This past weekend, another Cincinnati Bengals player was arrested, the 10th this offseason, and this morning, the decision to dismiss a lawsuit pertaining to the financing of Paul Brown Stadium was upheld.
Back in 1996, "voters approved a half-cent sales tax hike for the $450 million Paul Brown Stadium". However, an anti-trust suit was filed in 2003 claiming that taxpayers and officials had been forced into approving the funding with the threat of the Bengals leaving Cincinnati if a new stadium wasn't built.
The problem is that there is a four year statue of limitations attached to cases like that, and the suit was filed three years too late. It was dismissed without county officials' being able to state their case that they were "victimized by monopoly power".
In his ruling, Judge Jeffrey Sutton said:
"The only thing worse than having a losing team is having no team-- no team for the community and its political leaders to support and no reason to say: 'There's always next year.'"
What about a team that's had close to 1/5 of its players arrested? I'm sure that some Bengals fans wish they didn't have a team this offseason, and if the arrests keep up they might not have a team to field "next year". Unless the fans feel like making a visit to the county lockup. With any luck, Judge Sutton will have some of those Bengals players make appearances in his court so he can tell them how great they are no matter if they're winning, losing, driving under the influence, puking out of car windows or being drunk and disorderly.
