BY MIKE BROWN
Owner, Cincinnati Bengals

Over the past two years, the Bengals and Hamilton County have worked terribly hard to craft a delicate deal for a new Cincinnati football stadium. It's a tight arrangement for the team and a tight arrangement for the county.

Neither side expected otherwise as we worked to keep the nation's 31st-largest market among the 29 communities with National Football League teams. The agreement will take our team only to the NFL's ''average'' level of income, but we have said time and again that we are willing to work with less to make it work here. The county is making sacrifices, as well.

But on March 23, the city of Cincinnati - after three years of virtual silence and no financial contribution - attempted to pull a major cornerstone out from the deal. The city announced a plan to triple the current admissions tax, which sharply contradicts the understanding of the past two years between the team and the county. The city's unilateral action to fund schools in this manner threatens the fragile balance of the entire process.

Aside from its appalling timing, the tripled tax proposal is flawed because:

It assigns a major burden of school funding, traditionally paid by the community as a whole, to the sports teams and their fans.

The city is grabbing more than a fair share of the project's revenue by keeping admissions tax revenue, even without an increase. In most recent new stadium deals, city governments have handed over admissions taxes to the project.

If the Bengals were to pay the tax increase without adjusting ticket prices, the tax would take roughly $1.5 million from the stadium project in 2000, and more every year afterwards. This would represent 10 percent of all the new dollars the Bengals would make at the stadium, rendering the deal unworkable for the team.

If the Bengals were to shoulder the tax through a ticket price raise, it would add more than $30 to the average price of a season ticket. Fans would pay more in admissions taxes by the end of 2010 than the average cost of a seat license. It's clever politics, perhaps, to put the sports teams in a position where they may appear opposed to legitimate school funding. But an honest look at this plan reveals that it simply wouldn't work.

I venture to say that no other team in the NFL has committed so much time, energy and effort into a new stadium project as we. Bengals fans also are sacrificing more than most by paying the sales tax increase and seat license payments. We fear that a tripled admissions tax would be the final straw, even for our most loyal fans. The city, at the 11th hour, is demanding a load the sports teams and their fans cannot carry alone. And I feel that the very fabric of the stadium deal is jeopardized if the city moves forward with this proposal.