Aaron Peskin, a former member of the city's Board of Supervisors who has started an online campaign to pressure Mr. Ellison to personally cover the city's operating costs, offered a different explanation.

"Other well-to-do, philanthropic individuals and organizations aren't really interested in donating to the hobby of the third-richest person in the United States who's down to his last $40 billion," Mr. Peskin said. [...]

Mr. Ellison's Event Authority last year also backed out of an original plan to spend more than $100 million to build boathouses and repair piers that the city and a succession of private businesses had failed to develop in the past two decades. In return, the Event Authority would have gained long-term rent credits and development rights to the refurbished waterfront. Instead, the city itself is now paying for about $22 million in waterfront upgrades.

What's more, the America's Cup Organizing Committee, a civic group created to raise money to offset the city's extra operating costs for the event, has struggled to meet its goals, leading Mayor Edwin M. Lee to campaign personally. The committee has raised $15 million -- of which $5 million are loans from the Event Authority -- out of its initial goal of $32 million, though the city's operating costs are now expected to go down with the size of the event, Ms. Sullivan said.

Mr. Ellison declined through a spokeswoman to comment for this article.

Your tax dollars at work: enabling the transfer of public property to private, for-profit companies because your elected pinheads were bribed into supporting a story about how it would bring "economic benefits".

That fucking eyesore of a basketball stadium is going to be exactly the same story. Though I'll bet Lee makes out like a bandit on it, somehow.

Previously.