The Sacramento city council may not know where they want to build a Kings arena, or how much it would cost, or who would pay for it, or who would buy the team, or whether the NBA and the Maloofs would even let them buy it, but by gum they’re not going to let that stop them from voting on it! And so the council voted 7-2 last night to allow city manager John Shirey to spend $150,000 on lawyers and arena financing consultants, and to enter into negotiations with a group of new investors who’d be looking to buy the team out from under its preexisting Seattle suitors.
As to who exactly the city will be negotiating with, the council still has no idea. (The Sacramento Bee called this “an unusual twist.”) Mayor Kevin Johnson has said a formal proposal to buy the team will likely be made by this Friday, though whether that will include a full list of investors or just one rich dude and “I know some guys, see” remains to be determined.
As for what the city will be negotiating, that’s apparently wide open as well: The site is still up in the air, and while last year’s failed “sell future downtown parking rights and then make up for the lost city revenue from parking fees by — hey, look over there!” plan remains in play, the Bee says that “land sales, ticket surcharges and assessments paid by property owners near the arena are also on the table.” Also presumably bake sales. Or maybe shoeshine polish that glows in the dark.
Shirey stressed that nothing will be finalized until he can come back to the council with a term sheet, which he hopes to do by mid-April, when the NBA owners are set to vote on the Kings’ future. But no pressure or anything.
I’m not going to give a lot of info here, but my wife is one of the sponsors of tomorrow’s “State of the City” address Sacramento mayors annually hold. I fully expect that this address will be used almost exclusively to introduce the arena plan and the whales.
How exciting that my wife gets to be right there! (Sarcastic gushes)
As I said in my comments last night, I do like the changes Council Member Hansen got into the “guiding principles”, but we know what happened to the guiding principles last time, too: Regional approach, 1/3, 1/3, 1/3? Yeah, not quite. They can freely ignore any of the 8 guiding principles to their content.
This is all just diddling. We can take an offer to the BOG meeting, and if we give them that offer on April 17, they won’t even bother to read it. They must have a concrete offer by mid-March; it has to be set in stone by then.
And after all that, the Maloofs will simply decline the offer anyway. This was a complete waste of another $150,000. I bet the recipients of that money are happy. And they know there will be more. We just look stupid now.
What does a sponsorship of the State of the City address get you? There’s nothing to see here locally. The NBA BOG meeting in April is where the real action will be at.
Actually, the company she works for, which gets her VIP seating, a meet-and-greet, etc.
Kevin Johnson has promised to recreate his shower scenes with 15/16 year old girls and then take it on the road to all the strip clubs to make up the needed 250 million or so
Actually, bake sales might work. I love Sacramento but we really need more bakeries in this town.
Neil, what do you make of this report?
http://www.sportstalkflorida.com/exclusive-mayor-johnson-in-control-of-kings/
This is the first and only time I’ve heard that Hansen did not make the down payment. I always presumed he did. If he didn’t… Game-changer?
If Hansen made a down paymetn or not until Sacremento finds a buyer and has an arena deal with said buyer. The clock is ticking.
Per the Kings and the Maloof family, Hansen did make the deposit.
[tweet https://twitter.com/Ryan_Lillis/status/306931286696677377]
Confirmed from multiple sources that the “no down payment has been sent”-report was BS.
Well, what are the “multiple sources”?
Bee, Seattle Times, News10. That report was bogus, jhande.
Whales will be introduced tomorrow:
https://twitter.com/largesteven/status/306994430588645376
Yawn. Doesn’t matter. It’s now being reported that included in the PSA is an exclusivity clause — the Maloofs cannot negotiate with anyone else. The BOG has to find a reason to reject Hansen’s offer, not merely find a reason to take someone else’s offer. This is the problem the whale(s) will face.
On the “exclusive right” clause (and many other issues):
http://seattletimes.com/html/nba/2020449273_sacramento28.html
This is what David Stern said at his All Star press conference:
“We have been advised by Mayor Johnson of Sacramento, (who we have not met with and who we have no plans to meet with here), that Sacramento will be delivering to us a competitive bid to the one we have received from Seattle that will include the construction of a new building with a significant, you know, subsidy from the city of Sacramento and other things that would bring the region together to support the team. That’s all we have, the mayor has said that we’ll have that likely well before March 1 which appears in our constitution for when we must receive applications to move, it’s sort of irrelevant exactly but that was a good enough date so we selected that.”
I’m not at all convinced that KJ has come close to delivering on his three-part promise. But at the same time, I know deadlines do slip, especially when we’re dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars.
But, to recap: Investors, a plan, and a subsidy. Do we have that? Well, we probably have 1 of those things. Can’t really say we have the other 2 at all. They’re probably a year from receiving even one dime from a parking lease-out. They don’t even have an arena location yet.
I continue to think they’re in trouble.
Seattle does not have an arena location yet too. There was a court case where the city and Hansen’s lawyers were quite insistent that the Seattle arena does not have a set location. Seattle won’t have money to buy any arena land until they issue and sell bonds. Hansen certainly has his plans to be an owner though.
But it is very possible that Sacramento’s ticket sales would see a big turn-around if the Maloofs were out and new owners tried to do something with the team. I’d be a bit concerned about the impacts of recent trades but, it is what it is.
Seattle is many months ahead of sac. The eir will take 12-18 months. How can sac start an eir without a location?
Seattle is currently doing a SEPA review and evaluating no action, a place Hansen has bought land for, and several other sites to determine where an arena could work and what mitigation issues might be needed at each site. The plan is for that EIS to evaluate several sites and be done in Nov. If the Sacramento site has been studied for an arena or large development recently there’s a lot of room to catch up (compared to the slow pace of the Seattle process).
http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~public/meetingrecords/2013/cbriefing20130225_5a.pdf