Sacramento Kings officials presented arena “concepts” to the city council yesterday, including a bunch of renderings that, the Sacramento Bee stresses, “are not arena renderings.” Presumably this means “they’re just a bunch of random sketches that the Kings threw together so that we could put up a slideshow, because man, do slideshows bring in the hit counts — hey, have you looked yet at our slideshow of not-arena-renderings?”

So if the drawings aren’t meant to look like what the arena actually will, we’re left with what Kings officials said at the presentation. Which was apparently such a tsunami of p.r. verbiage that it’s best just to present it with no context or attribution or anything, just as pure unadulterated spin:

“We want to figure out how to knit the street grid back together. We can’t do that literally – (the arena) is bigger than any city block – but you can create the possibility of moving through the site.”

“We want people to walk there at 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon and enjoy being there.”

“We want to blur the lines of whether you’re sitting inside the arena or you’re outside.”

“It doesn’t make sense for us to build a big, giant building. When we go to the (NBA) Finals, and we will get to the Finals, we know we can address (the need for more seating) to pump up the crowd.”

What this seems to add up to, reading between the lines, is: “We don’t want to spend a lot of money building a building that we can’t sell out on a nightly basis, so instead we’re going to put some folding chairs outside and let people peek in through a window. Also, we know that arenas create giant obstructions to the streetscape, but this one will be different because, um, architecture!”

Which is a nice goal, but it’s far easier said than done. Kings officials are getting really good at the saying part, though.

Now that the disputed Sacramento Kings arena referendum petitions that were gathered by signature gatherers who were paid with money wannabe Seattle arena builder Chris Hansen are being submitted anyway, you might think that Sacramento is finally over this whole referendum-signature-controversy mess. But no, because apparently whoever is scripting this show has decided to throw in one more incomprehensible plot twist:

With support from nonunion contractors who have been locked out of the project, a new Sacramento citizens’ group was formed today to fight the proposed $258 million taxpayer subsidy for the new Kings arena downtown.

The new group, Voters for a Fair Arena Deal, will gather signatures for a ballot initiative launched months ago by another group opposed to the arena subsidy. But Voters for a Fair Arena Deal took pains to separate itself from the original effort and said it will “limit communications” between itself and the first group, Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork.

That’s right, the Kings arena has pulled off the rare feat of being opposed by a group of construction companies. But they’re construction companies that aren’t going to get a cut of the swag, so they’re all mad and stuff.

The new group was actually announced by Craig Powell, head of the watchdog group Eye on Sacramento, which you’ll recall from its excellent report on why the arena deal was a hot mess. Joining with a nonunion labor group seems a bit of a case of odd bedfellows — Powell said yesterday that “we are not opposed to a public subsidy for an arena, [but] what we are in favor of is an arena subsidy we can afford,” then declined to give specifics, other than that the group would push for eliminating the “project labor agreement” that gives preference to union contractors, because duh.

Meanwhile, Kings president Chris Granger announced that the proposed arena would have its seating capacity scaled down from a planned 18,500 to 17,500 or even less, possibly making it even smaller than the Kings’ current arena, which holds 17,317 and has been derided by the team as too small. But no worries, as according to the Sacramento Bee, the Kings have dispensed with the old notion that fans watching the game actually have to be at the game:

the $448 million Downtown Plaza facility may have far fewer seats than originally proposed, possibly fewer than at old Sleep Train Arena, but could pack more patrons in, nonetheless, by offering special standing-room-only ticket sections and a dramatic outdoor plaza seating area…

The Kings are talking about offering a number of standing-room-only tickets for fans to watch the game in open areas behind the arena’s lower seating bowl or on what officials say would be a dramatic “bridgeway” over one end of the arena, offering bar seating, couches, and a railing overlooking the event floor.

At one end of the arena, the Kings say they envision a glass wall that slides open onto a plaza at Sixth and K streets, making the arena an indoor-outdoor facility. Ticket buyers for some events, such as concerts, would be able to sit in the plaza with a view of the stage through the open glass wall, as well as via video screens in the plaza. The outdoor area could boost arena capacity by thousands for some events, Kings officials said.

Hey, here’s an idea: How about selling tickets to watch events on padded seats, in private suites among the company of your selected guests, via state-of-the-art high-definition video technology? We could call it tele-vision.

Oh, man, not another Marcos Breton “the extremists on both sides are wrong” article about the Sacramento Kings arena deal! I don’t think any of us has the energy for a point-by-point analysis of all his points this time, so let’s just pick one representative one and see how it looks:

Meanwhile, Fehr’s financing plan has evolved to a point that some in the public may not fully appreciate.

The city will generate most of the $258 million by borrowing against city parking assets and issuing tax-exempt bonds.

So, issuing bonds doesn’t actually “generate” money, any more than taking out a mortgage is a way to pay off your house — both just delay your payments for a while. And, for that matter, borrowing against city parking assets doesn’t really generate money either, unless you think the parking revenues will rise as a result of the arena, which Breton makes clear isn’t the case.

So the sentence comes down to “Sacramento doesn’t have to worry, because it’s borrowing the money, and paying for it later.” And this is the guy the Sacramento Bee chose to keep around while laying off pretty much everybody else. Maybe it’s for the best if newspapers die after all.

Saving the craziest for last, the Sacramento Kings‘ new owner is … Shaquille O’Neal? Yes, the guy who once called the team the “Queens” when he was on the rival Los Angeles Lakers. And O’Neal was in midseason form at his first press conference:

O’Neal praised the proposed downtown arena as a massive job creator that would put Sacramento on the map. He said the facility would be the world’s “first cash-less arena,” where fans would be able to use their smart phones to buy tickets, find the concession stands and even “the bathrooms with the smallest lines.

“As long as you’ve got a phone, you can get in,” he said. “It’s all 21st-century stuff.”

Actually, the San Francisco 49ers are already doing that bathroom line phone app thing, so it’ll almost certainly make it to other NBA arenas before Sacramento’s, but hey, you go tell Shaq that he’s wrong.

Meanwhile, Kings majority owner Vivek Ranadive has his own hype machine going full blast, promising a new era for the NBA by putting games on TV in his native India (“There’s a billion people in India – there’s going to be a lot of people watching”), and saying the new building will “be the first basketball arena that has this indoor-outoor feature to it. For concerts and other events, you could actually completely open it up and have 18,000 people inside and another 10,000 people outside.” Yet another part-owner, Mark Mastrov, told the Sacramento Bee that this could involve sliding glass walls to allow people outside to peer in, or maybe giant TV screens outside, or god knows, since the designs aren’t finalized. But whatever, it’s going to be big. You know, like Shaq.

It looks like the custody battle for Sacramento Kings arena referendum petitions that had Chris Hansen’s dirty fingerprints on them is over, and despite Hansen’s vow to stop them from being submitted, they’re going to be submitted:

STOP announced Tuesday it had received the signatures from an Orange County political consultant named Brandon Powers, who had arranged for the petitions to be gathered with $100,000 from Hansen. The campaign is in the process of verifying the validity of the signatures, said STOP spokesman John Hyde. He said the goal will be to collect 30,000 signatures, enough to provide a buffer for those that may be found invalid by county elections officials…

STOP said it would deny Hansen’s request to return the petitions.

“These petitions represent the will of 18,000 people who took the time to provide their signatures and express their desire to put this tax subsidy to a vote,” Julian Camacho, president of STOP, said in a statement. “We believe it would be wrong – ethically and legally – to deny them that right.”

There is a bit of weirdness here, in that Hansen violated campaign finance reporting laws, and the only punishment he’ll get for it is to pay a fine of … well, more than half his campaign donations, so that’s a pretty sizable chunk of change. More to the point, though, as Camacho notes, it’d be tough to argue that the 18,000 people who had the misfortune to sign Hansen-provided petitions instead of some other petitions should be disenfranchised just because of who bought the paper they put pen to — you’d have to start questioning whether there are people who passed up non-Hansen petitions because they’d already signed Hansen ones, etc., and that’s a road you really don’t want to go down.
Anyway, it looks like Sacramentans will get to vote on the proposed $334 million in arena subsidies sometime next year, in that time-honored American tradition where it’s totally considered legit for both sides to try to spend each other into the ground. (Even people with no connection to the vote! The Supreme Court says so!) The pro-arena forces are bound to have a massive spending advantage here, but let’s also remember the 100-to-1 rule, which says that sports facility proponents need to outspend opponents by at least 100-to-1 to have a decent shot at winning a public vote. Gentlemen, start your wallets.

Did I neglect to keep you up to date on the latest bill to fast-track sports development projects in California? Well, it was introduced by state senate president Darrell Steinberg, same as the last one, and it includes lots of additional goodies for the Sacramento Kings‘ arena project:

The bill will speed the judicial process for handling any environmental lawsuits brought against the planned $448 million arena the city and the Kings plan to build in Downtown Plaza. It also limits the courts’ ability to stop construction of the project if a lawsuit is filed, and bolsters the city’s ability to use eminent domain, if needed, to purchase the Macy’s men’s store downtown to make room for the arena. Macy’s plans to consolidate its downtown retail at the women’s store a block away.

SB 743 also represents Steinberg’s latest effort in a two-year quest to overhaul the venerable but cumbersome 47-year-old California Environmental Quality Act, which has made the state a national leader in environmentally friendly growth but has been used widely by plaintiffs to stall or kill projects, sometimes for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the environment. The legislation contains statewide provisions designed to avoid delays on urban “infill” projects.

With all the crazy that’s been injected so far this summer into the Sacramento Kings arena deal, you’d think that an agreement with construction unions on labor to build the thing would be relatively uncontroversial, right? Of course not: Yesterday a spokesperson for a coalition of nonunion contractors grabbed the mic at a mayoral press conference, warning “there will be a fight” and vowing to give money to the arena referendum campaign. It’s getting impossible to keep track of the sides here without a scorecard; I can’t wait until the Dead Men of Dunharrow arrive.

Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos Breton has made a special name for himself among sports subsidy boosters, as someone able to recognize the near-invisible economic returns on stadium and arena projects while simultaneously saying we should build them anyway. But Breton truly outdid himself with yesterday’s column, titled “Are arena subsidies good for cities? Let’s ask an expert.” The expert in question was our old friend Geoffrey Propheter, and here’s what Breton took from their conversation about the proposed Sacramento Kings arena:

• “Propheter found that either public subsidies were too high and never recouped by cities – or the new arena didn’t spur the level of consumer spending that arena proponents promised.”
• But Propheter’s work is “more nuanced and less uniformly conclusive” than this, and includes “a less publicized aspect…: That arenas sometimes can work in some markets,” especially those where the NBA team is the only game in town. In Oklahoma City, for example, “the arena and the franchise has had a positive effect on personal income levels,” Propheter told Breton.
• With Sacramento a one-team city, “The bottom line is: anti-arena advocates who claim there is no way an arena in Sacramento can work are just as wrong and partisan as those who say it will bring an economic windfall.”
• Propheter supports a public vote on a Kings arena, but as a Kings fan himself, would vote in favor of it because “I would be voting with my heart… The economist voice in me would be squashed completely.”

It all comes down to a nice simple “beware the extremism of both sides” message that is beloved by newspaper columnists the world over — and which sounded strangely at odds with the dispassionate statistical analysis that I’d read in Propheter’s research, and heard during my own previous conversations with him. So in the spirit of Woody Allen and Marshall McLuhan, I dropped Propheter an email asking if Breton’s conclusions jibed with what he’d told him. His answer: Not exactly.

• Propheter says he doesn’t recall saying that the arena would be likely to produce tangible economic benefits, “because I don’t believe it would (or that we’d ever be able to tell if it did).” Oklahoma City, he notes, does show a correlation between building the Ford Center and an increase in resident income, but because it also built a whole ton of other downtown development at the same time, it’s impossible to say whether the arrival of the Thunder caused it or not.
• If you want to talk about the benefits of stadiums and arenas, you should look at the intangible psychic benefits to a city, because economic benefits are going to be few and far between.
• With that in mind, Propheter concludes, “If Sacramentans love the Kings more than anything else on the planet including safer neighborhoods, dependable water, quality schools, etc, then it makes sense to give as much money as it takes to keep the team when the alternative is that the team leaves and Sacramentans lose the enjoyment of their first investment preference. But I doubt anyone in their right mind would take such a position.”

Now that’s a nuanced position — and certainly takes into account that some residents of a city might want to support an arena not as economic development, but just because they can’t stand to see the team leave. But it also is an excellent argument for letting people vote on it, because without the economic justification, it comes down to: Would you rather have your basketball team, or would you rather keep the money the owners are trying to extort from you? That’s a less pleasant question, perhaps, but it’s still one that reasonable people can come down on either side of.

What it isn’t is support for the notion that those who say an arena can’t be an economic benefit are “just as wrong” as those who say it will create an economic windfall, and surely no columnist would pretend it is just to support his own preconceptions, right? Boy, if life were only like that…