Jolt
Thursday Jolt: The Arena
Today's winner: The proposed arena.
King County Council members heard from an expert panel on the proposed arena this afternoon. The good news: The proposed public-private partnership to build the arena includes plenty of safeguards to protect the county in case of default, bankruptcy, or an unexpected team departure from Seattle, UW professor and panel member Justin Marlowe said. "As far as the risk allocation and the risk management goes, this is one of the better allocations that we’ve seen," Marlowe said.
(Not too surprising: The county will only be on the hook for its share of arena funding, $80 million, if Chris Hansen and his team of investors manage to recruit an NHL team in addition to scoring an NBA franchise.)
Additionally, the panel concluded that although the tax and employment impact of the arena will be minuscule (KeyArena, for example, produced less than one-tenth of one percent of jobs in the region when it housed the Sonics), it will have noneconomic positive impacts, including urban growth and renewal, the creation of a new public amenity, and economic development, panel member Dick Conway, a Seattle economist, told the council's budget committee.
Today's loser: The arena.
On the other hand, panel members told the council, the dollars the arena would bring in to Seattle's economy won't be "new" money, but will likely come from other parts of the region.
UW researcher Bill Beyers, who did an earlier study on the economic impacts of KeyArena, said a new arena would "likely redirect the spending of your and my consumer income from existing business activity to the arena facility and its tenants … It's not a net gain of tax revenues, from a regional perspective."
Second, although Seattle is the largest city in the nation without an NBA franchise, it's also "saturated" with sports teams, in terms of the number of teams per capita. If the city adds two more teams, the panel found, it would be the third most sports-saturated city in the nation.
Put another way, as Conway put it, Seattle---far from being the "best place in the United States" to locate a new NBA and NHL franchise, as ArenaCo has claimed---it's actually "the third worst," Conway said.
King County Council members heard from an expert panel on the proposed arena this afternoon. The good news: The proposed public-private partnership to build the arena includes plenty of safeguards to protect the county in case of default, bankruptcy, or an unexpected team departure from Seattle, UW professor and panel member Justin Marlowe said. "As far as the risk allocation and the risk management goes, this is one of the better allocations that we’ve seen," Marlowe said.
(Not too surprising: The county will only be on the hook for its share of arena funding, $80 million, if Chris Hansen and his team of investors manage to recruit an NHL team in addition to scoring an NBA franchise.)
Additionally, the panel concluded that although the tax and employment impact of the arena will be minuscule (KeyArena, for example, produced less than one-tenth of one percent of jobs in the region when it housed the Sonics), it will have noneconomic positive impacts, including urban growth and renewal, the creation of a new public amenity, and economic development, panel member Dick Conway, a Seattle economist, told the council's budget committee.
Today's loser: The arena.
On the other hand, panel members told the council, the dollars the arena would bring in to Seattle's economy won't be "new" money, but will likely come from other parts of the region.
UW researcher Bill Beyers, who did an earlier study on the economic impacts of KeyArena, said a new arena would "likely redirect the spending of your and my consumer income from existing business activity to the arena facility and its tenants … It's not a net gain of tax revenues, from a regional perspective."
Second, although Seattle is the largest city in the nation without an NBA franchise, it's also "saturated" with sports teams, in terms of the number of teams per capita. If the city adds two more teams, the panel found, it would be the third most sports-saturated city in the nation.
Put another way, as Conway put it, Seattle---far from being the "best place in the United States" to locate a new NBA and NHL franchise, as ArenaCo has claimed---it's actually "the third worst," Conway said.
