Late-Afternoon Fizz: Arena Announcement Expected Today

Exciting news! Especially if it is indeed expected to be profitable for the city, not just the owners/developers.

The only “profit” will be in the money the owners kick back to McDope’s campaign fund.

Don’t hate…

McGinn and his transparent govt. Time for the laugh track to kick in. 

Do you ever have anything nice to say, or were you just raised by your father?

I see the sports junkies are weighing in. This ought to be fun. See, McDope will unveil his plan that calls for a “city investment.” It will conceal the flip side, which will be “city risk,” and it will put the taxpayers on the hook to build his newfound hedge fund buddy a $400 million palace with city bond money.

We’ll be promised, but not guaranteed, that ticket tax receipts will pay back the $400 million. The city council will go along, urged by the Seattle Times. Everyone’s next campaign will be smooth and well funded. The Seattle smugsters will look the other way, because McDope likes bicycles, developers, and dope.

Just wait. You’ll see.

Make that an arena with NBA and NHL specs rather than a specific NBA arena.  They’re also trying to bring an NHL franchise to the area.

Other than that, when you consider the difficulty of undertaking any kind of an ambitious project in this city considering its politics, I’ll really believe a deal when they put shovels in the ground.

Oh, trust me, this is going to happen. We have the best politicians money can buy, and a pretty dumb population. 

“A number of “unfamiliar” faces have been seen on the elevators at city hall in the past two days…”  
I love how insular City Hall is.  I bet the staffers who tipped you off actually said this without irony.

Dumb, dumb, dumb! We might as well just blow up Key Arena, then. It won’t survive this.

This issue should fit your black and white world view nicely!  Lucky for you it came along in a nick of time, just before you’d said everything there is to say about everything else!

You ask for trust at the same time you call yourself dumb.  That’s ironical!

ah yes…profits will ensue on city investment in the stadium….

however the fine print will say that city spending for highway off ramps, a utility substation, moving utility lines, and police overtime for traffic is not an investment in the project.  it’s just cost it’s just a hundred milloin but it’s spread over many budgets and line items and is fairly well hidden.  once again the subsidy to the wealthy and sports fans will be obscured.  it’s  a smart plan!  you tax everyone, including nonfans and the poor most of all, then redistribute to (a) Chris Hansen and fellow owners, (b) multimillion dollar salaried ball players, and (c) the rich families that can afford $50 tickets and $9 beers at games. 

who gives a shit if roads are crumbling, teachers are being layed off, and services cut if they go to the poor?  This is politics.  Even liberals in the upper income zip codes, magnolia and queen ann and mt. baker, can get on board.  All cities do it.  Who cares if we take from the poor some more and don’t build something that benefits everyone, like a road repair, a train, or health care? .

The “progressives” will be all for this. Their cyclista hero, Michael McDope, will have his campaign fund (and the bank account in the Caymans) filled to the brim by his new friends, who incidentally are in complete cahoots with Downtown. A few crumbs about bike lanes and “traffic calming,” and they’ll fall in line. Just wait.

Great, so we build this thing, and then this new “team” is able to blackmail the city into paying more and more so that we can have a damn basketball or hockey team? Fantastic. Supersonics? Oh, don’t worry, that won’t ever happen again….

The gratuitous mention of Burgess is hilarious.  If McGinn makes this happen it is one more sign that any Burgess mayoral run is evaporating before it ever got started.  The nba lands here and the establishment types, Burgess’ base, stick with McGinn.

You’ve added conspiracy theorist to your minimalist repertoire.  Congratulations for branching out?

Yeah the Burgess name plant stuck out like a wart on a thumb. And tonight he headed off to sit at the seattle school board meeting apparently in order to get a shout out from Establishment White Male Club board president Debell.

Net votes to Burgess in 2013? Two. Max. Plus maybe fellow Establishment White Male Club Nick Hanauer’s. Although Hanauer’s vote is questionable in value these days.

I guess if there is a will the politicians will find a way and the “no pubic funds for sports arena law” be damned. 

You sports haters need to learn how to read. You have no credibility and are proving you are just anti-sports nerds. You are against an arena no matter how it is funded. Go move somewhere else!

If this facility is built by private money, and is better, there isn’t anything that can really stop Key being relegated to background noise.

You’re a “progressive” sucker. As soon as the rich dude hedge fund guy dumps money into your cyclista mayor’s pockets, you’ll be down on your knees.

 If the rich dude pays for it himself, it’s none of my business. But if that’s what he was going to do, he’d have never needed secret meetings with Mayor McDope and the $20,000 a month “sports consultant.”

Really? Even when I agree with you for once you bitch and insult? Jeez…..

 No, No!  Roller Derby–Rat City Rollergirls really draw well at the Key–they won’t have a place to skate.  It would also be a good place for derby regional and national tournaments once others vacate the Key.

while his conspiratorial theory sounds weird, in fact it’s true:

politicians who help sports teams
get many donations from DSA, lawyers,  sports team owners, wealthy fans of sports teams.

is this so hard to understand?  a pol delivers something to a group, they support him.

it could be bikists or sierra club.  since that’s not working so well amounting to 23% of the population, mcginn needs another 27% why not pimp for an nba team?

do the poor need an nba team?

do the unemployed need an nba team?

do the struggling middle class folks need nba team when behind one month on mortgage, can’t afford the co pay for a check up, certainly can’t afford the $295 sports fee for their 16 year old kid to be on the swim team?

sports arenas are for the rich owners, the rich players, the fans who can afford $50 tickets who disproportionately are upper class and top half, and the fooled, stupid deluded working class folks who plaster themselves with team jerseys in search of an identity they can’t achieve on their own being out of work and not too successful.

this arena needs massive pubolic subsidies for roads, utilities, tax concesssions, police, etc. otherwise why does he need to talk to government at all?  this is so american.  we pay lip service to the free market then liberals AND conservatives in government conspire to shovel public aid to the rich and top half.  here it’s mortgage interest deduction, there it’s bailouts, here it’s tolled 520 only the top half can afford, there its  THIRD nay FOURTH stadium.

for what we spent on these stupid stadiums we could have 5 subway lines linking every town between everett fed way bellevue renton and seattle with 25 stops in north seattle and 5 in west seattle and 25 in south seattle and not just the skinny little light rail line we’re building that btw is in danger of not being built due to ST 25% shortfall and now risk of losing federal funds. 

 don’t forget the Storm!

Wait a second, you’re telling me that politics is a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back game?

Psst … lean in close and I’ll let you in on a little secret: sports stadiums don’t get built without some level of public subsidy.

Psst … Psst … lean in closer and I’ll let you in on another one: the bigger the business the bigger the subsidy.

Psst … Psst … Psst … even closer now: FP lives in his own little utopia where he delights in envisioning people down on their knees.  I live in the real world.

Ditto on this prediction – and frankly, it’s cutting enough that you could have done without the last two sentences of the second paragraph entirely.

You’re actually wrong on that – there are lots of progressives who will oppose this (though not necessarily the self-styled New Urbanist so-called progressives who dominate the discussion in this particular echo chamber).

Actually, I’d be against another stadium in that particular location even if it was self-funded, which it won’t be – there isn’t a single new stadium that I can think of that has been, because none of the different pro sports have a business model that works without massive public subsidies.

 OK, we get it. You are against the sports arena proposal but spare us the nonsense about being able to build 5 subway lines for the same cost of the stadiums.

Can’t even do the one airport to Northgate line for the costs of the existing and proposed stadiums/arena. Also, ST risks losing federal funds because the ridership levels are so far below projections. Puget Sound Regional Council now projects 2040 ridership levels will be 47% less than what ST projects for 2030. Light rail extensions to Bellevue and Federal Way  ridership forecasts don’t justify even applying for
federal funding to support these extensions.

Its OK to hate on stadiums if you want to but they are not related to ST’s problems.

I would say it’s pretty bad business to subsidize a potential major competitor to a facility you already own – especially when that facility works pretty darn well for a  whole lot of things (even if it  does lack some of the current revenue-producing bells and whistles the NBA is currently demanding municipalities provide for them at public expense).

I have less than zero regard for this city’s “progressives.” There isn’t a single thing you people won’t sell out. 

“Better” is arguable. Madonna just decided to bring two shows to the Key. She clearly thinks it’s an acceptable venue… I don’t feel sorry for NBA teams that demand more luxury boxes and fancy amenities to sell to corporate ticket buyers. As Mr. X says, WHY would you support a privately-built facility that competes with a publicly-owned one?

Then you should oppose this new arena, because it will be devastating to the Key as corporate buyers move to the new arena for events.

If I buy the land in SODO out of pocket, get permission from the city to merge various parcels/streets into one giant land mass, and build a better tourist destination/farmers market than Pike Place Market–and it buries the PPM–I mean, that’s just sort of what happens. It sucks, but legally, what can be done to stop someone building a stadium with private funds and various little tax benefits any more than someone building a new mall, or office buildings, or whatever else? 

As long as we’re not outlaying any real money up front, which we’re not, this is just modern life 101. Developer wants to build something, gets some assistance on zoning and moving utilities around, and they build it. When it comes to all this, I’m really baffled why people are so upset about that aspect of it. It’s just how it is and always has been or else nothing “huge” ever would get built.

You’d have nothing otherwise constructed but little structures that fit in pre-existing parcels and don’t compete with or interfere with existing private or public assets. 

THIS is not just a case of a private developer deciding to build a project. This is happening with the support of the Mayor’s office and others, and will most certainly require city support. And it’s being done knowing that it will be detrimental to a city-owned facility. That’s called negligence.

The poor need the resulting sales tax revenue. Sales tax revenue is a major source of funding for the county and city.
It directly feeds the general fund.

Then it would be built in Bellevue, and you get all of the downside of Key Arena not competing and people from Seattle going to Bellevue to dump their wealth 82 nights a year.

They have to announce this now, Seattle isn’t the only city in western Washington working on this.

 Just like we blew up Mercer Arena instead of giving it to Seattle Opera- oh wait

 They might lose WWE events and other huge concerts. Otherwise, events that require a smaller venue (a WNBA game wouldn’t sell out a full size NBA/NHL arena) could still work at KeyArena.

In fact, having two large in-city arenas could expand programming opportunities.

Perhaps… We’ve already seen that happen with the hockey arena in Kent. That doesn’t mean there aren’t better solutions to propose aside from a new arena in SoDo. Caving in to private developers, however, is NOT the solution.

That’s not quite the same thing… Aren’t they next to each other? And Mercer literally could not accommodate current productions? There is nothing actually wrong with Key Arena as an event facility.

I’ll just assume you’ll come up with another reason to be opposed to this, now that your predictions have turned out to be wrong.

 $200,000,000 is the first ask – and I GUARANTEE there will be more.

Signed – a veteran of 3 stadium wars….

No one ever accused me of making sense or using too much logic.  Oh, and shut up, you pathetic smugster basketballista.

You whining stadiumistas will change your tune in 10 years when the city decides to raise the car tabs to pay for the sales tax shortfall on the gas tax surplus deficit on the arena parking fees.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you so!

You whining stadiumistas will change your tune in 10 years when the city decides to raise the car tabs to pay for the sales tax shortfall on the gas tax surplus deficit on the arena parking fees.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you so!

The Key is not a revenue producer, and Seattle Center has been running in the red for ages.

The Key is not a revenue producer, and Seattle Center has been running in the red for ages.

“There is nothing actually wrong with Key Arena as an event facility. ”

That must be why it sits empty 300 nights a year.

Stop it, you’re killing their nonsensical stream of feel-good talking points!

The “progressives” will cave. It’ll actually be pretty funny to watch.

This is going very much as I predicted.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the smugster party.

Nice appropriation of the FP handle though.

Between Rat City and the Storm, Key has the lesbian sports fans tied up, but there’s a finite number of them.