The NBA Kings yesterday launched a "fast-track effort" to build their new Downtown Plaza arena, as the team unveiled their "new sales and promotions office downtown, called the Experience Center," according to a front-page piece by Bizjak, Kasler & Lillis of the SACRAMENTO BEE. The "stylish, loft-like suite overlooking the arena construction site offers potential sponsors, luxury suite buyers and others the opportunity to take a high-tech virtual reality tour of the arena, view a full-scale mock-up of a luxury suite, and try out plush new arena seats." Kings President Chris Granger said that workers will be at Downtown Plaza this week "preparing for demolition this summer of some buildings, and said new arena steel will rise by fall." The team "aims to finish the building" by fall of '16. Meanwhile, the team and city "may yet have a hurdle to jump" after a small group of arena opponents yesterday announced that they are "organizing what appears to be a late-hour effort to stop the project." Local attorneys Patrick Soluri and Jeffrey Anderson said that they hope to form their own PAC "in the next few days and launch their own fast-track project: a petition drive to bring the city arena subsidy to the voters." Kings execs "shrugged off the latest controversy." Granger said, "Big projects generally draw some lawsuit or other drama" (SACRAMENTO BEE, 5/22). In Sacramento, Ailene Voisin writes the arena deal that "has been more than a decade in the making is moving forward with the force of a bulldozer and the speed of a bullet train." Momentum "is a ferocious, unrelenting beast." The group of arena opponents "hoping to initiate a last-ditch effort to quash the public-private partnership should probably save their time and money and move on to other important issues" (SACRAMENTO BEE, 5/22).
A SHORT HONEYMOON? The Sacramento Bee's Marcos Breton said the city approving funding to build the Kings a new arena was the "culmination of more than a decade of work and failures and pratfalls and false starts." Breton: "It spoke to a city that had been written off by the national media and a lot of really famous pundits who had predicted tat the Kings were headed to Seattle." But Breton added, "There's big pressure on the ownership because this honeymoon is only going to last so long. The prices for Kings' tickets have gone up significantly since the team was sold to Vivek Ranadive and this past season, I think people accepted the fact that it was a losing product and that they realized that it takes time to undo seven years of terrible ownership under the Maloofs. But the clock is ticking and people's patience will wear thin when you factor in the prices and at a certain point people get frustrated and impatient for a winner. I'm not saying he needs to win the NBA title next season, but there has to be definitive progress in this coming year or the honeymoon will end pretty quickly" ("Yahoo Sports Talk Live," CSN Bay Area, 5/21).
