You weren't asking me, but I'll take a stab. If I lived in the Seaport, I'd have a very different opinion if the following three "one-offs" were proposed: a one-time repeat of the cliff diving off of the ICA, a one-time repeat of the OpSail "tall ships" event, and a one-time IndyCar event. ( I do understand that all of those either were more than one-offs or at least had the potential to be more than one-offs, but I'm answering your question as posed.)
The cost/benefit analysis for me as a neighborhood resident would come down to not just the event, but any pre- and post-event issues. For the cliff-diving and tall ships, I can't see how any pre- or post-event issues could affect me, or at least not much. So for each event, there'd be some extra tourist crowds in the neighborhood for a weekend. So? I could deal with that. But the IndyCar thing involved a LOT more pre- and post-event work. In a few cases, that work would mean insuring tat the course itself had really good quality paving: that'd be a benefit. But from what I saw, there were median strips being removed and re-installed every year, and that sort of thing, not to mention the deployment and then gathering up of all those barriers. This would be vastly more of a hassle and would weigh heavily on my willingness to support it. I am pretty sure I'd come down against it: too many weeks/months of hassle.
That's my answer if I lived in the Seaport. I don't live there, or even within Boston city limits. As a MA taxpayer, I'm open to having some modest amount of state tax dollars go to support one-off events (most of which, though not all, will tend to be in Boston proper). Key word is modest tax expenditures, with letters of credit from sponsors covering any really big overruns that happen. And, I'd want those events to be something unique, that also benefits us with unusual exposure for either Boston or a Boston institution. The ICA cliff diving, for instance. I have no idea whether any of my tax dollars supported it, but I wouldn't have been upset at all to learn they did. That was really an off the wall (see what I did there?) event, and showcased not just a newly arriving neighborhood but also the ICA itself. IndyCar? I'm a lot more "meh" on that. There's all sorts of car racing that race fans can go see, so it's just way less of a unique thing in my mind, so the alleged benefits on exposure seem minimal. So my opinion was (and is), if it can be done with no MA tax money, it's no skin off my nose, but I'd be opposed to MA tax dollars going in. Since I'm not a Boston resident, i's not my call where the city comes down on it, but if I were a city resident, I'd feel the same way on the city's financial stance.
