Les Coyotes de l’Arizona ont donné un coup dur à Glendale. Et Tempe veut le répéter ?
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jdcnosse1988
@Coyotes de l'Arizona
Les Coyotes de l’Arizona ont donné un coup dur à Glendale. Et Tempe veut le répéter ?
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jdcnosse1988
11 Comments
Paywall so cant see it, but if the writer of this article doesn’t acknowledge that Glendale fucked the coyotes just as hard, they are high.
And to even compare this deal to the other is absurd and screams “we don’t actually understand the situation.” One was literally Glendale begging for the yotes to come out, and very willingly building them arena. The current situation is an entirely different ownership group offering to privately finance an entire arena/entertainment sector. AZ Central can fuck off
Since it might be pay walled based on cookies.
Opinion piece by Rep Athena Salman (LD-26)
>In my five years in public office, Tempe residents haven’t clamored for an entertainment district.
>They’ve clamored for housing, elder care, child care and employment. They’ve clamored for fully funded schools and solutions to the ongoing effects of the pandemic.
>The Arizona Coyotes’ proposed entertainment district in Tempe addresses only one of those demands – employment – and very partially at that. The City Council should scrap the whole project.
>In promotional materials, the hockey team speaks of their $1.7 billion “Manica” district at Rio Salado Parkway and Priest Drive in alluring terms that portray a luxurious “unique destination” that would create jobs and generate net new taxes.
>But look a bit closer at their commercial scheme and it turns out not to be that desirable at all for Tempe’s current residents. It would essentially entail giving a proven bad economic actor – the current Coyotes owner – generous tax giveaways and thereby depriving our city of additional funds for the much-needed services mentioned above.
>The embattled NHL team is promising to turn a city-owned, 46-acre site into a “regional landmark” that would include a multipurpose arena (the team’s future home), a music venue, “upscale” retail and office space, more than 1,600 residential units, and “boutique” and “convention” hotels.
>The Coyotes make sure to repeatedly tout the estimated 6,900 permanent jobs and the $215 million in net new taxes (over 30 years) the project would bring to Tempe.
>What they don’t share so openly is that they’re also requesting either a 30-year and an 8-year government property lease excise tax (GPLET), to the tune of more than $649 million in tax abatements, or a 65-year and an 8-year GPLET that would total over $1.1 billion in tax abatements.
>And then there’s the Coyotes’ dishonorable fiscal track record under current owner Alex Meruelo, who took over the franchise in July 2019.
>Early on, his tenure was mired in “a turbulent transition in business operations, contentious financial disputes between the team and its contractors and vendors, a rash of termination and resignations of key employees and upheaval within the front office,” as an in-depth exposé by The Athletic put it in early 2021.
>Just six months later, after months of stalled negotiations with the Coyotes over a joint lease agreement for Gila River Arena, the city of Glendale had reached a point of no return, opting to kick the team out by this June, a decision all City Council members backed last summer, according to the sports publication.
>As reported by The Athletic last August, negotiations between the city and the Coyotes broke down after months of stalled negotiations and “multiple notices about outstanding and delinquent balances” owed by the hockey team as part of their lease agreement.
>The publication also revealed that the Gila River Arena notified the Coyotes that the team owed $1,462,792 to the arena as of July 17, 2021, and of that amount, $300,000 were “over four months delinquent.”
>Is this really the kind of corporate behavior the city of Tempe wants to be rewarding for the next 30 to 65 years?
>I don’t think so. And as the many residents who’ve spoken out against the project at several City Council meetings show, I’m far from being alone.
>Like Glendale, our community deserves better.
I’ve said this from the start, this arena deal is going to come down to what ASU wants. Residents, local politicians can voice whatever concerns they have but let’s be real. Asu provides millions of dollars to the cities coffers. Every year they are putting up a new building and expanding out from their original tempe campus across the valley. The smartest thing the yotes ownership did was to make an actual relationship with ASU. Now it’s on ownership to keep that relationship on good standing and tempe will have a state of the art building that will host concerts, hockey, and college basketball.
Reset the « hit piece » counter.
Just the usual antidevelopment nonsense. Reading it, she clearly didn’t understand the situation in Glendale nor how when changing ownership (and subsequent cleaning of house) things are chaotic in that momemnt…oh..and it was covid time to boot.
I’m shocked every other sentence wasn’t « affordable housing » . She also phrases the abatement on taxes on Murello Group somehow as if it was the city giving away money. The land is currently an old dump. They Coyotes are not asking for public funds for the building. They are just asking for tax abatement to make it business viable. Sales taxes from establishments on property will still go right into the koffers of the city. Contrary to the massive amount of money the land is making now /s.
Politics hit piece. It’s all nonsense. Don’t let r/hockey see this
After she referred to Katie Strang’s hit piece, this moron representative’s credibility was disqualified.
You know what’s a raw deal? Driving to Glendale from the east valley on a weekday evening.
Yep, totally ignorant opinion. Glendale threw the kitchen sink to get the Coyotes to move there, it was a shit move for the team’s longevity, and Glendale broke the agreement – not the Coyotes. When the Coyotes took the hint and looked for a new home, Glendale started playing the part of a mob boss – publicly bashing them, working to smear them so they couldn’t get a new home, etc, then trying to pressure them into a long-term lease agreement to stay in Glendale on their terms. As many others have pointed out the hypocrisy: if the Coyotes were horrible tenants and unworthy of doing business with…why did Glendale immediately turn around and beg the team to sign a longer-term lease agreement instead of move away?
But yeah, go on about how the Coyotes screwed Glendale and the new PRIVATELY FUNDED, TAX REVENUE GENERATING entertainment district the Coyotes are building on currently-unused dump land is the same thing…
Athena, respectfully, you don’t know what you’re talking about
People keep saying hit piece but his was written by a public official not a Strand or the Athletic. I think it’s worth considering.