$60M Vs. $1.8M: Sports Facilities There And Here

Last week’s program featured the story of not one but three $60 million high school football facilities in Texas.

Karen Given visited the first of these facilities six years ago, where she had trouble finding voters who opposed the project. Last week she interviewed people in McKinney, Texas, the community where the third stadium will be built. In McKinney, two thirds of voters supported the expenditure.

Those favoring the renovation of the athletic field that serves the students of Hull High School in Massachusetts didn’t fare as well. By a vote 1,719 to 1,483, the citizens of Hull killed a measure that proposed spending $1,800,000 to reclaim what proponents say is a “substandard” field that “does not meet the minimum requirements for post-season games.”

The defeated plan proposed installing an artificial turf field, and those in favor of the plan have embarked on a campaign to rally community support for the project.

There are, no doubt, lots of differences between Hull, Massachusetts and the communities in Texas where the overwhelming majority of citizens happily supported spending over 30 times as much money as backers of the project in Hull are trying to raise.

Still, the contrast between the two efforts struck us as extraordinary.