Two hundred fifty million here for a race-car track and $68 million there for accompanying highway improvements and pretty soon you’re talking big money. You’re also talking about the ante Washington must provide to join the big leagues of auto racing – a fee to be shared in part by the state’s taxpayers to provide a major benefit to a small area on the other side of the Cascades.

With the state facing a $1 billion shortfall in revenue, it’s hard to get excited about Snohomish County’s so-called chance-of-a-lifetime to land a $300 million NASCAR track. Sure, NASCAR’s willing to foot $50 million of the construction bill and races will attract fans from our circulation area, too, but this proposal doesn’t pencil out. The project offers Eastern Washington minimal benefits. The state might even delay road projects here while rebuilding roads there to handle traffic to and from the proposed track.

State lawmakers should be wary of this proposal unless Florida’s International Speedway Corp. is willing to sweeten the funding package considerably or underwrite a good portion of road reconstruction. In the past decade, Eastern Washington has watched from the outside as Washington legislators provided a $372 million financial package to help build Safeco Field and then was outvoted by the West Side as the Seattle Seahawks won 51 percent approval for a public financing proposal for $300 million of a $425 million football stadium.

The Spokesman-Review endorsed both of those public financing proposals, arguing that the two teams were established, integral parts of the Inland Northwest and that surrounding communities would benefit from their continued presence. We can’t make the same arguments for NASCAR racing. NASCAR doesn’t have a history in this region. Nor, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer pointed out this summer, can it be said that a pro sports team provides much of an economic ripple effect beyond its parking lot. If the issues are jobs and economic development, there are better ways to invest the state’s money in tough financial times than an automobile racetrack.

An economic study by supporters claims the track would spin off 1,846 jobs, with up to $121 million in new spending statewide. But detractors counter that track revenues would be about equal to an average Costco store. All 63 AFL-CIO unions have endorsed the project. But that figures because the two-year project would provide 3,000 construction jobs at union-level prevailing wages. The number that bothers us most is 50 – or the number of full-time year-round jobs that will be provided by the track. Only 50.

And what does Eastern Washington get for helping finance a third major sports facility in Western Washington? Maybe a track construction worker will buy gas and a meal in Spokane on his way to a vacation at Glacier National Park. Meanwhile, NASCAR fans in the Inland Northwest would have another reason to spend their hard-earned entertainment dollars on the other side of the Cascades rather than here.

It’s hard to get excited about either scenario.