April 09, 2008
Sonics reno plan dead - for now
Sure enough, it wasn't a last-minute deal: Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' announcement yesterday was that a proposed $300 million renovation of KeyArena for the Sonics - half to be paid for by a group of local billionaires, half by taxpayers - was dead, with not enough time to get public funding through the state legislature before the rich dudes' self-imposed April 10 deadline.
That said, it's not necessarily the kind of dead you don't recover from: Seattle developer Matt Griffin, part of the plutocrats' group, said "we'd be irresponsible to say we wouldn't keep an open mind" on future arena talks. It does mean there won't be a deal in place before the NBA owners vote next week on relocating the Sonics to Oklahoma City; even that, though, isn't necessarily a death knell for the team, as there's still that city lawsuit trying to hold the team to its lease through 2010. City officials say they're not looking for a buyout settlement (they rejected a $26.5 million offer in February), so if they manage to drag things out in court, that could at least buy some time for an arena deal to be worked out.
Whether that's a good thing or not depends not just on whether you think it's worth spending $150 million to renovate an arena that the city just spent $74 million to renovate in 1994, but on who would reap any increased revenues from a renovated arena: the Sonics, the private investors, or the public. While the split of costs has been a matter of intense public debate, there's been almost no discussion of the split of revenues - beyond a brief mention that the city would recoup its $75 million share from "revenues generated" at the arena, would could mean anything, from actual money from naming rights or ad boards, say, to dubious pay-your-taxes-and-eat-them-too schemes like TIFs. If I've said it before, Judith Grant Long has said it a thousand times: You can't evaluate a stadium or arena deal until you've gotten a look at the lease.
