For anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of how the Seattle city council ended up issuing an environmental impact statement that said Key Arena couldn’t be renovated to modern NBA/NHL standards while it had another report in hand saying that it could, a report this morning by the Seattle Times’ Geoff Baker has all the nitty that your gritty could ever need:
Six weeks before the city of Seattle’s release last May of an environmental study on the proposed Sodo District arena, the woman preparing it received a telephone call.
The man phoning URS Corp. Vice President Katy Chaney was Ryan Sickman, a project manager with AECOM preparing a different report for the City Council on KeyArena’s future. Public records released to The Seattle Times indicate Sickman and Chaney discussed how their reports differed on whether KeyArena could be modified for NBA and NHL use without demolishing its unique roof…
“Let me know if you have suggestions on whether to, and how to, revise either the EIS text or the response so that we don’t appear inconsistent between the two documents,’’ [Chaney] emailed Sickman on March 25, 2015.
Sickman two weeks later suggested a 221-word revision stating: “There are now studies in front of the city that show how the KeyArena could be reconfigured and redesigned within the building’s existing structure to accommodate both NBA and NHL franchises based upon the now accepted Sacramento Kings design model for NBA seating distribution.’’…
After the suggested changes bounced around privately between Seattle city staffers and politicians, the AECOM report’s scheduled early May rollout was postponed.
Nick Licata, who was on the council at the time, previously said, “There’s a lot of ways of not holding back information but not amplifying it. I wouldn’t say [the AECOM report] was purposely held back, but I don’t think there was much attention given to it.” That sounds about right from this latest timeline: Right as the council was about to issue a report finally moving ahead with Chris Hansen’s proposed SoDo project, the possibility of renovating Key was raised, and everybody more or less went, Oh, jeez, we can’t handle going back and looking at more options. Let’s just pretend we never saw it.
Baker also provides some detail on what happened in that “bounced around” period, drawn from city emails, particularly those of then-city policy analyst Sara Belz:
AECOM project lead [David] Stone by then was still tweaking his own delayed report and asked Belz on May 15 about mentioning the EIS — given extensive media coverage of its release and continued NHL possibilities in Seattle.
Belz took three days to reply, saying she’d checked with colleagues and “we don’t think you need to devote space in your report to the EIS or NHL stuff. Our thought is just that it might create confusion regarding the scope of your contract and analysis.’’
Again, this is way short of “coverup,” but still certainly doing their best to pretend that the two reports didn’t say dramatically different things, because nobody likes to do rewrites. The interesting bit now will be to see whether there are any repercussions, either for the city officials involved or for the SoDo project itself, especially with the council set to give final approval and opponents turning up the heat to try to block it. If last year was seen as too late to make changes based on new options, it seems impossible that the council would pursue it this year, but stranger things have happened. I think.
Is the new Sacto arena wedged into a site as small as Seattle Center Coliseum’s? (I don’t use corporate arena names.) My understanding was that the old Sonics arena was in such a small area that it made it tough for concerts and impossible add an atrium that could contain a team store, restaurant, etc.
I get that the new Sacto arena has a tiny seating bowl and fewer seats, but I thought that te overall site size of Seattle Center was still a sticking point for the NBA.
The new Sacramento arena has about 200 more seats than ARCO. (17,500 vs 17,317) and will actually have one of the largest lower bowls in the NBA (allowing them to supposedly charge more per seat.).
As far as the square footage, their new arena is on par with other arenas and is about 70% larger than ARCO.
The “trend” in new NBA arenas are with a seating capacity in the 17k+ range. Barclays Center has a capacity of just over 17,700. The new Milwaukee arena will have a seating capacity of between 17,000-17,500 with a large lower bowl, like Sacramento’s new facility. Both of which will incorporate surrounding retail, housing and hospitality to help generate revenue for their respective teams. At least that’s the theory. The days of 20k seat NBA arenas appears to be over.
This whole article from Geoff Baker at the Seattle Times is a SHAM. Geoff makes things up because he and the Times are in cahoots with the Port trying to delay the Sodo Arena vote. PATHETIC
If Chris Hansen intends to use public money (and he does) then the Sodo arena is a “SHAM”.
There’s nothing wrong with privately built arenas. But that’s not what Chris Hansen is proposing.
Chris Hansen and his partners will likely have to pay $1 billion for an expansion team or to purchase and relocate an existing team, plus help build a new arena. His plan to use $200 million in public ‘loans’ risks being made into a permanent gift because otherwise it just doesn’t pencil out.
There’s nothing wrong with using public money if the public is getting revenues back for its trouble. The SoDo arena wouldn’t be nearly the slam dunk that Hansen pretends it is, but it’s a lot closer to break-even than most.
Though I don’t think Baker is making things up, either.
I understand what you’re saying and I agree to a point. I just don’t buy into the rosy revenue projections by Chris Hansen. Hansen has supposedly already spent $100 million acquiring his Sodo land. I think the Maloof brothers also kept the $30 million deposit Hansen and his partners put down to relocate the Sacramento Kings. So with Hansen & Company invested for $100 million already with an expansion franchise likely costing at least $1 billion and a new arena costing at least $500 million, it just doesn’t pencill out. Yes Seattle is a large market but it’s not Chicago, New York or Los Angeles.
At some point if Hansen’s Sodo arena moves forward and he’s able to secure a team either through expansion or relocation, I expect he’ll seek to make the $200 million city / county loan a permanent public contribution.
I know the new trend in arena construction is the “L.A. Live” model (with surrounding retail and hospitality). Maybe that’s how they hope to recouperate some of their investment? But I just think the numbers for a team and arena are too high to make it pencil out.
We’ll see.
That’s a pretty dramatic charge, Shawn, that the Seattle Times is fabricating emails from city officials and printing them on the front page. What evidence can you provide?
I mean, it’s not like we’re talking the Associated Press here:
http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/no_nba_did_not_cancel_north_carolina_repeal_anti_lgbt_law
My recollection Ben is that the AECOM report points out that the prior remodel of KeyArena was done in a way where the roof structure is basically a building sitting on top of the lower half of the building, not like a house where the roof won’t stand if you demolish the lower half of the house. That’s why they concluded they could dig down deeper and change the seating bowl arrangement, essentially building the lower half of the Key as a bigger, deeper facility.
I still think there’s a bit of a coverup. Once upon a time, the city council maintained a website with all the arena documents on it. About the time the AECOM report would have been released to the public, the city’s arena documents website went away.
Chef, look at the city clerk site. The whole thing changed about a year ago. It’s a mess.
@ Ben – the perimeters of the arena buildings themselves (Key and G1C) are roughly equivalent. Golden1 Center has the attached practice and team office facility that gives the entire complex a bigger footprint. Also, G1C didn’t have that pesky roof to deal with.
To be sure, the folks in Seattle could “dig down” just like they did in the early 1990’s with the prior reno, but the problem they face is that nobody wants the arena in Lower Queen Anne. Yes, the arena location itself is iconic, and being (almost literally) at the foot of the Needle will make for some terrific blimp shots and other exterior video packages, but it’ll be a bitch to (re)build, and the NIMBY-fu in Queen Anne is strong.
Yeah… “Re-writing is too damn hard”… Why is that such a hard pill to swallow?
The report on Key Arena was commissioned because part of the deal with Hansen included an analysis of what to do with Key Arena once its made obsolete by a new SoDo arena. When they did the alternatives analysis, two of the alternatives looked at were a complete gutting and re-building of the arena to NHL/NBA standards with two different seating bowl configurations (one N/S config, one diagonal config). These were very basic SWAGs (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) at capacity and cost and they both came up with a fairly small arena (N/S was about 15,500 seats, Diagonal was about 16,500 as I recall, both fairly small) but the estimate was that it could be done for about $285mil. That raised a few eyebrows at the time because that number is a good bit lower than $490mil for a brand new arena. But being just an alternatives analysis, there’s no EIS, no fianancial backer, etc. It also made a point of saying that couldn’t be done without a light rail stop at the Seattle Center, which will be coming around some time next century (2031 on the yet to be passed ST3 proposal)
To say this was a competing proposal or comprehensive study that was covered up or ignored is a little spurious. Compared to the amount of work done on SoDo, this is basically a back-of-a-napkin level look at what could be done. And yeah… studying what to do with Key Arena to the same level as has been done with SoDo would be quite a bit of work… Whats that going to cost the city? You want them to do a fully fledged study for every single possible building site? We’d be here another 5 years trying to decide where to build the thing. SoDo has a guy ready to throw cash at the project and already has the land in hand. Minus getting a team, and teaching the Port about true traffic impacts, there’s very few hurdles left. Now everyone wants to go back to the drawing board?
It seems less like a cover-up and more like the old move of “Ill read that report now” as the report gets thrown in the trash. The council gave no fucks about the KeyArena and knew no one would use it except as a temp hone, so they just ignored everything about it so they could move on to an actual new arena.
The problem is that in the EIS scope it was accepted as a fact that no private party was interested in paying for a Key Arena remodel. It’s still true. So spending money to study an option that nobody has be interested in over the past decade. The conspiracy is based on a hope that one of these decades somebody might pay for it.
https://twitter.com/tweetmrbaker/status/719577903038464000
ChefJoe, are you talking about this site? http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cityplanning/designcommission/projectreviews/currentprojects/seattlearena/documents/default.htm
No, there is/was a collector page. King County’s is still there http://www.kingcounty.gov/council/issues/arena.aspx . The city version had its links rendered useless when the city changed its database.
@ Chefjoe: When they did the second remodel of the building in ’94-’95, they made the decision to separate the roof from the rest of the structure. In a way, it’s smart, but it also proves a challenge. The roof might not have landmark status at the moment, but it’s considered iconic enough to go after such status, which means the option will almost have to work with the restriction of the roof in place.
The AECOM report says they can basically level the existing lower building/bowl, dig down, dig further out from the roof structure and set the bowl at a diagonal to try to work within a similar floorplate as the existing structure. This is something that was initially considered in the SoDo arena EIS but was dismissed because the floorplate was considered too small for the project they want to build. The cost, effort, and environmental impact made more sense to just consider leveling the building and starting from scratch. So, by law, they ruled out the remodel in the EIS.
The funny thing about the AECOM report is that the potential remodel is a preliminary concept and not dedicated plans. It also creates an arena that would be one of the smallest in both the NBA and NHL, which creates the potential for almost immediate obsolescence. And it doesn’t really address one of the big issues that made the Key untenable to begin with: where is the additional space to support all of the amenities for the additional revenue streams. They talk about turning a building at the south end of the Key into a place for amenities, but it’s not particularly defined.
Even more funny, the AECOM report lists, at least, 6 better uses of the building or land than as a sports arena.
Not to mention the fact that all of the private parties that are currently involved in or floating around the various arena projects in the area have looked at KeyArena and aren’t interested in investing in it. It’s such a non-starter that it’s almost laughable, and yet the Times keeps trotting out this supposed conspiracy.
You guys keep twisting what the EIS does around. The EIS is environmental impact and considers alternatives without dropping them quickly due to perceived costs or lack of investors. The cost analysis is a part of the assessment, not a criteria to rule things out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_statement
Considering most of the bonds are to be repaid from admissions taxes, they could assess that tax at the 10% rate allowed by the county instead of the 5% rate and be able to repay bonds. Of course, it doesn’t make sense for the city to plan this without an NBA team, but that’s always been Hansen’s baliwick.
It was this – https://web.archive.org/web/20150417050319/http://www.seattle.gov/arena/documents.htm
It was noted by May 2015 – http://nosonicsarena.com/wp/?p=2397
“I also have noticed that the whole City of Seattle collection of arena documents for the city has gone dark with a 404 error. (I think I found the re-designed collection for the County) Hopefully, that’s a temporary issue.”
That new Sacramento arena is wedged into such a small area that, yes, indeed, it’s going to cause issues.
There are two functional areas where the old site is vastly superior to the new site: Parking, and freeway access. These two issues are so major that I fully expect the complaining to be vociferous from opening day. And it’s within one mile of Raley Field. That’s no joke; I’ve been stuck on the I-5 North to 50-West connector ramp for one hour. It’s a one-mile connector ramp. There was no traffic accident, just people getting to a Rivercats game.
If they’re serious about 150+ events per year at Golden 1 Center, there will be nights when both Raley Field and Golden 1 Center will be in use. It’s entirely unavoidable.
Not to mention paying for the arena on the backs of downtown workers. It’s maddening.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention this, Neil.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article71153332.html
Not as surprised as I am that you’re posting about a California mortgage fraud settlement in an item about arenas in Seattle.
Any excuse to bash the Vampire Squid is reasonable.