July 11, 2007

NBA considers private Kings arena ... or does it?

A scantily sourced (one "person close to the negotiation process") story on Sacramento's CBS affiliate says that the NBA may consider financing a new arena itself for the Kings, after the failure of last year's arena tax referendum. "They have the money to do it," state assemblymember Dave Jones, a public arena funding opponent, told CBS 13. "They make tons of money, providing professional basketball and it's a business like any other business. So if they want a building, they should invest in it just like any business does."

The problem, of course, is that Jones' statement presumes that an arena will make money for its investors, and they generally don't. There's also the question as to whether this unnamed source means NBA funding or NBA financing (the news story uses both terms) - if Stern only intends to sell the bonds for the arena, then have somebody else pay them off, we're right back where we started.

Some clues may have been provided by a recent interview Stern gave to the Sacramento Bee's Ailene Voisin, in which he said of the Kings arena campaign:

We accept the notion that a referendum on raising money in California starts at a disadvantage and needs a degree of perfection. I'm not sure that anything I have been associated with in terms of marshaling a proposal, etc. has been this complicated. So what we're looking at won't need the same degree of public support. ... I have become familiar with the state, and the public has spoken very clearly on this. Now, that doesn't mean there won't be a situation where we're asking the taxpayer to [contribute] something, but I'm not sure.

Has somebody been taking evasiveness lessons from Lew Wolff?