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The city had a $3 million budget deficit and hordes of hungry, unemployed citizens.

The Board of Aldermen planned a series of new taxes to fill the budget hole and pay for relieposals was the city’s first-ever amusement, or ticket, tax.

The idea had been tossed around for years, modeled after a similar federal tax. Officials would charge up to a 5 percent tax on tickets to boxing and wrestling events, baseball games, concerts and movie theaters.

A decade later, in 1947, the tax finally passed, and it’s been a thorn in political leaders’ sides ever since.

I looked up the history of the tax after civic and political leaders announced the revival last week of a plan to secure a Major League Soc and build a soccer-only on Market Street west of Union Station.

The proposal lifted the spirits of soccer fans and civic boosters whose hopes were dashed last year by the failure of a public vote to dedicate about $60 million in public money to the stadium project. Enter the Taylor family, founders of the Enterprise Holdings car rental empire, with their deep pockets and strong St. Louis roots, promising, along with Jim Kavanaugh of World Wide Technology, a team and stadium t

The news

was met with the sort of cheering that fills a stadium when the home team takes the lead in extra time. Think .

Here’s how my colleague, sports columnist Benjamin Hochman, put it:

“St. Louis soccer culture is special because its homegrown. Many other cities — these modern metropolises like a Denver or Las Vegas — have affluent and thriving soccer cultures, too. But there’s so much newness to it. Dad didn’t play soccer in Denver. In St. Louis, not only did dad, but grandpa, too,� he wrote.

I had to pick a tiny nit with Hochman only because I grew up in Denver, playing soccer, coaching my kids, and now, from afar, watching my grandkids play.

My granddaughter’s team has what they call the Ava rule. After my 5-year-old granddaughter scores more than a handful of goals, she has to pass to other pl

But I digress

.

The point is: I love soccer. I’m still not over the U.S. Men’s National Team loss in Trinidad & Tobago. I want the MLS in St. Louis. It belongs here. I believe it will thrive.

But the financial details — all of them — matter to a city on the brink, a city that just committed to extending bonds to refurbish a convention center, a city that is studying the potential privatization of its airport in part because the city is, well, broke.

A few days after the announcement that Carolyn Kindle Betz and other Taylor family women would lead the first women-owned MLS effort in the country, 24th Ward Aldermen Scott Ogilvie made it public that he won’t run for re-election. In a very thoughtful , he explained that being an alderman in the city of St. Louis is like being a hair stylist without scissors. All too often, city officials just don’t have the tools to do the job.

Ogilvie blames, in part, the broken system of regional governance in which the city is separated from the county, and that county has 88 municipalities, and the result is nearly all the governments are broken. It’s one reason why there never seem to be enough cops, or trash trucks that work, or a tax base that is spread out fairly to pay for luxuries, like sports stadiums, where the deal often works for some, but not others. During the last soccer debate, Ogilvie actually tried to insert the amusement tax back to the deal, to add money to general revenue rather than the other way around.

St. Louis knows a thing or two about stadium deals that sometimes seem a little too good to be true. Hello Rams. Goodbye Rams. We know about the promise of private investment to be followed by a public bill 20 years later. Call it the Taxpayer Blues.

The new #MLS4TheLou effort suggests for instance, that it won’t seek money from city taxpayers, except for an abatement from the city’s amusement tax.

Fact is, hardly anybody pays that tax anymore. At Scottrade, er, Enterprise Center, it goes to pay off the bonds that saved Kiel, er, Peabody, er, Stifel. The Cardinals don’t pay it. The Rams paid it, but got in a legal tussle with the state about it.

Thirty years ago, things were different. The city actually threatened to arrest the owner of the Blues if he didn’t pay the tax. Fifteen years after that, it was still producing more than $6 million a year for the city’s general revenue coffers. Now? Not so much. In the most recent fiscal year, the tax brought in just $343,000.

A tax that was created to help poor people these days goes mostly to the wealthy owners of sports teams as an incentive to keep their franchises in town. Maybe that’s a fair trade.

But in a city where the trash trucks don’t work, I wonder.