As promised, the city of Seattle received two proposals for renovating KeyArena this week, and—

One of the groups interested in renovating KeyArena for NBA and NHL is prepared to spend more than $500 million on a complete overhaul of the 55-year-old facility. The Oak View Group (OVG), based in Los Angeles, has produced a $564 million plan it says can have the arena renovated by approximately October 2020 – leaving it ready for the 2020-21 NBA or NHL season – spokesperson Steven Gottlieb said—

Hey, hey, Seattle Times, thanks for reporting what one of the developer spokespeople said, but the city of Seattle has made available the actual proposals, so let’s just go read those, shall we, and see what’s actually in them?

The Oak View Group (aka Tim Leiweke and friends) is proposing that $564 million redo, expanding the underground part of the arena — which is most of it — to modernize it for basketball, hockey, and concerts. (And probably change the whole seating bowl, since that’s necessary for hockey.) Oak View promises that the project “will not require any City investment,” with the developer covering all constructions, operations, and capital improvements, as well as paying $1 million a year rent; however, it does note that the city will still own the land (so presumably it will remain property-tax-free) and that “OVG will work with the City to identify a mechanism for reinvestment of new revenue streams back into the project,” which is just vague enough to be slightly ominous.

Seattle Partners, aka AEG and friends, aka Leiweke’s former employer, doesn’t put a dollar amount on its renovation plans, except to say that it will be “world-class.” As for funding, the only promise (in the executive summary, anyway, which is all that the city seems to have made available) is that the developers will “guarantee all financing, public and private, through revenues that would not exist but for the renovations proposed for the Seattle Coliseum,” which is usually code for tax increment financing or some similar scheme to kick back taxes that can be claimed to be due to the renovated arena, even if they’re ultimately cannibalized from spending elsewhere in the city.

Neither of these is quite a “no public money” promise, which is what the city was requesting. But they’re potentially close, which is kind of crazy, given that everything we know about arena operations is that spending half a billion or so on upgrading these buildings doesn’t usually generate a great return on investment. But this is a weird moment in the arena biz, what with AEG, Live Nation, and Madison Square Garden (who would be Leiweke’s financial backers) engaged in a nationwide war for control of the concert industry, meaning that they could be more likely to overbid in an attempt to lock their competitors out of the Seattle market. That’s an opportunity for anyone doing business with them, and Seattle is smart to be trying to play this for all it’s worth.

In short: This still needs way more analysis of the competing groups’ funding plans, and in particular of how weaselly those weasel words are about arena-related revenue streams. But it’s well worth exploring, since this might be a rare chance for a city to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to getting a new or renovated arena. Getting a team will be another story — hello, Kansas City — but cross one hardball negotiation at a time.