The recent City Council tax dollars giveaway to the Fury Women’s Volleyball team is another ugly example of how decisions are produced inside the secret walls of City Hall.

Your gerrymandered City Council voted 5-4 to approve $500,000 to the for-profit professional sports team – all while the thousands of homeless are living in tents around the city. The most important priority is to support women’s sports and not their actual lives. This was a stupid and selfish decision by your City Council. 

What made it all the more sinister was how your gerrymandered City Council voted: 5-4. They want your reaction to be, “Wow! That was a close decision! It could have gone either way!”

Wrong. Dead wrong.

The 5-4 decision was an example of “political theater” designed to give us the appearance that decisions are not already made before each and every vote.

It’s cooked to recipe by people who are most concerned with their next campaign donation and photo opportunity.

Joe Burrow and his parents are the owners of the Fury Women’s Volleyball team. Burrow signed a 5-year contract in 2023 for $275 million. They are rich; they don’t need more money. They don’t need $500,000 to fund a for-profit sports team.

This is greed-leadership and the end of empathy

Columbus residents are facing an affordability crisis due to electric bills, water and sewer rates, property taxes, health care, and rent; it makes this decision absolutely insane. That $500,000 should have been used to provide assistance for neighborhoods and people that are actually in need.

Don’t want to find a way to help people in Columbus?

Fine, donate the $500,000 to the Columbus City Schools to off-set the over 50 million dollars in tax abatements the city awards each and every year to the developer-industrial complex instead. No planning. No empathy.

But at least we get some beautiful and useless speeches by City Council on how much they love women’s sports.