As an Austinite who has been following this all pretty closely, the whole deal almost came apart due to the woefully uninformed and deliberately malicious anti-development ANONYMOUS bloggists on the Statesman newspaper's Web site. Any time an article on the project would go up, the same core group of opponents would begin relentlessly posting up totally fabricated "information" that would be recycled and regurgitated on other blogs, call-in radio shows, and emailed to local legislators and elected officials. The City Council became so paranoid they balked at the deal and the state rep responsible for actually altering the METF establishing verbiage to include F1 as an eligible "sporting event" changed his mind at the last minute.

The degree of willful ignorance regarding the Major Events Trust Fund that is providing the $250 Million (actually $25M per year, with each subsequent year's funding based on the performance of the previous, and that the race actually occurs) is political hackery of the sadly typical kind. When one State Senator (now considering a run at federal office, thanks to redistricting) began saying that money could be used to pay teachers' salaries (read the law - it absolutely cannot), even though his district has benefitted from that very fund more times and for more dollars than any other in the state, everybody followed suit and stopped discussing the actual pros and cons of the deal and turned it into a political football.

It's not funding the track/facility, it's for the Formula 1 race itself. That didn't stop people from attacking the private investors, going so far as to instigate an IRS investigation into their hiring practices 9actually, the contractors and subs used to construct the track).

The city, county and state give away tens of millions of dollars, likely hundreds, in economic development incentives every year. Tax breaks, abatements, rebates, refunds, etc. to the likes of Apple, Dell, NCAA, Samsung, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Toyota, etc. Why this became SUCh an all-consuming topic and the focus of so much politically motivated ire is anyone's guess. A large portion of the opposition was centered around the European-ness of the sport. Blatant xenophobia was on display in a dispiriting number of opponents' comments. Some folks are just anti-development and want Austin to time warp back to 1968. Others are just angry. A few had valid, LIbertarian ideals and oppose ALL public funding for private enterprise.

At the end of the day, no one was really discussing or debating facts. Politicians made decisions out of fear and not base don what's best for the city/county/state.

Damned trolls.