Photo via Pizzarena of Stony Point, NY.

No news on the arena today (Chris Hansen is still meeting with city officials to hash out a memorandum of understanding the city council can live with), just an analogy to illustrate why some people believe the proposed arena is a bad deal for the city---specifically, for its existing arena, KeyArena.

Let's say you start a pizza restaurant, Pizza Mart. You're going along fine, running your neighborhood business, when a national competitor---let's call it Pizza World---says they're planning to open up the street. You offer to give your business to them for free, but they say no. Instead, they say, they'll let you pay them to stay in the market and compete with them.

What's more, Pizza World is going to take over Pizza Mart's business operations---its menu, its hours, the quality of its chefs---everything about the way Pizza Mart is run. The result is that they get to run two pizza stores for less than the cost of opening one. And they can decide whether to make your business viable or a failure.

That, basically, is the deal Chris Hansen has proposed with KeyArena. After Hansen declined an offer by the city to give him KeyArena for free, the city of Seattle and King County would pay as much as $200 million to Hansen's investor group (to be repaid with future city taxes on arena operations), and hand over operations of KeyArena to those investors. (According to a letter to Hansen from his arena consultant, Global Spectrum, "With any [KeyArena] option, it is imperative that the Owner of the New Arena also be in control of the booking of the repurposed KeyArena.  This is required to eliminate any conflicts over dates or reduction in rental fees.")

Hansen's group would thus be in a position to determine what sort of shows and events get booked at KeyArena and what gets booked at his new arena---and to decide whether KeyArena, which would still physically be owned by the city, thrives or flounders.

Put another way, Hansen would get control of two arenas---the Key and the new arena---for the price of 60 percent (Hansen's $290 million investment) of one (the $490 million total for the new arena).