Field of Schemes new post King County gives preliminary OK to Seattle arena, pending economic study

The King County council voted yesterday to approve the MOU with Chris Hansen for a new Seattle arena — but with a couple of amendments. The most significant of these: Hansen has to pay for an independent economic analysis of the arena plan, which the county will then get to review before giving final approval to the deal. Other provisions include additional guarantees that Hansen will repay public bonds, that the county will be able to examine the new arena company's books, and that 500 tickets per game will be made available to youth at $10 each.

Hansen was apparently involved in crafting the new provisions, so presumably he's fine with them. Since much of this overlaps the requests made yesterday by the Seattle city council, this really only leaves two potential sticking points on the deal: the council's demand to get a larger share (okay, any share) of arena taxes, and the requirement that plans be made for KeyArena once the new building is open.

For now, Hansen's only public response is a brief post on his sonicsarena.com website, in which he thanks the county council for their vote and says he's "looking forward to sitting down with City Council members to figure out how we can make this deal work for everyone." While obviously any deal can fall apart over even a single sticking point, it's certainly promising when you have local government agencies looking to finetune a deal to protect taxpayers, while the prospective arena builder is willing to concede to reasonable requests. It's almost like democracy is meant to operate, you know?

Of course, then Hansen would still need to find an NBA team to buy at a price that he can afford, on top of paying nearly $500 million to build an arena. (The Sacramento Kings are the obvious much-rumored choice, but it's always hard to predict what the hell the Maloof brothers will do.) If he pulls it off, it would be an impressive sign that a sports arena, prior evidence to the contrary, can actually pay for its own construction cost and still turn a profit. That, in turn, could be a game-changer in cities' future negotiations over arena deals — though given that the San Francisco Giants' mostly privately funded stadium didn't exactly stop the flood of public money pouring into MLB facilities, we probably shouldn't get our hopes up too much.

from Field of Schemes http://www.fieldofschemes.com/news/archives/2012/07/5033_king_county_giv.html