If you are an NFL owner, nothing beats a trip to the Super Bowl, especially when taxpayers are paying for your teams hotel bill.
After Super Bowl organizers booked $1 million worth of rooms for NFL players at two pricey Miami hotels, Miami-Dade’s government got the bills.
Miami’s Super Bowl Host Committee recently sent invoices totaling $1 million to the county’s budget office from the J.W. Marriott Marquis hotel downtown and Aventura’s Turnberry Isle Resort to cover an NFL requirement for subsidized rooms provided to players earning millions for teams owned by billionaires.
Miami-Dade’s budget director said the county agreed to cover the hotel rooms as part of a $4 million contribution to the local Super Bowl effort, one of many tax-funded concessions to the most popular and wealthy sports league in the country.
“These are basically things we have to do to get them to come,” said Rodney Barreto, the chairman of Miami’s Host Committee, a nonprofit formed to compete for the Super Bowl and handle local organizing duties, including securing tax dollars for the effort. “If we’re not doing it, another city is.”
Source: Sun Sentinel
