Wednesday, January 11, 2012

CIB/NFL Agreement for Use of Indiana Convention Center

I have now been sent the signed agreement between the Capital Improvement Board and the National Football League for the use of the Indiana Convention Center and two surface parking lots abutting the south end of the ICC.  I have uploaded it to Google Docs - click here.

Like the agreement for the use of Lucas Oil Stadium, this agreement is lengthy, running 136 pages.  Unlike the LOS agreement, the ICC agreement sheds little light on the original bid by the 2012 Super Bowl Host Committee (now operating as Our2012SB, Inc.).  The original bid and subsequent Host Committee/NFL agreement is being deliberately held from public view, as are the cost to Indianapolis for Police and Fire services, snow removal preparations, and code enforcement/court enforcement activities during the Super Bowl season.

As you might guess, the ICC, with some exceptions for offices used by tenant organizations and CIB operations, is being provided to the NFL FREE OF CHARGE from 8 am January 18 through 5 pm February 11, 2012 (p 2 of the pdf).  There is one carve out in that the Sagamore Ballroom lease is up at 12:01 am February 11.  I believe the County Democratic Party Slating Convention is scheduled on that day.

NFL use of the two parking lots began at 12:01 am January 9 and will extend through 11:59 pm February 17, 2012.  They get the use of these parking lots "rent free for construction and preparatory activities for the NFL Events, conducting NFL Events and for dismantling of construction and equipment after the NFL Events" (p 2 of the pdf).  Revenues from the parking facilities will go entirely to the NFL (p 22 of the pdf).

There are expenses that will be the responsibility of the NFL incurred from their free use of the grounds of LOS and ICC.  I'll go into those in a future post.

Back to the use of Indy's Code Enforcement Officers to police infraction of NFL copyrights, we have this section of the ICC agreement (p 125 of the pdf):

4. Licensor [CIB] shall use its reasonable commercial efforts to prevent the unauthorized sale of such merchandise [Super Bowl and NFL-related merchandise and novelty items], including scorecards, line ups or newspaper inserts with line ups and roster, depth charts or similar items relating to the participating teams in the Super Bowl Game within the Licensed Premises.  In accordance with the terms of the Host Committee Agreement, the Host Committee shall use its reasonable efforts to request that the City enforce the prohibition during the NFL Events of all temporary vendor licensing authorized by local governmental authorities for the area within a one mile radius of the ICC property boundaries.


That is again reference to the Clean Zone, establishment of which was enabled through the Super Bowl Ordinance.  No accounting for the number of man hours our Code Enforcement Inspectors will be away from their usual jobs in our neighborhoods, nor the extra costs for 24-7 patrolling of the Clean Zone, nor the cost for having the Environmental Court Judge on call 24-7 to man the rocket docket to mete out on the spot justice, has been made available to Indianapolis taxpayers, who are on the hook for the expense.  There are other costs to our City that remain unreported to the community who will be required to cover the expenses.  That is not right.

1 comment:

Jon said...

So far the only money that isn't going to the NFL is whatever the fans pay for housing, food, car rental etc. None of those dollars directly impact the city's bottom line. There is no way a super bowl can generate hundreds of millions for a hosting city. And you of course we still don't know what the cost is to the city.