Quote (dragoneth @ May 16 2023 11:19pm)
bettman is going to take league profit buy land and make them an arena at this point i feel like
nah but for real the coyotes didnt pay the last arena to use it and they made more profit selling other events why would anybody ever open an arena for them? huge commitment for a team that has no fans and doesn't pay
The specific deal for the arena included land remediation for the dump in which the commercial center hosting the Coyotes would be built. Taxpayers would pay via tax breaks once the whole thing got built, but they wouldn't need to fork the dozens of millions to fix the landfill that's currently contaminating the water table. Now Tempe is stuck with the contamination problem they'll have to pay upfront for sooner than later, and no way to get any money back from what they'll have to spend.
As much as I hate Bettman trying to forcefeed the NHL in Arizona, the deal on the table was very very good for the city and it was rejected on fairly petty grounds - opposition framed it as a "handout" for billionaires when in reality Meruelo would be spending a ton of upfront money and Tempe would only be on hook for foregone revenue they wouldn't get without the project, old NIMBYs in general wanting to kill anything fun that brings more traffic to Tempe, and Meruelo himself getting on the bad side of local unions by refusing to use local labor (since he owns his own construction company). At the end of the day Tempe passed up on free remediation and a big commercial anchor for the city in exchange for a generation's worth of tax relief.
Compare it to the Calgary arena deal where both the province and the city are fronting hundreds of millions of dollars while retaining ownership of the arena, which is generally terrible for cities because they only last a few decades and are very expensive to maintain. Most of the infrastructure and parking improvements will be used up by the Flames themselves, even. So taxpayers are spending a shitton of money to demolish and build an arena for a tenant that will only be paying a small fraction of their revenue back to the city, and the payments are neither upfront (except for $40m) nor pegged for inflation/interest rates. So taxpayers are asked to commit vast sums of money upfront, they'll have to maintain the surrounding upgrades and they're potentially stuck with a boondoggle for future generations if the same arena song and dance happens again.