The New Dallas Cowboy Stadium Opening Soon

I have not been shy about verbalizing my disgust regarding how the City of Arlington and Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys committed the most outrageous abuse in American history of the perfectly legal practice of using eminent domain to seize private property for the public good.

To build a sports stadium.

But, now that the stadium is almost finished, I have to admit, it is one cool-looking structure.

That looks totally out of place in its location. It would have been such a good thing to have built this at Fair Park in Dallas, particularly now with the DART train having a new line going to Fair Park.

Arlington has no mass transit of any type.

It's pretty easy to predict what the reaction will be when the stadium opens for football, particularly the Super Bowl. For the Super Bowl, one team will be staying in Fort Worth. About 20 miles from the stadium. People will come to the stadium and marvel at the neighborhood of, well, let's call them "older" houses. And a rather, well, eclectic blend of businesses. People will arrive at D/FW airport, take a taxi to their motel, and then be appalled at how far they are from the stadium, and that they have to take another taxi to get to it.

Now, when Arlington was conned into voting to build this stadium they were told it would spur all sorts of development, new hotels, restaurants, retail. For awhile a big development called Glory Park was dangled before the locals as an enticement to approve being taxed for the stadium.

Sadly, the voters of Arlington have very short memory retentions. Way back in the early 1990s, a similar con was run on them to get approval for the Ballpark in Arlington. That's where the Texas Rangers play baseball. Voters were told the Ballpark would spur all sorts of development, including a San Antonio-like Riverwalk. Well, there is a little lake and you can walk around it. But nothing else.

And now, today, there is surprise that nothing new is being built around the new Dallas Cowboy Stadium. All the people of Arlington had to do was visit the current Dallas Cowboy stadium in Irving and make note of the vast wasteland that surrounds the stadium. It's been there for decades without spawning anything of the sort Arlington voter's thought was going to happen around their new Dallas Cowboy Stadium.

Now that the stadium is almost finished, does anyone in Dallas have any regrets that it is not in Dallas? Dallas has over a million people, the tax burden would have been far less than that which Arlington's 332,000 have burdened themselves with.

And what an incredible addition to Fair Park that stadium would have been. Instead it is now sitting in an industrial wasteland. And I think it is too big to move.