U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr., fast becoming the congressional watchdog of the ticketing industry, is at it again, this time setting his attention to the Washington Redskins, which recently admitted to selling tickets to brokers that the team took from season ticket holders who could not pay for them.
Angered over fact that the team sold hundreds of those tickets to brokers while fans remained on its waiting list, the New Jersey Democrat dashed off a letter to his congressional colleagues this month calling for them to support his proposed legislation, called the BOSS ACT which aims to clean up the ticketing industry. The move by the Redskins, and its subsequent lawsuits against season ticket holders who could not meet their contractual obligations, was first reported by The Washington Post.
Calling the relationship between the Redskins and ticket broker “corrupt,” Pascrell said fans deserve to be treated better. The BOSS ACT stands for Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing Act.
“There is simply no excuse for funneling these tickets directly to the resale marketplace when there are thousands of fans on a waitlist ready, willing, and able to purchase these seats at their face value,” Pascrell wrote. “This is just one of the many corrupt business practices in the ticketing industry that my legislation, H.R. 2669, the Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing Act of 2009, seeks to curtail. The bill would have prevented Redskins fans from being deceived and overcharged in this instance by requiring the distribution method of each ticket be publically disclosed, prohibiting employees of the Redskins organization from knowingly selling tickets to scalpers, and requiring the organization to disclose when it sells tickets directly on the secondary market.”
Following a rash of negative publicity about the lawsuits, the Redskins vacated at least one of the court judgments in its favor, a $66,000 judgment against a 72-year-old grandmother who could not pay the remainder of her 10-year season ticket commitment. Pat Hill of Fairfax County, VA now will not have to pay the judgment, according to The Post.
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Pascrell is a joke. This BS Act wouldn’t stop the Redskins from funneling tickets to brokers, nor would it have stopped Ticketmaster and promoters from funneling Hannah Montana and Springsteen tickets to TicketsNow. This is because, although it requires all this reporting about what tickets go where, there really isn’t anything about where they can and cannot go. So the Redskins file that they re-sold a thousand tickets to a broker, then what? There is no law about how many tickets need to go to the public, and/or how many can be re-sold on the secondary market, and there SHOULD NOT BE. The Redskins are a private enterprise, and I don’t get why the government should tell them, or any other business, who to sell and who not to sell their inventory to, and for how much.
While he’s at it, why doesn’t Pascrell enact legislation that will require banks who received billions of dollars in taxpayer money to sell some of the thousands of foreclosed homes they have at heavily reduced prices to the poor so they have a place to live? Or have GM, who is basically owned by the government at this point, sell some of their cars at drastically discounted prices to students who just graduated so they can drive to their job?
I agree that sometimes the government needs to step in and save the Average Joe from themselves, but I don’t see anything in the ticketing industry that would indicate there is a problem here, other than the coercion of primary ticketing entities with the secondary market, specially Ticketmaster with TicketsNow. If you want to solve the problem, simply enact legislation that says an entity within the primary market (like Ticketmaster or the Redskins) cannot have or own an interest in the secondary market (like TicketsNow). There ya go, problem solved. It seems like all of Pascrell’s grandstanding and legislation is really an attempt to solve a problem that a) doesn’t really exist, and b) he doesn’t really understand.
what does the government know about tickets? And why should the government care about tickets?…People are up in arms about the government’s interference with healthcare…Something that involves our everyday lives and well being let alone whether or not someone paid too much for a bruce springsteen tickets they could of gotten for way under face value for in a less popular city (ex. Greensboro…Detroit…Chicago…)And lord knows they did a great job of interfering with banks/home loans….I just don’t get it…Yeah ok there’s some inside business deals…HELLO…what do you think happens when a stock’s IPO comes out? Insiders/Businesses get better deals because of who they know and that actually affects are economy…If there’s no deals for bulk purchases of tickets than companies like the Redskins shouldn’t do the deal…The reason the Redskins did the deal is because it made good business sense…something the government doesn’t really know anything about…