Joey Jones
Another day, another Sacramento arena plan.
So far, we have: rebuild at Arco, build at the railyard, some sort of land shuffle that makes one dizzy trying to remember which cup the pea is hidden under, and, for all I know, proposals to build on the planet Naboo or the floating island in “Avatar.”
Local politicians, team owners, NBA officials and developers are vocal in their support for this plan or that. Fans will doubtless make their views known.
Only one constituency has yet to be heard from.
Most residents of Sacramento County do not regularly attend Kings games. Some don’t go for economic reasons. With tickets running from $10 each for the “nosebleed seats” to $165 for a single game, and far more for a luxury box seat, many of our residents simply can’t afford to go. Others, like me, aren’t basketball fans. Just as some people love Brussels sprouts and some don’t, we don’t object to basketball; we just like other things more.
If you were to add up the residents who, for one reason or another, don’t often go to the games, we outnumber those who do – local politicians, developers, players, team owners, and NBA officials put together. What do we want from a new arena? My ambitions for a new arena are few. I want it to use not one taxpayer dollar. Not one grant, loan, tax waiver. I want it to pay its own way.
I’m not alone in this. Voters, including Kings fans, have soundly rejected previous proposals to invest tax dollars in a new arena.
Studies into the economic benefits of a sports arena to a city are mixed. Once you factor in what it costs – the economic incentives offered to get the team owners and builders to put up the arena, including taxes waived and outright loans – it’s debatable how long it takes a city to see any profit from an arena.
Compared with other ways of spending tax money, arenas may not provide much more new income – much of it is money that just moves around.
The person from Elk Grove who buys a Kings season ticket instead of, say, going to movies and restaurants more often, isn’t creating more local spending – she’s just putting it in one pocket instead of another.
Building anything is a business proposal. If it’s a good one, those who wish to build it should have no trouble finding funding without taxpayer contributions. So that’s what I want from it … unless I can get something else I want, something worth my investment.
Asked tough questions about what financial benefit a city will derive, supporters often hide behind phrases like “prestige” and “world-class city.”
Many things make a “world-class city.” Among those, as we’ve seen all too recently, are provisions to care for citizens in the event of a disaster. We’ve been reminded by the Army Corps of Engineers that our county sits in a floodplain. We aren’t all that far from earthquake fault lines. Where is our world-class emergency shelter?
If planners were to learn from the lessons of Katrina and Haiti, and work to design an arena not just as an expensive place for well-paid athletes to display their talents and wealthy executives to court each other, but as a durable, thoughtfully designed shelter for residents displaced by a disaster, I would enthusiastically support the building of a new arena.
This issue should drive the location debate. Some locations will be up to their giant billboards in water if the levees fail. Where does the Army Corps of Engineers think it should be built?
Federal dollars might be available to support the building of a complex that could provide shelter, with safe spaces for people to sleep, to shower, to survive, with places where those with RVs can park, making more beds available for those who don’t, and space where pets could be kenneled so residents don’t face watching beloved pets perish while they survive (reducing the number of those who don’t comply with evacuation orders, putting residents and emergency workers in peril).
Show me how this new facility will be built not just with luxury box seat sales in mind but also to give me and my neighbors peace of mind when we’re watching the rivers rise, and you’ve sold me on spending some of my tax dollars for a new arena.
The word “multipurpose” has been kicked around as arena plans float in the air like so many dandelion seeds. It’s nice if the place also has shopping, and the arena can host “Garbage Trucks on Ice” as well as basketball. But if you want real grass-roots support for a new arena, make it truly multipurpose.
We live between the rivers and the fault lines, and who wants to have to drive to the Houston Astrodome if the worst happens? Voters who aren’t interested in paying for an arena they may not visit might be willing to invest in the insurance that a truly well-designed arena could provide. That kind of farsighted intelligence would mark this region as truly world-class.