do you think Sacramento will get a new arena built for the Kings? (Los Angeles: how much, contractor)

[NewToCA]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Well, it makes sense. The Kings are already losers and Sacramento will simply lose more paying to keep them. Sounds like a match made in heaven; and that for a relative handful of fans and a very few bragging rights.

Most teams only have a fairly small % of local folks who are supporters of the team, Sacramento is hardly unique in that manner.

As a sports fan myself, and a pro basketball fan, I've seen this repmeatedly in multiple cities. In Washington DC, the Bullets/Wizards only had about 15 or so percent of the local folks interested in the club, same with the Philly Sixer's and the Cleveland Cavs.

I lived in KC for a few years when the Kings played there, the Sacramento area supports the team to a greater degree than the support they received in KC.

Now, regarding the team itself I disagree with your assessment. They significantly improved as the season wore on last year, and the acquisition of Marcus Thornton appears to be a significant positive move. Without turning this into a Kings analysis, they have a few pieces in place for a competitive team, and should be "interesting" if they get to play this season.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by NewToCA

Most teams only have a fairly small % of local folks who are supporters of the team, Sacramento is hardly unique in that manner.

As a sports fan myself, and a pro basketball fan, I've seen this repmeatedly in multiple cities. In Washington DC, the Bullets/Wizards only had about 15 or so percent of the local folks interested in the club, same with the Philly Sixer's and the Cleveland Cavs.

I lived in KC for a few years when the Kings played there, the Sacramento area supports the team to a greater degree than the support they received in KC.

Now, regarding the team itself I disagree with your assessment. They significantly improved as the season wore on last year, and the acquisition of Marcus Thornton appears to be a significant positive move. Without turning this into a Kings analysis, they have a few pieces in place for a competitive team, and should be "interesting" if they get to play this season.

Well, if ya gtta have 'em, let's hope they come roaring back!

[shelato]

The part of the plan that bothers me the most right now is the idea of selling off the parking rights. This seems really short sighted.

First, I don't see some outside vendor having any additional expertise that they city doesn't currently have. Mostly the reason they are selling the parking rates is because the city doesn't want to deal with the negative political fallout from raising parking rates itself. But if they sell off the parking rights, the first thing the new buyer is going to do is raise the parking rates and voters will figure out pretty quickly why that happened.

But the biggest reason to not sell off the parking rights is that right now is to maintain planning flexibility. If you want to hold an event in the city that needs to close off the street like say the Tour of California bike race, or California International Marathon and the event crosses streets that normally would have parking meters, well you only need to get permission from the city. But once you sell off the parking meters, now you have another entity that has veto power over which events and where you can stage them in the city and even when you can stage them. To me that seems like a really bad idea.

Second a lot of the livability measures that make living downtown work have involved screwing around with traffic flows and screwing around with parking. If you bring a streetcar or another light rail line into downtown, you might need to pull some lanes of traffic, you might need to lose some street parking or you might need to do both. When the city owns the streets and the parking spots well this is purely a municipal decision. But when the parking spots have been leased for 25 or 50 years to the outside parking vendor, again they are going to be in the mix of saying what you can do and where you can do it on the city streets. This seems like a needless additional complication to revitalizing downtown. Who is to say what areas of downtown are going to be strong or weak 15,25,40 or even 50 years from now. I suspect that city will really regret giving up this flexibility in the future.

Moreover cities around the world seem to be doing some pretty innovative things on their streets right now in parking spots. Take a look at what Vancouver did on Dunsmiur Street to build a protected bike lane. If Vancouver had sold off the rights to parking downtown, do you think they could have tried doing something like this downtown?


Introducing the Dunsmuir separated bike lane - YouTube

San Francisco is looking at eliminating street parking on some streets in North Beach and converting that into additional outdoor eating spaces for cafes and restaurants. Again if the city of Sacramento goes ahead and sells off its parking right, would it have the flexibility to add sidewalk space at the expense of parking?

Cafes get more sidewalk under North Beach plan

Reasonable people may disagree about the merits of the city subsidizing a downtown arena. But surely there is a consensus that selling off city parking rights to outside vendors is a bad idea and that is would be far better for the city to just raise downtown parking rates itself instead?

[BeeGlee]

Power Balance should be completely renovated and a hotel & casino should be added to the site. This could be done by partnering with an American Indian tribe as the developers. Ultimately the new development would be a mini version of MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay or Caesar's Palace.

The renovation still allows for a state of the art arena, the casino would allow for perpetual income throughout the year, and the hotel would give Sac a new 5 star resort that is easily accessible to the airport.

The downtown railroad yard plans should be put off/reserved for a baseball stadium. That would give Sac two professional sports teams that utilize both facilities, and hopefully we could host the Olympics during the next 20 years.

[Howest2008]

Originally Posted by BeeGlee

Power Balance should be completely renovated and a hotel & casino should be added to the site. This could be done by partnering with an American Indian tribe as the developers. Ultimately the new development would be a mini version of MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay or Caesar's Palace.

The renovation still allows for a state of the art arena, the casino would allow for perpetual income throughout the year, and the hotel would give Sac a new 5 star resort that is easily accessible to the airport.

The downtown railroad yard plans should be put off/reserved for a baseball stadium. That would give Sac two professional sports teams that utilize both facilities, and hopefully we could host the Olympics during the next 20 years.

That would've worked 10 or 12 years ago , but not today the NBA wants a brand new arena or nothing at all.

[CeJeH]

although I absolutely love this idea I know it will never happen. I'm pretty sure you can only build indian casinos on tribal land and I'm pretty sure Natomas is not tribal land. Although afaic this idea is like a ****ing wet dream to me.

[wburg]

The city council wouldn't even let a cardroom open on K Street--I wouldn't hold my breath about approval for a full-sized casino.

There are plenty of other plans going on in the Railyards besides this arena, and those will proceed unimpeded. The spot where the arena is planned is already partially in use, as the parking lot for the train station and bus terminal/turnaround for Amtrak and RT buses, there is no particular reason that it has to go in that spot other than the city owns it--although to make room for the transit center, they will probably have to purchase a chunk more land from Inland anyhow--or risk losing $10-20 million in transit fund grants.

[BeeGlee]

I agree that my idea is a long shot, but it's not unreasonable. I just don't understand what is going to happen to Power Balance if/when a completely new arena is built? Is it just going to sit empty most of the year?

[NewToCA]

Looks like the arena proposal still has some decent momentum:

It appears the Sacramento City Council will approve tonight issuing a request for qualifications from companies interested in leasing the city's downtown parking operations, the key peg in the financing of a new arena.

City Beat: Sacramento council on verge of approving key arena vote

[wburg]

To some extent...a couple members of the Council are interested in seeing what bids are generated even if there is no arena, as theoretically the money from a parking contract could be used for any purpose the city sees fit.

We'll also see what kind of restrictions the city puts on the contract: they want to retain city staff rather than letting a contractor hire their own, don't want parking rates to go up exorbitantly (as they did in cities like Chicago) and don't want to lose the $9 million per year in parking revenue the city currently gets (that would be lost to a parking contractor.) Several council members are not comfortable with a 50 year contract and asked for the RFQ to mention potentially shorter contracts, maybe 30 years. So, if a contractor has to use city labor, can't raise prices too much, might have to pay back much of the profits to the city anyhow, and may last longer than 50 years, the contractor stands to make that much less money. And the less money a contractor can make, the less money they will be willing to pay for the rights to run our parking program.