Dribbles
Our friends in Seattle were busy last week.
On Tuesday, a city council committee took a big step toward making Seattle an NBA-ready town again, approving a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would authorize the construction of a $490 million multi-use arena in the city's South Downtown area, near the sites of the Seahawks' CenturyLink Field and the Mariners' Safeco Field. The arena would be home both to a relocated NBA and NHL team.
There are still several hurdles to overcome and it will likely be at least 18 months before the first shovel hits the first patch of grass. But the deal is a sea change for the city. Its inability to convince the Washington state legislature to approve a new arena deal in 2007 and 2008 was the death knell for the Sonics, whose new owner, Clay Bennett, had a foot out the door anyway and soon moved the team to Oklahoma City.
Hedge fund manager Chris Hansen has pledged to buy an existing team and move it to his hometown. But without an arena deal, there was no chance the NBA would approve such a move. That big obstacle has now been removed.
Five years ago, when Bennett was looking for the city and county to foot the bill for most of a $500 million building in suburban Renton, many locals blanched, both at the cost and at another multi-millionaire sports owner asking them to pay for a palace, as the Seahawks and Mariners had in recent years. There was arena fatigue.
But in the four years since the Sonics left, sentiment changed. And supporters of an arena produced people from a broad cross-section of social and economic strata -- from heads of construction companies to public school teachers -- who told city council members they were on board.
Thanks to last week's political events, Seattle-ites got a step closer to getting the NBA back.
"We won it with numbers," said Brian Robinson, the old Save Our Sonics co-founder now running Arena Solution, a local coalition of business, community and entertainment leaders in town that has lobbied for a new building to lure a team. "That's how we did it. We had more people."
A final vote of the full council to approve the deal is schedule for a week from today. But after a 7-1 committee vote -- supporters were surprised they'd get eight people to vote, much less seven supporters -- approval is expected. Hansen went ahead and bought celebratory beers for 1,500 fans last Thursday at a local bar.
The city got several concessions from Hansen's original proposal that had been worked out with Mayor Mike McGinn in May. Hansen had already pledged $290 million of the total $490 million to build the arena. Now, he has committed to repaying the $200 million the city and county will put toward construction if the new arena doesn't generate enough revenues over 30 years to pay the city back.
Hansen had to double, from $15 to $30 million, a reserve fund established to pay the city back immediately if there is a financial shortfall in the first years of the deal, and has agreed to an independent, annual audit of his finances to ensure he is worth at least $300 million personally. And he pledged to pay up to five years of the debt service on the arena if need be.
The city also got Hansen to agree to spend $7 million in the interim to make improvements to Key Arena, where the Sonics played from their inaugural season in Seattle in 1967 until they moved, including refurbishing of the locker rooms.
According to a source with knowledge of the negotiations between Hansen and the city, the NBA has indicated, informally, that if Hansen is successful buying a team and moving it to Seattle, the league could live with the team playing temporarily at Key until the new arena is completed.
There are opponents to the deal. There is concern that the agreement violates the state's environmental protection laws that require municipalities to consider alternative sites and conduct environmental impact studies before committing to specific areas for public projects.
There is still opposition from officials at the Port of Seattle, the sprawling nexus of commercial docks, cruise ship terminals and shipping lanes that is the sixth-busiest in the United States and third-busiest on the west coast. The Port also owns the land on which Seattle-Tacoma Airport lies. But some of the Port's busiest areas are in Sodo, and some Port officials claim the proposed arena and its subsequent affects on local traffic patterns could cost up to $3 billion in annual revenues at the Port, impacting up to 33,000 jobs.
But Hansen also committed $40 million to a transportation fund designed to try and alleviate potential traffic issues, including construction of roads and bridges that would help ease congestion. And the city agreed to a year-long environmental review that would explore potential alternative sites to the Sodo location favored by Hansen, who has spent $50 million the past two years buying land in that area.
Ominously, though, there appears to be opposition from the Mariners. The proposed site for the NBA/NHL arena is near one of the parking lots at Safeco. The Mariners released a statement Thursday in which they indicated they'd prefer the new arena be built elsewhere.
Hansen told the Associated Press last week, "about the only comment I would make is the Seahawks and [Major League Soccer's] Sounders have engaged with us and are interested in what we are doing, expressed their concerns and are willing to work with us. We have made a lot of outreach to the Mariners and they are not interested in having a dialogue. You can't reach a point with people if they're not interested in having the discussion about what it would take to make it happen and make it acceptable for them."
There also remains the not-so-small issue of finding basketball and hockey teams to buy and move.
The Sacramento Kings are always first on everyone's lists these days, though the Maloofs would have to sell to Hansen, obviously, before they could be moved, and the Maloof family has given no public indication that they're ready to do that. But there isn't a single soul in the league that doesn't think the Kings are again looking at Anaheim as a potential destination after this season in Sacramento. There are rumblings that the Kings have lawyered up.
But everyone has a price. Hansen has a few hundred million, a commitment for a building, and time on his side. It's not inevitable that he or anyone else buys the Kings, nor is it a fait accompli that they are leaving Sacramento. But it's worth watching.
