July 21, 2006
Kings, Nats, Magic, Niners news
Way too much news today and I'm on deadline (see the Village Voice website on Tuesday afternoon for the fruits of this labor), so let's get right to a bullet-point Friday:
- More details have emerged on the latest Sacramento Kings arena proposal, though the whole mess is so complicated that it's still pretty murky. The total arena cost would be between $470 million and $540 million; the Kings owners would repay $72 million in existing debt to the city for construction of Arco Arena, in part by selling off the land under the arena once it's been razed; the Kings would pay $4 million a year in rent for 30 years, plus arena operations costs, estimated at $10-12 million a year; the arena would be owned by the city, so presumably not be subject to property taxes. Clearly, the vast bulk of the construction bond costs - would would likely total $35 million a year or so - would fall on the public purse, but it's going to take a bit to crunch the numbers and come up with an exact breakdown of who's paying what. Stay tuned.
- Major League Baseball has declared that the Washington, D.C. government is in default of its lease deal for the new Washington Nationals stadium, insisting that the project has already missed key deadlines - an MLB lawyer calling this "a recipe for causing the Project to be late, over budget and substandard in quality, and susceptible to costly and unnecessary disputes between the Team and the Commission." (Lawyers like to capitalize nouns.) The leading theories are that this is either a maneuver to light a fire under the D.C. government to move faster on stadium construction - which would also be a recipe for going over budget - or an attempt to establish a paper trail should the dispute end up in court. Either way, it's apparently holding up the official sale of the Nats to new owners Ted Lerner and Stan Kasten, which was announced in May but still hasn't been finalized.
- In case you missed the big vote on Tuesday, Florida's Orange County commission voted 6-1 to hike hotel taxes by 1%, with some of the proceeds earmarked for new and renovated pro sports facilities. With the Orlando Magic pushing for a new $350 million arena and other downtown interests demanding a $252 million renovation to the Citrus Bowl, however, the hotel tax alone is unlikely to make the nut: "I don't think this ordinance gets us there," county commissioner Homer Hartage told the Orlando Sentinel. "There's a tremendous amount of work still to be done."
- The San Francisco 49ers announced their plans for a new stadium, which they say will cost between $600 million and $800 million and could be financed by unspecified private funds, and would be expandable to host the Olympics. That certainly sounds familiar.
How many deadlines did MLB officials miss in
moving the former Expos to Washington and in
selling the team to the Lerner group? Sounds a
bit hypocritical to me. Practice what you preach,
MLB.
As near as I can tell, by making the Maloofs new sports palace the property of the County, this makes it so the Maloofs do not have to pay property taxes (annual assessment: 1% of assessed value), which is very, very close to their rent (1% of $377 million = $3.77 million a year in property taxes they don't have to pay). Very clever: Charge an average of $4 million/year in rent, then save the Maloofs an average of $4 million/year in property taxes, and call that the Maloofs' share.
The proponents of the arena say turning this down makes us a cowtown; I think that accepting this deal as "fair" changes us from a cowtown to a rubetown.
I hope the voters figure all this out soon. The word is that the next step is "education," and it's starting out with, "It's not all about the Kings!"
I think smart people have already figured out that it IS all about the Maloofs. They don't own the building; they just own exclusive rights to it, that's all.
It took me a while to figure out why the Maloofs would want to knock down the existing arena when the new one is built, and then it hit me: They want an arena monopoly. They're better off knocking down a perfectly usable arena so it won't get, well, used. Eliminate the competition. It's a tactic I hadn't thought of before.
Posted by: MikeM on July 21, 2006 07:01 PM
