, since graduating from law school, I have practiced law in Mecklenburg County courts. Throughout that time, I have heard a different message whenever the subject is the court system, mental-health treatment, transit safety, working highway lights, road maintenance, or meaningful traffic relief. Then we hear about shortages, divided authority, restricted accounts, delayed projects, and limited revenue.

I am not against sports. I am against using public money to enrich billionaire team owners while public institutions struggle to perform basic duties. When I go out to eat in Mecklenburg County, I pay the county’s additional 1 percent tax on prepared food and beverages, just like everyone else in town. While not a property tax, it still involves the government taking money and giving it to someone else. Calling it hospitality revenue, tourism money, or a restricted fund does not change its source. The restriction may control where government spends the money, but it does not make the money private.

And frankly, I do not care how government packages it. Public officials take tax revenue paid by locals and visitors and use it to subsidize capital improvements that benefit billionaire-owned sports enterprises. Spare me the greater-good and world-class-city malarkey. Decades of economic research have found that stadium subsidies generally produce fiscal returns and job growth far below their public cost. Much of the claimed economic activity is simply spending shifted from one part of the local economy to another.

The issue is not whether sports have value. They do. The issue is why government repeatedly underwrites private capital while pleading poverty when asked to fund courts, mental-health services, public safety, transportation, infrastructure, and the employees who keep those systems running. That is not a partisan argument, or at least it should not be. It does call into question public priorities and being a good steward of public resources.

The Carolina Panthers are now valued at $8.1 billion. David Tepper paid about $2.28 billion for the team and Bank of America Stadium in 2018. That’s roughly 3.5 times the purchase price. Tepper’s personal wealth is estimated at about $24 billion. Yet Charlotte has committed $650 million in public financing to renovate the stadium.

The City of Charlotte has also committed $275 million to Spectrum Center and related Hornets projects. The Charlotte Knights are now seeking $26.6 million from Charlotte and Mecklenburg County for a ballpark that opened in 2014. If the Knights request receives approval, the combined public commitments and request for the three facilities would reach $951.6 million before interest and other public costs.

Meanwhile, North Carolina has acknowledged shortages in mental-health treatment capacity, workforce capacity, and legal-system capacity. Mecklenburg’s jail is already overcrowded, and the final bill for Iryna’s law hasn’t yet been fully tabulated. Our courts lack enough people and courtroom time. State and federal auditors have documented serious CATS failures. Charlotte reports about 170 miles of unlit thoroughfares and more than 200 street segments without a dedicated funding source for lighting. Drivers sit in traffic or pay a private concessionaire tied to a Spanish company for a faster trip on I-77.

That is not scarcity alone. It is a choice about who receives public help. It’s about the government’s levying taxes and stewardship, or lack thereof.

Sports vs Basic Public Duties, Like the Justice System in Mecklenburg County

Government exists to perform work that private businesses will not perform for the public as a whole. Courts administer justice. Mental-health systems provide treatment and crisis response. Transportation agencies maintain roads, lights, buses, and rail lines. Public employees process cases, supervise detention facilities, answer emergency 911 calls, repair streets, and keep public systems running.

A professional sports owner operates a private business. That owner receives ticket revenue, suite revenue, concessions, sponsorships, media rights, naming-rights income, franchise-value appreciation, and sale proceeds. The owner should also carry the cost of the building and land used by that business.

Charlotte has already committed $925 million to Panthers and Hornets facilities. The proposed Knights contribution would raise the figure to $951.6 million. The total does not include financing costs, public traffic services, favorable leases, or later demands.

Officials respond that much of this money comes from hospitality taxes that cannot presently pay prosecutors, judges, treatment providers, or road crews. That is legally accurate and politically incomplete. The General Assembly wrote those restrictions. The General Assembly extended the relevant tax authority through 2060. City officials then chose eligible sports projects over other eligible uses.

A restricted account is still public money. A restriction written by lawmakers is still a policy decision. Taxpayers should not accept the government defending a collection of excuses and failed promises.

The Meals Tax | It Isn’t Just a Tax on Visitors

Charlotte officials have said the Panthers stadium deal required no new tax. That explanation fits what my grandfather, Robert L., used to call “Prevarication . . . Two-Thirds of a Lie.” The statement may be technically accurate, but an existing tax is not free money. Prevarication involves telling part of the truth while omitting facts that would change the conclusion a reasonable listener might draw.

Charlotte did not create a new tax for the deal. It committed hundreds of millions of dollars collected through existing taxes that North Carolina law authorizes Mecklenburg County to impose until 2060, long after I will be dead and gone.

The city’s approved stadium terms authorize the $650 million contribution through debt or credit facilities. The City of Charlotte expects (hopes) to pay that debt primarily with Mecklenburg’s prepared-food-and-beverage tax and hotel occupancy tax. The North Carolina State Treasurer confirms that those revenue streams should pay debt service.

When you buy lunch, take your family to dinner, order takeout, or meet a client at a Charlotte restaurant, you help fund that revenue stream. Tourists contribute too. Visitors don’t erase the payments made by Mecklenburg locals.

“It is not property tax money” does not answer whether the spending is wise. It only identifies the account. It’s also more than a bit of prevarication.

Panthers Billionaire’s Asset | More Than Triple in Value

The current numbers make the public subsidy harder to defend. WSOC reports that Forbes values the Panthers at $8.1 billion. Tepper paid about $2.28 billion in 2018. That is an estimated increase of roughly $5.8 billion and a current value about 3.6 times the purchase price.

Charlotte does not receive a share of that appreciation. Taxpayers do not receive equity in the Panthers. They do not share in future sale proceeds.

They do, however, carry $650 million of the stadium project. Tepper Sports & Entertainment later raised its private contribution, bringing total project spending above $1.3 billion while the city commitment remained $650 million. More private money is preferable to less. It does not explain why the public must contribute hundreds of millions to a business owned by one of the wealthiest people in the country.

The approved agreement also requires negotiations about a possible new stadium to begin by April 1, 2037. The current deal contains the beginning of the next demand.

This is the familiar cycle. The public finances improvements. The owner retains the appreciating franchise. Years later, the facility is called outdated. Another jurisdiction becomes leverage. Elected officials warn that the team may leave.

Frankly, I do not care if a team leaves because taxpayers decline to finance another private facility. Charlotte’s economy does not depend on surrendering to every relocation threat.

The Choice to Fund Billionaire Stadiums While Courts and Mental Health Remain Underfunded

Iryna Zarutska’s murder on a CATS light-rail train was a human tragedy and a public failure. Her name should not become a slogan that substitutes punishment for functioning institutions.

North Carolina enacted Session Law 2025-93, known as Iryna’s Law, after her death. The law changed pretrial-release rules, expanded the use of electronic monitoring and mental-health evaluations in specified cases, changed commitment procedures, and ordered a broad study of mental health in the justice system.

A statute can assign duties. It cannot create a treatment bed, hire a clinician, add a prosecutor, open a courtroom, train a detention officer, or install a monitoring system.

The General Assembly’s own research process has already identified treatment capacity, workforce capacity, and legal-system capacity as pressure points for implementation. The North Carolina Collaboratory’s April 2026 preliminary report describes gaps across crisis response, evaluation, commitment, jail-based care, reentry, courts, and community treatment.

The legislature later directed DHHS to develop a plan for what Session Law 2026-38 calls the “ongoing shortage” of staffed and available behavioral-health beds in state facilities. The same law identifies staffing deficiencies that keep existing beds from being used.

That is the public-safety problem in plain language. North Carolina can tighten release rules, but if treatment and court capacity remain inadequate, the burden moves to county jails, sheriffs, court staff, families, police, and the public.

That burden is already visible. Mecklenburg’s main detention center was built for 1,791 people but held more than 2,200 in early September 2026, according to reporting on the reopening of Jail North. Sheriff Garry McFadden reports that the jail population had grown by about 700 since January, shortly after major provisions of Iryna’s Law took effect.

A government that passes stricter rules without paying for the people and facilities needed to apply them has not solved the problem. It has reassigned the cost.

Mental-health care and criminal accountability are not competing ideas. A safe community needs both. It needs accessible treatment before a crisis, secure care when a person presents a danger, lawful release decisions, enough detention capacity, timely competency evaluations, and courts that can hear cases without years of delay.

Those are public responsibilities. A luxury concourse is not.

CATS Security Failures Expose Charlotte’s Spending Priorities

Criticism of CATS security failures and Iryna’s law is not criticism of public transit. Charlotte needs dependable transit. That makes competent management more important.

The North Carolina State Auditor’s August 2026 report found serious weaknesses in security, fare enforcement, coordination with police, and project execution.

CATS estimated that 45 percent of bus and rail riders did not pay a fare, including an estimated 60 percent on light rail. The auditor estimated lost fare revenue of $5 million to $6.5 million each year. CATS collected only $550 in light-rail fare-evasion fines in state fiscal year 2025.

At the time of Zarutska’s murder, CATS cameras lacked a direct connection to CMPD’s Real Time Crime Center. Only two CMPD officers had been assigned to the Metro Transit Unit. The exclusion list for banned riders lacked a clear enforcement process. The auditor also found that CATS spent only about 21 percent of its fiscal year 2025 budget for planned safety and security equipment, leaving about $1.7 million unspent.

The Federal Transit Administration issued 18 findings of noncompliance in February 2026. The state auditor also reported that CATS used federal defense guidelines for its system risk assessment instead of federal transit guidelines.

The city says it has made changes since the murder. Its response cites expanded off-duty police and sheriff coverage, a new safety plan, a direct camera connection, fare-enforcement staff, and a $10 million increase in fiscal year 2027 transit-security spending. Those actions deserve fair acknowledgment.

They also prove the larger point. Money and personnel appeared after a fatal failure, state scrutiny, and public anger. The system should not require catastrophe before management performs basic work.

Before Charlotte gives another sports owner public money, officials should explain why security funds went unspent, why fare losses continued, why police coordination remained so thin, and why federal intervention was needed.

Underfunded Courts Cannot Carry Every New Mandate

I work in the Mecklenburg County court system and have done so for more than 34 years (since 1992). Delay is not an abstraction there. It affects victims waiting for resolution, defendants waiting for trial, witnesses whose memories fade, families living with uncertainty, lawyers preparing crowded calendars, and public employees trying to keep the machinery moving.

The Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office reports about 85 assistant district attorneys handling roughly 10,000 felony matters and more than 200,000 misdemeanor and traffic matters each year. The DA’s Office in Charlotte says the criminal court system lacks enough judges and other court staff to conduct jury trials in every case.

The same system must now carry added hearings, evaluations, monitoring questions, detention consequences, and commitment procedures created by new laws. Each new duty consumes time from judges, prosecutors, defenders, clerks, deputies, evaluators, and treatment providers.

North Carolina’s 2026 budget sets a $56,000 minimum salary for assistant district attorneys and assistant public defenders. It sets the minimum for a full-time deputy clerk at $37,404. Those salaries show what the state asks public servants to accept while it permits hundreds of millions in local public financing for sports facilities.

Court funding has divided responsibility. The state pays most operating costs and salaries. Counties generally provide court facilities. Charlotte controls neither part by itself. That division does not relieve elected officials of accountability. It requires state, county, and city leaders to stop pointing at one another while the public waits.

A delayed criminal case can keep a dangerous person in legal limbo, hold an innocent person under accusation, deny a victim closure, and add costs to detention while in jail. If public safety is the stated concern behind Iryna’s Law, court capacity should, at minimum, receive the same urgency as sports ventures.

Broken Lighting and Bad Roads Are Daily Public Failures

You do not need an economic-impact report to understand the value of a working streetlight. You see it when you merge onto a dark highway on I-77 South, drive through heavy rain, or try to read lane markings at night.

Charlotte’s street-lighting program concludes that the city has about 170 miles of unlit thoroughfares. It lists more than 200 thoroughfare segments without a dedicated funding source for installation. The city says it installs lighting as money becomes available.

That admission belongs in the stadium debate. Public officials can assemble $650 million for stadium improvements while ordinary roads remain dark for lack of dedicated funding.

Responsibility for lights can move among Charlotte, NCDOT, and Duke Energy depending on the road and equipment. A driver does not care which entity owns the pole when the road is dark. Government should coordinate repairs and make the results visible.

The same applies to pavement. Charlotte maintains more than 2,500 miles of streets. The city has active resurfacing and pothole programs, and crews do real work. Yet every driver knows the condition of the route used each day. A repair list does not make a pothole disappear, and a planned project does not restore the tire, wheel, or time already lost.

Road maintenance, lane markings, drainage, lighting, and safe interchanges are core government work. They serve workers, families, emergency vehicles, freight, and local businesses every day. Their value does not depend on attendance, a winning season, or a team owner’s willingness to stay.

I-77 Sends Toll Revenue to a Foreign-Controlled Concession

The I-77 Express Lanes show what happens when the state chooses private financing for public infrastructure.

The federal Build America project profile states that the private partner invested $248 million in exchange for toll revenue. The $635.8 million project also used about $94.7 million in public funds and a $189 million federal TIFIA loan.

I-77 Mobility Partners operates the lanes under a long concession. Cintra, part of Ferrovial, a Spain-based infrastructure company, created it. Ferrovial lists the concession period as 2014 through 2069.

In practical terms, North Carolina drivers pay a company controlled by a Spanish corporate group for access to a faster lane on a state-owned highway. Private capital was not a gift. It purchased a decades-long revenue stream.

State officials can call that innovative financing. Drivers may call it paying again to escape congestion on a road their taxes already support.

The city and regional transportation board withdrew support in 2026 for using a similar model on I-77 South. That decision came after years of public experience with the northern toll lanes. It should also prompt a broader question. Why can government make long financial commitments when a private company receives the revenue, but plead poverty when residents ask for ordinary public road capacity?

The Baseball and Basketball Deals Confirm the Pattern

The Panthers deal is not isolated.

Charlotte committed $275 million to Spectrum Center and related Hornets projects. Under the revised plan, that includes $245 million for arena work and $30 million for a practice facility. The team is financing the remainder of the practice project, but it also received a lease of city-owned land for $10 per year, as Axios reported.

The Knights proposal is more recent. Truist Field opened in 2014. I attended a game there this month and saw only a few hundred people in a stadium that appeared nearly empty. Tickets distributed may produce a different announced figure. My point concerns what the public could see.

The Knights are seeking $13.3 million from Charlotte and $13.3 million from Mecklenburg County for a $40 million project. The club says its own $13.3 million share includes $5 million already spent. If officials credit that earlier spending, the new public contribution would be $26.6 million while the club’s new contribution would be about $8.3 million.

WBTV reports that the public presentation did not say what the work would include. A team executive also said the stadium was not falling apart. As of September 14, 2026, the request has not received final approval.

A twelve-year-old ballpark, an unclear work list, and a sparse crowd do not make a persuasive case for public money. They make the subsidy habit look automatic.

Stadium Studies Do Not Support the Sales Pitch

Sports events create visible activity. That does not prove that a subsidy produces net economic growth.

A person who spends money at a game may spend less at another Charlotte business. Revenue paid to owners, players, leagues, and outside vendors may leave the region. Construction activity ends. Traffic control, financing, maintenance, and later renovation requests remain.

A Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis review explains these problems and reports that 83 percent of economists surveyed agreed that stadium subsidies probably cost taxpayers more than the local benefits they create. A broad survey of stadium research found near-universal agreement that professional sports venues do not produce large positive local economic effects.

Sports can provide entertainment, identity, and civic pride. Those are legitimate amenities. They are not the same as a financial return to taxpayers.

If civic pride is the real justification, officials should say so and let the public decide whether it is worth $650 million. They should not dress an amenity as a profitable public investment when decades of research reject that sales pitch.

A Public Budget Should Fund Public Obligations First

Charlotte and Mecklenburg should adopt a plain rule. Private professional sports owners should finance their stadiums, arenas, practice facilities, improvements, and land.

They can borrow against franchises worth billions. They can sell equity, use league financing, issue private debt, sell naming rights, obtain sponsorships, or invest their own capital. Taxpayers should not serve as the financing arm for owners who retain all equity and appreciation.

If officials reject that rule, every proposed subsidy should require full project details, independent fiscal review, public repayment rights, a public share of revenue or appreciation, strong relocation remedies, and enough time for voters to examine the agreement. No deal should begin planning the next subsidy before the current one expires.

The public ledger should also show the unmet obligations beside the sports request. How many court positions remain vacant? How many cases await trial? How many staffed behavioral-health beds are available? How many people wait for competency services? How many jail beds and detention officers are missing? How many miles of road lack lighting? How much pavement needs repair? How much transit revenue is lost? How many audit findings remain open?

Put those numbers on the same page as the stadium request. Make elected officials choose in public.

North Carolina cannot complain about crime, court delay, jail overcrowding, and public tragedy while starving the courts and mental-health systems expected to respond. When those systems fail under demands they were never funded to meet, elected officials blame the institutions instead of confronting their own budget choices.

The Panthers, Hornets, and Knights are businesses. Mental-health care, courts, secure transit, working lights, maintained roads, and accountable public infrastructure are government duties.

We keep hearing that government cannot afford those duties at the level Charlotte needs. Yet it found $925 million for sports facilities and may add another $26.6 million.

The money is not missing.

The priority is. Just sayin’.

Bill Powers has practiced law in North Carolina courtrooms since 1992 and is a former President of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice. His perspective on court funding comes from decades of seeing what delayed cases, crowded dockets, extended detention, and inadequate treatment capacity mean inside the justice system. If you are facing a serious criminal charge or bond proceeding in Mecklenburg County, Powers Law Firm may be available to help.