Things just keep getting crazier and crazier.
■ Now that the downtown Kings arena plan has collapsed like the house of cards it was, visions of renovating Power Balance Pavilion are emerging from the darkness.
■ City officials are shrugging off the spending of $680,000 intended to give the failed arena campaign momentum and telling us they have learned how they might dump big bucks into some other project when the mood strikes them.
The renovation idea, which was floated by the Maloof brothers as the railyard deal was collapsing, received another boost this morning from Bee sportswriter Ailene Voisin. She publicized the push by Rann Haight, the architect for the first and second Arco arenas in Natomas, and his group, to improve Power Balance Pavilion for $100 million or so. That price tag will surely seem like a bargain compared with the $391 million estimate for a new arena, so local taxpayers best prepare for another call to subsidize the basketball millionaires.
What interested me most in the column was Haight’s comment that his group had been pursuing the renovation plan for a year and was put off by representatives of the railyard deal who claimed the arena wasn’t worthy of renovation. Once the railyard backers got the upper hand, the idea of renovation or even building a new arena in Natomas, a far more suitable location than downtown, virtually disappeared from public discussion. The Bee and local TV stations jumped on the downtown arena bandwagon and provided almost no coverage of alternatives, to say nothing of analyzing the far-fetched financial schemes that were trotted out.
If you’re a tad cynical or maybe just a political realist, you might think that renovating Power Balance Pavilion – at public expense – was always the Maloofs’ Plan B if Mayor Kevin Johnson and his developer buddies couldn’t twist enough arms to get the downtown arena built.
Meanwhile, city officials are trying to justify their expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars over eight months to build momentum for the arena. It’s bad enough that the cash-strapped city made a lousy bet on the arena, but what exactly did the Barrett Sports Group, which was the city’s financial adviser and lead negotiator, do to earn $252,350?
Equally irksome was the expenditure of about $175,000 for analyses purporting to show how future city parking revenue could be leveraged. Initially, the idea was to get about $200 million in upfront money the city could dump into the arena project. Now officials are claiming the studies will be useful for assessing other possible downtown capital improvements.
Privatizing city parking revenue is risky business, as the city of Chicago has rapidly learned. I think some city staffer earning $30 an hour could have discovered that and save Sacramento from a fiasco.
There are positives for revamping Arco (power balance), for starters the area is ready for development, the infrastrcture is in place, easy in, easy out, International Airport a stones throw away, thousands of the fans of the various venus are from – out of town -, No. Natomas is a dream for those folks to get to. Down town ? its a political night mare, egos have gotten in the way of common sense, as for the Maloof family, give them credit, they have spent a pile of cash in this community, mainly in support of youth activities, and the current Kings team? they are young and headed for stardom, there is no way to continue playing ‘spin the bottle’ and ever hope to reach first base!
Many thanks to this blog for bringing yet another unsavory aspect to this deal to the surface- the City of Sacramento’s use of consultants to help shepherd the project. In my career in government, I have seen consultant work ranging from the mediocre to the excellent and everywhere in between. But what has been consistent in dealing with consultants is their spectacular salesmanship abilities. But once the final product arrives, you ask yourself, couldn’t we have done this in-house and was this really worth all that money we paid? But the graphics in the report are quite good. I could see the pitch that City Hall got. Hire us for an amount in the low six figures and we could help you save “gazillions” of dollars in getting hosed by parking providers and by the NBA. Even with these consultant services, the city entered into a term sheet in which the City puts up most of the upfront money while walking away with little in future profits and no one figured out how the city would protect its finances after it would have”invested” decades worth of parking revenue.
In addition to consulting work that has left us with next to nothing, there’s the $680,000 itself- which could have kept some pools open and some youth sports leagues going for a little longer. Using the $680,000 for swimming pools would have saved us from viewing the ridiculous spectacle of city councilmembers sitting in kayaks outside of city hall with their cell phones raising money for city pools. While consultants get fairly easy access to rare city funds, the private fundraising for pools represents a “new way of doing things”, “a wave of the future”, and a “public-private partnership”- or whatever other Orwellian jargon that applies. But the suggestion of funding pools and sports leagues with the $680,000 would have been met with Bee columnists and the City Manager telling us that there is “no way” that the $680,000 could have been used for pools and that those of us who would suggest that are “ignorant” or “don’t know anything about municipal finances.” But if the City Manager is the expert some in our local media make him out to be, what was the value of spending $680,000 for expertise that yielded a term sheet in which Sacramento would have gotten the short end of the stick while providing no strategies to plug an enormous budget gap resulting from mortgaging the city’s parking assets? Maybe one has to understand municipal finance to get the full benefit of $680,000 in consulting services.