Politicians Line Up For Super Bowl Tickets

For the average person, attending a Super Bowl game is not attainable. Even if you were offered a ticket to the game at fair market value, the cost of travel and other costs associated with attending the event puts it out of your price range. According to the Star's "Behind Closed Doors" column, the Indianapolis Colts made tickets available to all City-County Councilors, state lawmakers and other elected officials in Indiana. At least 26 of the 29 councilors paid $800 a ticket for Super Bowl tickets. Another 32 state legislators, or 21% of all state legislators, purchased the tickets and four of Indiana's nine-member congressional delegation bought tickets.

The IBJ reported on package deals of $4,000 per person being offered by Ambassadair for a 4-day trip to the Super Bowl. That included hotel accommodations on the Gulf Coast, a long bus ride from Miami. According to the IBJ, Ambassadair made reservations on the Gulf Coast to avoid the crush in the Miami area. I'm familiar with how many of our councilors earn a living, and I don't think it would be too presumptuous of me to question how some of them can afford to go to the Super Bowl on their annual income. Recall that candidate Greg Ballard challenged my former councilor, Patrice Abduallah, on how he could afford to go to the Super Bowl four years ago when he couldn't afford to pay the property taxes on his home. Candidate Ballard said the public deserved to know who paid for the councilor's tickets and the cost of his trip as part of a call for ethics reforms in city government. That was then. We now know that Ballard has accepted gifts totalling well in excess of $50,000 since taking office, including country club memberships, junkets to Asia, Europe and Brazil, and free tickets to sporting events and concerts.

The City's ethics ordinance, like the state's lobby registration law covering the lobbying of state legislators, requires councilors to disclose any gift they receive during the year that total $100 or more. If a lobbyist and a councilor agree to conceal a gift, the public is not likely to ever know about the gift unless a whistleblower makes the undisclosed gift known. For example, if a public official stays in a condominium owned by a lobbyist while attending the Super Bowl, will that public official report the fair market value of that gift? I can tell you from my experience as a lobbyist at the State House during the 1990s, many unethical legislators and lobbyists hide some of their gifts.

The Colts' organization emphasizes that the tickets were offered to the officials at their fair market value. For the average person, though, your only hope of attending a Super Bowl is to purchase tickets through a broker. A quick check of one ticket broker showed seats in the nose bleed section going for about $1,700, while club seating ticket prices reached $5,000. All things considered, it looks like a big discount on ticket prices to me. It also is further evidence of just how much clout these professional teams exert over our public officials as a result of their ability to offer special treatment to them to attend sporting events. It explains why these officials can continually come back and ask working men and women to pay more taxes and provide more subsidies to the billionaire sports team owners without blinking an eye. The only way we are going to end this undue influence is to ban our public officials altogether from receiving any gifts or special offers that are not accorded to the public generally on equal terms.

UPDATE: I've been able to confirm the identity of the three councilors who did not purchase Super Bowl tickets. They are Christine Scales, Ed Coleman and Angela Mansfield. As a condition to the purchase of the tickets, councilors were asked to sign an agreement that they would not sell the tickets to someone else for more than the face value.