People just don't want to drink as much. But if you look at sales of microbrewed beer, those sales are not slumping. In fact, dollar sales of microbrewed beer increased 10.5% last year, and volume sales were up 5.8%. People are either unwilling or unable to spend money on expensive luxuries, but drinking better beer is a luxury everyone can afford. I think that if we can bring in beer from local microbreweries and sell it at our ballpark, we can restore beer sales. People may not be as willing to pay $5 for a regular beer, but they will pay $7 for something better. It's a better value proposition for the customer and it gives us a higher markup.

So not only do we sell more beer, but we make more money on every beer we sell. It will cost us $10,000 to make the changes to the layout of...

We get to restore profitability to our concession operations. The customers get more selection, and they get a product that based on several years of steady sales increases nationwide they clearly want. The breweries even win. This $10,000 investment, if you approve it, is going to give us a $50,000 return in the first year, and every year after that as well. We well restore profitability to the stadium. And best of all, nobody has to be the scapegoat to the voters because we won't have to raise their property taxes. This is the best $10,000 investment the Parks Board will ever have the opportunity to make.…