Surratt’s response seems specious because Hansen wasn’t proposing to house sports at the center, per the city’s request. Sports activities would all be housed at Hansen’s SoDo arena, which could also accommodate the larger concerts with minimal impacts because it’s in an industrial/commercial neighborhood with almost no residences.

The abrupt back of the hand Surratt gave Hansen signaled the city’s eagerness to do the Oak View deal without considering whether repurposing KeyArena is an idea whose time has come. It called to mind the letter sent in June to the city by AEG Facilities President Bob Newman. In withdrawing his company’s bid, he excoriated the city for bias in the bid process. Newman wrote, “And we believe the city has failed to conduct a sufficiently thorough, objective and transparent process to properly evaluate the respective strengths and weaknesses of the two proposals and, most significantly, to identify the proposal best positioned to deliver a project consistent with the community’s interests.”

Newman reserved a shot for Oak View, saying he was highly skeptical its plan could be pulled off: “If the city elects to proceed with that remaining proposal, to protect the public interests of Seattle, it is imperative that you closely and diligently monitor the process to ensure that Oak View Group is held accountable …”

It would be easy to write off Newman’s complaints as sour grapes when he realized his company wasn’t going to win. Indeed, AEG — which ironically has contracted with the city to manage KeyArena since the Sonics’ departure in 2008 — was behind from the start because its bid included a request of the city for $250 million in bond financing for construction. The request was similar to one from Hansen in 2012 that he subsequently abandoned because, in Seattle’s no-stadium-subsidy political culture, the hit on the public exchequer was radioactive.

At least some explanation for Newman’s contempt likely is rooted in the profound animosity between Leiweke’s company and AEG, where he was president from 1996 until 2013, when he had a falling out with owner Phillip Anschutz. A Denver billionaire and one of the most influential figures in global sports and entertainment, Anschutz hired Leiweke to build an empire, and he did. AEG owns and/or operates more than 100 facilities worldwide, including London’s opulent The O2 Arena and the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

But after an unsuccessful attempt in 2013 to sell AEG for $10 billion, Leiweke was ousted, apparently the fall guy in the deal’s failure. After a couple of years as president of Toronto’s Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment in Toronto, which owns the NHL Maple Leafs, the NBA Raptors and the MLS Toronto FC, Leiweke partnered with music industry titan Irving Azoff and James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and New York’s NBA Knicks and NHL Rangers, to form Oak View.

Oak View set about to usurp AEG’s hegemony in the entertainment world. This past summer, a turf battle broke out that typified the animus. Oak View/Madison Square Garden’s tour operation announced it was forbidding from its arenas any acts that previously had appeared in AEG-operated buildings. Since Oak View/MSG has a partnership with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion company, the upstart has considerable leverage in the concert bookings business. Leiweke is quick to point out that Live Nation believes in the Seattle bid so much that it is taking an equity position in the project with Oak View.

Whether this acute business rivalry has added intensity to the Seattle drama isn’t clear. But council members would be well served to consider whether the urgency with which the project is proceeding is driven more by Oak View’s needs than the city’s long-term interests.

The haste may be part of why Oak View insists on an exclusivity clause in the draft MOU, after Leiweke said early on that Hansen was welcome to build the SoDo arena in the hope (wink, wink) that the NBA prefers his place instead of Seattle Center.

Leiweke doesn’t want the SoDo plan to disrupt his plan, so Oak View’s executive summary in the MOU now states: “ … the city will not provide financial support, benefits or incentives … with respect to the construction of any live entertainment venue with a capacity of more than 15,000 seats within the city of Seattle.”

If Leiweke’s MOU language is adopted, it would jeopardize Hansen’s plan because Hansen needs a “benefit” from the City Council of vacating two blocks of Occidental Avenue South. Hansen has maintained the vacation approval comes at no cost or risk to the city, because he would begin construction only after an NBA team was secured, and would pay the city market value for the property, perhaps $20 million or more. Hansen needs the city’s street vacation permission to receive a Master Use Permit to build, a vital turning point in his financial plan to induce investors wealthier than he to come forward as majority owners of an NBA team.

Business logic also says that if Hansen’s bid is alive, the city can use it as leverage in gaining concessions from Oak View prior to signing a final MOU. But perhaps the city is less worried about the best possible deal than it is with no longer aggravating the Port of Seattle.

Oak View and its supporters in city government are not the only objectors to Hansen’s SoDo enterprise. The neighbor to the west, the Port, and the neighbor to the north, the Seattle Mariners, have offered strident opposition to the location of Hansen’s arena, fearing more traffic congestion. The Port claims the arena will be a threat to middle-class jobs because freight mobility will be degraded and shippers will go elsewhere. It seems a dubious claim, but it worked to help give five council members sufficient cover for the original 5-4 "no" vote in May 2016 on the Occidental Avenue vacation.

SoDo arena events largely would be held on nights and weekends, when the Port is closed. Economic threats to the Port far greater than a busy First Avenue South exist globally, nationally and regionally, which introduces the bigger question whether container shipping is the highest and best use of Seattle’s spectacular, expensive shoreline. In the Bay Area, the port of San Francisco is Oakland; in Puget Sound, every bit of container-ship logic says Seattle’s port should be Tacoma.

Independent of the arena but partly because of the attention the controversy drew, the Port over the summer won a landmark development: Funding was completed for the $123 million Lander Street overpass, which will carry freight unimpeded over nine railroad tracks, the way Edgar Martinez Drive does next to Safeco Field. The port has been pursuing the project for 15 years, long before it heard of Hansen. But the celebration was muted because Port backers didn’t want the City Council and voters to think their freight mobility problems were solved independent of their anti-arena claims.

The Port’s broader anti-arena lament, the gentrification of Seattle’s last blue-collar industrial neighborhood, was torpedoed in October by none other than an ally: Mariners CEO John Stanton. Talking to reporters after another dismal end to the Mariners season, Stanton was asked his views on the arena. “If Chris does build in SoDo, we’ll absolutely work with him,” Stanton said. “The fact is if [Hansen] doesn’t build an arena, they’re going to develop it in some way. I’m excited to see what that is.”

There goes the neighborhood, Port fans. Their comrade in arena bashing knows the middle-class worker’s paradise is going to be scuttled regardless of the council’s decision.



Photo by Navid Baraty.

Speaking of neighborhoods, Hansen grew up in Rainier Valley and attended Nathan Hale and Roosevelt high schools, spending summers and weekends washing dishes in the restaurant kitchens of legendary Seattle barkeep Mick McHugh. He attended San Diego State and USC and lives near San Francisco, but his local origins have endeared him to many sports fans, some of whom are cool, maybe even cold, to the prospects of a return of big-time hockey to a glamorous new arena. Forty-one years of basketball have left a yearning in many that is not allayed by biscuits in the basket.

For a non-native, Leiweke is hardly a stranger to Seattle sports, and has often been curiously influential. Born in St. Louis, the fourth of six kids, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Bernadette. His daughter, Francesca, works for Oak View.

In 1994, he was president of the Denver Nuggets, who entered the NBA playoffs with almost no hope, yet eliminated the top-seeded Sonics — the first time in NBA history a No. 8 seed beat a No. 1. In 2004, while at AEG, he was also president of the MLS Los Angeles Galaxy when he fired Coach Sigi Schmid, who later became the first coach of the expansion Sounders FC. In 2013, when Leiweke was president of the Raptors, he joined 21 other owners’ reps in voting to deny Hansen’s bid to relocate the Kings from Sacramento to Seattle.

Most famously, he’s the older brother of Tod Leiweke, considered the most successful sports executive (2003-2010) in Seattle’s modern sports history. As CEO of the Seahawks and Sounders, Tod in 2009 needed a football coach after firing Jim Mora. He wanted USC Coach Pete Carroll but needed a clandestine place in Los Angeles for a meeting to assure secrecy. Tim offered Tod the backyard of his home for a dinner chat al fresco. As you may have heard, things worked out.

Tod Leiweke left the Seahawks in 2010 for the NHL, where he was CEO and part owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, which reached the 2015 Stanley Cup finals. A longtime hockey player and fan, Tod put Tim onto the possibilities for the NHL in Seattle. Tod left his favorite sport in 2015 to become COO of the NFL, the No. 2 executive position behind Commissioner Roger Goodell.

It would be hard to find two people, let alone brothers, more knowledgeable about and experienced in the business of big-time global sports. Which explains much of Tim Leiweke’s certitude when it comes to his plan.

“What I believe is, if we don’t get an arena built first, [Commissioners] Adam Silver and Gary Bettman are always going to hesitate as to whether anything can get done in Seattle because of the history here,” he says. “Only by doing [a concert arena before sports] will we have the best chance to ultimately convince a league to bring a team here.”

That may be true. It is also true that Leiweke has never done a remodel like this in a place like Seattle, where process is king and the land and building remain public. And he has a patient competitor, even if city government doesn’t seem to appreciate him as much as many sports fans do.

“Our goal is to bring an NBA team back to Seattle,” Hansen told KING 5. “No one can make us sell our land or do anything different. We’re gonna sit here, patient, as long as it takes.”

The driving force for swift approval of Oak View’s plan was former Mayor Ed Murray, who said he was eager for a legacy building that would make him “the first openly gay mayor to bring sports to his city.” No one has yet explained what those aspirations had to do with good public policy, but Murray’s timetable was rendered moot when The Seattle Times reported three allegations he sexually abused minors more than 30 years ago. When another accuser came forward in May, Murray ended his reelection bid but insisted he would serve out his first term through December 31. When a fifth person, a family member, came forward with allegations, Murray resigned on September 12.

Murray’s career collapse has not slowed the project, which is now in the hands of the council, as is the decision on whether to grant Hansen a hearing on his revised SoDo proposal. Following two interim mayors, either Jenny Durkan or Cary Moon will succeed Murray when the November 7 election is certified on November 28. Surratt and others on city staff are eager to have the council vote in the first week of December.

Neither mayoral candidate has said much during the campaign about the arena when more pressing matters are at hand. But even if neither has a dog in the arena hunt, if something goes haywire in the Oak View proposal, the new mayor will be thrust into the fray at the back end, which is never the place to be in a controversy.

As the council studies a report from independent consultants hired to vet the Oak View deal, there is nothing pressing the arena agenda other than the proposed opening date for the NHL season of October 2020. At this point, a question worth pondering is whether 2021 is a better aspiration if it results in better decisions in 2017, which would be aided by another hearing for the SoDo project.

Deborah Frausto is a leading member of the community group Uptown Alliance, which represents the neighborhood likely to be most affected by a large uptick in KeyArena activity. She agreed to be a member of the Arena Community Advisory Panel, which heard from Oak View and the city on their plans for surface-street mobility that was the highest priority issue for the neighborhood. Frausto was supportive of the process, but apprehensive about the pace.

“We can’t sacrifice due diligence for [NHL] scheduling,” she says.

For a Civic Cocktail TV program broadcast on the Seattle Channel in September, Hansen was asked if he would sue the city if denied an opportunity to present to the council his case for SoDo again. He said he would not.

“I want what’s best for Seattle,” Hansen said. “If Seattle goes through this process and they decide what to do, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. The chance of us suing the city is zero.”

Lawyers for the city might be disinclined to take him at his word. But it wouldn’t have to come to that if the City Council can resist the gravitational pull of the fast fix for a slower deliberation, one that includes considering the SoDo option that’s committed to the NBA and to repurposing the dowager queen for music and arts.

Besides, what would Leiweke do? Sue?

This article appears in print as the cover story for the December 2017 issue. Click here for a free subscription.