Sonics to seek money for arena

SEATTLE – A delayed plan for a state-of-the-art arena in the Seattle suburbs that would seat approximately 18,500 and cost more than $500 million – including $300 million from taxpayers – will reach the state Legislature by month’s end, SuperSonics and Storm owner Clay Bennett said on Thursday.

Bennett told the Associated Press the luxurious arena would be built in one of two spots along Interstate 405, in Renton across the street from a retail and housing development known as The Landing or in Bellevue along a business stretch called Auto Row. The new building would house the Sonics, the WNBA Seattle Storm, high-profile concerts, and perhaps national political conventions, college basketball’s Final Four championships, even the Grammy Awards.

Although Bennett renewed his intent to keep the teams in the region, his proposal still carries the not-so-veiled threat that has hovered over the Sonics and Storm since his purchase of the teams last year: Without taxpayer money for a new arena, they will leave for his native Oklahoma.

The new arena would include a minimum of 50 high-cost suites and would be similar to Denver’s seven-year-old Pepsi Center, home to the NBA’s Nuggets and the Avalanche of the NHL.

“My simple thinking is there is a need for the facility,” Bennett said. “Let’s do it while the economy is good. Let’s do it while leadership is relatively accepting of the notion. Let’s do it while we have the team in place and begin to grow and make something wonderful happen starting now and not have to begin years from now.”

He hopes to have the building completed in the fall of 2010, which would coincide with the end of the Sonics’ current lease at Seattle’s KeyArena. The team has been losing money under that lease. Bennett figures it will lose $20 million this season.

“What we have found is an extremely complex proposition,” Bennett said of a plan he had intended to present to lawmakers at the beginning on their current session on Jan. 8.

“I think there is a drop-dead deadline to have the best proposal we can put together by the end of the month.”

Bennett said he has personally invested “very heavily” in hiring consultants and doing exhaustive studies to develop the best possible arena proposal.

“We’re going to unveil a proposition, renderings, drawings, recommendations,” Bennett said. “It’s up to the leadership and the public to determine if this is what they want. It’s really not any more complicated than that.”

If they don’t, a clause in the $350 million purchase contract for the Sonics and Storm that Bennett signed last July allows the team to move to Oklahoma City if a new arena in the Seattle area is not agreed upon by Oct. 31. Bennett and his seven co-investors in the Sonics and Storm are all prominent residents of Oklahoma City.

The chief obstacle for Bennett’s proposal? Money.

In a letter Bennett sent to Gov. Chris Gregoire, Bennett said the teams will ask for at least $300 million in taxpayer money.

That money would come from the King County restaurant and rental-car taxes that helped build Safeco Field for the Seattle Mariners. The Legislature would have to authorize the alternate use of the money.

“That sounds like a lot of money to me,” said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, who wouldn’t rule out the proposal. “We really need to see a specific plan. A lot of senators don’t want to see the Sonics leave the region.”

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, the team’s previous owner, had little success last year in lobbying lawmakers for a smaller amount of money to renovate Key Arena.

Opponents of spending taxpayer money on another big-league sports venue didn’t like Bennett’s proposal any better.

“We’re utterly astounded,” said Chris Van Dyk of Citizens for More Important Things, the civic activist group that pushed for a ballot initiative that essentially blocked such a deal for an arena inside Seattle itself. City voters overwhelming passed that initiative in November.

The restaurant tax, which generates $20 million annually, was scheduled to run through 2015, but the Safeco Field construction bonds it is paying off will expire in 2012, said Trent House, director of government affairs for the Washington Restaurant Association.

The association does not want the tax extended, but would support letting it continue until 2015 because Bennett and his group have pledged to at least match that $60 million, House said.