Continuing Glendale, Arizona’s bid to be the cautionary tale for more or less everything, KJZZ-FM has a long report on the disaster that has been the city’s construction of new spring training stadiums for the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers while hoping to pay them off with money from sales tax proceeds from a surrounding development. Operative word: “hoping.”

It’s impossible to predict how long [7-year-old William] Almazan will play baseball. But if he settles in Glendale as an adult, there’s a real chance he’ll have to help pay some of the roughly $331 million the city currently owes on Camelback Ranch. “Possibly one would argue this was a high-risk transaction,” said Michael Bailey, Glendale city attorney… Retail, hotels and a golf course were planned for around Camelback Ranch, which Glendale agreed to build in 2007. But the economy tanked in 2008. The venue opened in 2009, and developers failed to deliver sales tax generators needed to pay for the project. Now the facility is only projected to bring in $160,000 over the next year, and there’s still no developer.

Yup, that’s bad! The city has already paid $96 million on debt service for the stadium, and according to KJZZ’s charts — which don’t exactly match that $331 million figure above — has more than $227 million to go (non-present-value numbers, mind you, so the true cost is going to end up closer to the $152.6 million that the city actually borrowed for the ballparks several years ago). And now all that money has to come from the Glendale general fund, because nobody’s paying sales taxes on an empty lot.

But! If we’re going to take into account the substitution effect when something new is built, we need to do so when something isn’t built as well. So maybe when the Camelback Ranch development failed to take place, developers chose to build something else somewhere nearby instead, and locals are spending money and generating sales taxes there instead, and maybe that place is even in Glendale! Slim silver lining, I know, but when you’re Glendale, you have to take them where you can find them.