Sacramento city manager John Shirey finally released the city’s long-awaited term sheet with the local group that wants to buy the Sacramento Kings on Saturday night — conveniently, almost exactly 72 hours before the council meeting that they hope will vote on the deal, which requires 72 hours’ notice. And so of course I had to stay up late reading it, and commenting about it all over Twitter.

I’ve gotten a couple of nights’ sleep now, and had a chance to consult with some other arena finance experts (Stanford’s Roger Noll, for one), so let’s get down to analyzing what’s in the latest arena financing plan, and what isn’t. But because embedded tweets are fun, let’s use those as conversation pieces:

Tips on how to read term sheet: Blah blah blah blah when do we get to the part about the money? — Field of Schemes (@fieldofschemes) March 24, 2013

Most of the document released on Saturday night can safely be ignored, since it’s about the history of the Kings saga, and how Sacramento wants to build a “first-class venue for sports, entertainment and cultural events … and blah blah blah. The question everyone wants to know is: Who would be paying for a new Kings arena, and how?

#SacKings term sheet asserts parking $$ to pay off $212.5m in arena debt, plus $3m+/yr in "surplus net revenues." Doesn't show math, tho — Field of Schemes (@fieldofschemes) March 24, 2013

The first piece of the Kings financing puzzle would be for the city to raise $258 million to pay off 58% of the arena construction cost. (The other $189 million would be paid off by the Kings’ new owners.) $45.5 million would be covered by the sale of city land and a couple of other small subsidies (a construction sales tax kickback, for example), leaving $212.5 million. That money would come from diverting future parking revenues from city-owned lots downtown to a nonprofit corporation, which would in turn use them to pay off $212.5 million in bonds.

That’s all fine and dandy, and pretty much the same deal that Sacramento proposed in last year’s term sheet, only there it would be a for-profit company paying up front for the parking revenues. And the city apparently feels confident that this money would be enough to pay off not only the annual payments on $212.5 million in bonds (probably around $13-14 million a year), but produce an additional $3 million a year left over—

If parking $$ isn't enough, Sacramento would use hotel-motel taxes to fill in the gap. — Field of Schemes (@fieldofschemes) March 24, 2013

Okay, not all that confident, then. Or at least, the city doesn’t think bond buyers would be that confident, so they’ve come up with a backup plan just in case the parking revenues go south.

The prospect of the parking revenues coming up short is a doozy, though, because of:

How lost parking revenues be paid back? By counting anything city gets from new arena – ticket tax, rent, sales tax, parking – towards that. — Field of Schemes (@fieldofschemes) March 24, 2013

Some of that money would actually being paid back by the Kings — there’s $3.7 million from a 5% ticket tax, for example, which would come off the top of the team’s ticket sales, plus another $1 million in “profit sharing,” though given that the “profits” would actually go to pay for the city’s arena debts, Sacramento wouldn’t actually be sharing in anything.

But also notice that “parking” is one of the items being used to repay the lost parking money. That’s right — Sacramento is expecting so much new parking money to flow from this arena development, that there will be enough parking money to pay back $3 million a year the city from giving up parking money. Or in tweet form:

Bingo. @Jasonfin So are they paying for the arena with parking $$ and than filling the general fund back up with more parking $$? — Field of Schemes (@fieldofschemes) March 24, 2013

And how does the term sheet come up with that calculation that parking revenues will rise enough to leave $3 million in extra cash after paying off the bonds? (Actually $3.6 million, because another $625,000 is supposed to be provided by “city parking revenues from [arena] events,” which is just another category of the same thing.) Here is the entirety of the “city parking revenues” explanation in the term sheet: