Tax breaks for Super Bowl tickets, back-to-school goods move ahead

Here’s how you get what may be a controversial tax break passed in the General Assembly: You combine it with something else everybody loves.

A House panel Monday approved legislation to waive the state sales tax on tickets for the Super Bowl, a break worth an estimated $5 million to $6 million. In an effort to make it more palatable, supporters tacked on the annual sales tax holiday for back-to-school shoppers.

The Atlanta Sports Council — along with Gov. Nathan Deal and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed — is backing the ticket bill in hopes of persuading the National Football League to bring the Super Bowl to Atlanta to showcase the new stadium that’s rising next door to the Georgia Dome.

Such deals are typical of cities bidding on Super Bowls, officials said, but anything involving tax breaks that help big-money sporting events (and wealthy owners) is sure to spark debate. Particularly in Atlanta, where the city has put big money into the new Falcons stadium and the state has borrowed more than $40 million to build a parking deck for the facility.

Atlanta has already committed $200 million in bonds backed by hotel-motel taxes for construction of the nearly $1.5 billion stadium.

The NFL said in a statement earlier this year that it requires any city hosting the game to exempt sales taxes on tickets “in order to benefit the attendees who would otherwise have to incur it.”

The sales tax holiday for back-to-school shoppers has been wildly popular for the past decade or so.

Tacking the Super Bowl bill onto the sales tax holiday — which costs state and local governments about $70 million in revenue a year — greatly helps its chances of passage. Similar maneuvers have been done in past years to make it easier for lawmakers to swallow less-popular tax breaks.