Adirondack Phantoms, Suburban E.I.T. Tax Grab Toast?
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The major announcement that Pennsylvania state lawmakers are currently ‘working’ to elminate the contentious Earned Income Tax from the notorious – if not unconstitutional – Neighborhood Improvement Zone Law makes a curious mind want to know why the suburban EIT was deemed ‘absoulutely essential’ for at least a couple of acrimonious months in the first place?
Whatever. The bottom line is that a last-minute deal to re-configure the NIZ (again) will be struck and included as part of embattled Governor Tom Corbett’s proposed $ 27.7 billion dollar budget for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that will be voted on by state legislators later this summer. Somewhere in there lay the funding keys to Chairman Pawlowski’s transformative $ 220.0 million dollar Palace of Sport complex here in the audacious City With No Spending Limits which will, according to the The Morning Call, locate “the most expensive minor league arena ever built.”
And that’s another story altogether – so on immediately to the status of the short-lived Adirondack Phantoms of the American Hockey League, then.
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The conclusion of the 2012/13 AHL campaign is all but certain to bring down the curtain once and for all on the ill-fated Adirondack Phantoms. It is believed far and wide that, with the suburban EIT tax monies being left untouched in the ‘new’ NIZ legislation, the 19 different townships and one school district will, ‘finally’, withdraw all the lawsuits pending in the Commonwealth Court. That would clear the way for the new Allentown Neighborhood Improvement Zone Development Authority to sell the bonds which would raise the needed revenue so that construction on the record-smashing Palace of Sport can resume in earnest again.
And that spells the end of AHL ice hockey in Glens Falls, New York, if only for the time being. Adirondack supporters, of course, have every reason to try and rally the troops in the hopes that a strong showing at the box office might, someday, lure another minor league club to the Glens Falls Civic Center. The Phantoms averaged 4,631 spectators per contest last season in a facility which lists 4,806 fixed seats with the additional ability to host up to a couple of thousand more people in standing-room-only areas as the official capacity.
As it stands now, 68 different cities in both Canada and the United States have played host to an AHL team in the storied circuit which recently completed its 76th season.
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