最新杏吧原创

ST. LOUIS 鈥� The owners of 最新杏吧原创 City SC soccer team want to add a 1% sales tax in order to reimburse themselves for a $23 million cleanup job involving contaminated groundwater at the downtown stadium.

The additional tax would be imposed on sales made at CityPark, at North 20th and Market streets.

If approved, that could mean consumers would pay as much as 12.7% in sales taxes at the soccer stadium, which already has an additional 2% levied in special taxes that go toward paying for various improvements.

鈥淲e鈥檙e aware pricing (at CityPark) is relatively high,鈥� Jason Thein, the team鈥檚 chief operating officer, said at a recent meeting of a city development board. 鈥�(But) I don鈥檛 think this will be prohibitive. ... It鈥檚 just 1% more.鈥�

The ownership group 鈥� the Taylor family, of car rental giant Enterprise, and World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh 鈥� touted that the more than $461 million soccer stadium would be overwhelmingly privately financed, though the group pitched public help via .

The owners also received $5.7 million of tax credits; 25 years of real estate tax abatement worth $35 million; and amusement tax abatement worth $22 million.

But City SC hit several hurdles during construction. A broken electrical pipe and a rainstorm postponed the inaugural game, forcing the team to pay millions of dollars to fix it.

And work crews discovered the groundwater contamination during the stadium鈥檚 construction, Thein said at the meeting last month. The crews broke through bedrock at the northeast corner of the stadium, found a 鈥渒arst spring鈥� and realized it was releasing up to 200,000 gallons a day. The owners had to spend $23 million to build an extensive system to gather and clean the water before it hit the Metropolitan Sewer District system, he said.

Thein said the groundwater is contaminated with hydrocarbons, likely from underground fuel tanks abandoned decades ago.

The Port Authority Commission is expected to vote on the matter at its .