Category: Kalamazoo arena

Kalamazoo arena to provide “experience,” “culture,” “basket3al,” all for the low, low cost of (reply hazy, try again later)

access_time personNeil deMause

Kalamazoo, Michigan, has been talking for a while about building a $110 million arena for its many local indoor sports teams (okay, it’s actually only the minor-league hockey Wings, though there’s also been talk of something called rocket football?), and I can feel your interest waning already, but wait! I come to you today not to ask you to care about Kalamazoo, but to marvel at the latest batch of renderings dropped by the arena’s proposed developers, which feature a whole lot of clouds but also … this:

Props to the designers for not including the usual assortment of gratuitous clip art people populating their endless gray void, but the rest is just baffling. Let’s try to imagine the thought process at work here: We need a slide that shows the “assortment of experiences” that will be available, but we don’t have the time or the Photoshop skills necessary to actually show people playing sports. What if we just print a bunch of sports’ names in bold letters on the outside of generic-looking buildings? “BASKET3AL” is a sport, right? Also “LOCAL CULTURE”? Which is, what do people do in Kalamazoo that’s special, ride bikes or something? That’s fine, just send it, we’re not being paid enough to put more time into this.

And then there’s the aerial view, which gets even curiouser:

So there would be an ARENA for, presumably, arena-y things, but also a separate HOCKEY building and one for BASKETBALL that would be super-narrow … yeah, no, no clue what any of this is supposed to mean. And that’s even without getting into why someone chose to print the words EXPERIENCE in several places on the surrounding gray void.

City officials “didn’t immediately respond for comment Tuesday night to clarify how much the project will cost,” according to MLive, though a local auto dealer who is chair of the local private development booster group did promise that it will be built “completely privately, with no public taxes required.” Sure, the state passed a law more than two years ago allowing Kalamazoo to raise its hotel taxes to fund an arena, but who are you going to believe, the text of legislation or a used car dealer?

It’s always possible that Kalamazoo, after getting approval to raise taxes to fund an arena, instead happened upon developers who are convinced they can spend maybe $300 million for construction and then make it back by renting the place out for one minor-league hockey team and some college and amateur sports. It’s not likely, mind you, but it’s not impossible. Whatever Kalamazoo residents and taxpayers and basket3al players are in for, it is undoubtedly going to be an EXPERIENCE.

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Friday roundup: Phoenix to maybe get soccer stadium/robot factory, Raiders roof is delayed, Def Leppard and Hamilton face off over who’s old and smelly

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I have no meta-commentary to add this week, but hopefully when you have Def Leppard getting into a flamewar with Canadian elected officials over arena smells, you need no prelude:

  • The Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation, long rumored as the possible site of a Phoenix Rising F.C. soccer stadium, has released an image of a proposed “$4 billion sports, technology and entertainment district” that indeed seems to show a soccer stadium, though honestly it looks a little small just from the rendering. There’s also an amazing image of people testing out robots and what looks like robot dogs, which surely will be the growth industry of the rest of the century, because I bet robot dogs don’t have an enormous carbon footprint or anything.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders are now projecting $478 million in personal seat license sales for their new stadium, up from an initial projection of $250 million. (All this money will go to defray Raiders owner Mark Davis’s costs, not the state of Nevada’s, because why would revenues from a publicly funded stadium go to the public? That’s crazy talk!) Unfortunately, the stadium might not be ready on time thanks to its roof behind months behind schedule, which could cause damage to the already-built parts of the stadium if it rains, but all those Raiders fans in Vegas (or people in Vegas anticipating selling their seats to out-of-towners who’ve come to see their home teams on road trips) will surely be patient after shelling out as much as $75,000 for PSLs.
  • Charlotte is still up for giving Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper $110 million to renovate his NFL stadium to make it more amenable to hosting an MLS franchise, but may want Tepper to agree to a lease extension first. Given that the last time Charlotte gave the Panthers money for stadium upgrades it was $87.5 million for a six-year extension, the city could maybe keep the team in town through 2027 this way. At this point, it might have been cheaper for the city just to buy the Panthers outright, thus guaranteeing the team stays in town while not only avoiding all these continual renovation fees but also getting to collect all that NFL revenue for itself. (Ha ha ha, just kidding, the NFL outlawed that years ago, no doubt partly to avoid anyone from trying exactly this scenario.)
  • The Atlanta Braves‘ stadium got a new name thanks to a bank merger, and the bank got lots of free publicity when news outlets wrote about the new name, but hell if I’m going to participate in that, so google it if you really must know.
  • A Virginia state delegate wants to reboot Virginia Beach’s failed arena plans by setting up a state-run authority to attempt to build a new arena somewhere in the Hampton Roads region, which includes both Virginia Beach and Norfolk. “The hardest part is the financing mechanism behind it,” said Norfolk interim economic development director Jared Chalk, which, yeah, no kidding.
  • Denver is helping build a new rodeo arena, and as a Denverite subhead notes, “The city says it won’t reveal how much taxpayers could be on the hook for because that would be bad for taxpayers.”
  • Kalamazoo is maybe building a $110 million arena to host concerts and something called “rocket football,” which I’m not even going to google because it would almost certainly be a disappointment compared to what I’m imagining.
  • Anaheim is considering rebating $180 million (maybe, I’m going by what one councilmember said) in future tax revenues to hotel developers so that Los Angeles Angels and Anaheim Ducks players will stay in them? Don’t the Angels and Ducks players own houses locally? What is even happening?
  • And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: A video from last summer has surfaced showing Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott complaining that Hamilton, Ontario’s arena is “old” and “stinks like a 10,000 asses stink,” to which Hamilton councillor Jason Farr replied that Def Leppard is “also old and stinks.” Clearly one of them needs to be torn down and entirely replaced! It worked for Foreigner!
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