On Tuesday, when it was announced that the team would extend their lease agreement with the Centennial Authority to stay at PNC Arena and improved PNC Arena for what we are going to call it a 20-year lease agreement. There is an out earlier in that process for circumstances, but I thought all of that what we heard on Tuesday was super positive. Luke Tkach has been on top of this as well and he joins us on the Adam Gold Show as he is wont to do on a Friday, sir. So let's start with what happened on Tuesday because I have just heard no negatives from anybody. It is the rare negotiation where it seems that really all parties are pretty happy and in many ways got exactly what they want, even if state might have a slightly reduced parking footprint for tailgating, although I don't think it will be too bad. What were your thoughts coming out of Tuesday?
Yeah, as I wrote, as a columnist, it is very rare you get to write about something in a sort of unqualified manner. There is always a catch or a red flag, but this made a lot of sense. I mean, it is what should have happened 25 years ago, to be honest.
Everybody got something out of this. Tom Dundon gets the right to develop the land, which is going to be great for everybody because that arena is set in the middle of nowhere. Whether you like to tailgate or not, you don't have the option of going to get a beer before or after the game. Now you are going to have that, not to mention the live music venue, which isn't even included in the first $200 million 20-acre phase of development in the first five years. The hurricanes are going to pay rent now, but they get an upgraded building. They get the right to develop that land.
They are committed for the long term. They are going to get new revenue streams from the renovations to the arena. Fans of both NC State and the hurricanes and concert goers get an upgraded arena.
They get new amenities. The city and county, I mean, the land that the arena sits on now is state-owned land that's leased through 2096. That's the same length of the lease on the development that's going to happen. There's no property tax paid on that. When the land is developed after the infrastructure improvements, basically meaning new access from Wade Avenue and Edwards Mill, we all know how much that needs that.
We saw it at the outdoor game. When that's done, then this property will generate property tax. It's also going to generate the funds, the seed money to build a new arena starting that conversation begins in 2039, which is the earliest chance the hurricanes have to get out of this lease. NC State gets a $300 million improved building and preserves a five-acre tailgating zone around the arena. Plus, they still keep all the lots around Carter-Finley. That was never going to change. Half of any parking that gets converted from lots now has to remain surface parking in some way.
Even beyond that five-acre tailgating zone, there's still going to be sort of tailgating opportunities. The state doesn't have to put a nickel in any of this. No one's asking the state for a dime here. No one's asking taxpayers for a dime because the money for the improvements is either coming from Dundon or coming from the tourism tax fund, which paid for the arena and the convention center and is paying for the arena renovations and the convention center.
Again, that's been true for 30 years or almost 30 years now. No, not a lot of downsides. There's even an affordable housing component. Yeah. I've heard some criticism that there's not enough housing in the site, but I think that's probably fair, but it's also just the first phase and things that generate more revenue.
We're always going to be part of the first phase. Yeah, so a lot of positives in a lot of ways. I mean, Phillip Isley, the chairman of the Centennial Authority, former Raleigh City Councilman, deserves a lot of credit. Last May, when Gary Bettman came here and kind of read the riot act to the Centennial Authority, Isley had been chairman for less than six months. He was just sort of getting his feet wet in the sort of succeeding 15 months. He's been able to pull all this together. And look, there are a lot of ropes to pull on here. All three of these things, the development, the new lease and the renovations all had to happen simultaneously.
They were all dependent on each other. And it's really and look, the state was involved, the city was involved, the county was involved, Department of Agriculture, Department of Administration, Council of State Legislature, Governor's Office. I mean, everybody in the state of North Carolina who's got any kind of juice had the ability to block this.
And they were able to kind of make sure everybody was okay with it the same way that, you know, bandwidth, the new bandwidth campus off Edward Mill had a lot to do with this. That's on state land. And I think this may just be the beginning. I mean, I think you could see this development spread toward the fairgrounds in the long run. That's another giant piece of undeveloped land.
And there's every indication that the Department of Agriculture is willing to listen. Luke Dukakis here as he is on every Friday. First of all, Wendell Murphy couldn't have seconded it. Seconded it.
I made up a word. He could not have seconded the motion any faster than he did after Randy Woodson. I think Randy Woodson wasn't even done praising the whole project before Wendell Murphy was second.
And then they had to formally ask him. But the thing about it is that you've been to other places. Have you been to Fenway Park, right? Sure.
Okay. So for people who have not been to Fenway Park, there is something called Yawkey Way. Now it's kind of old and it looks a little bit rundown, but it's ultimately, it's a big alleyway that is adjacent to Fenway Park with shops and bars and retail and all sorts of stuff.
And it's, again, it doesn't have the housing component. It's not modern, but it is an area where fans can congregate before or after a Red Sox game. There's something like that around Wrigley Field. If you go to Nashville, where the arena is, I think it's called Bridgestone Arena, right? It's in the middle of a big entertainment area. Broadway. Right, Broadway, where the arena is in Memphis.
Beale Street kind of like funnels all the way into the arena. We have not had that here. I don't think people recognize just how much we have missed something like that because it could be an entire happening.
This is one of the best things that has ever happened to this part of North Carolina. I mean, I've been saying this literally for years when we talk about this, and I said it again last week or this week when it's been a long week. For various reasons, and we don't need to go back into them, but they made sense.
They do make sense. This wasn't a horrible decision. The arena got built where it was. It didn't get built downtown. Now, if it had been built five years later, it probably would have been, but that's not how this happened. Charlotte made that mistake and fixed it by tearing down the old Charlotte closet, which looked just like this. It was just a zit surrounded by asphalt, and that's what PNC has been for 24 years. Anywhere else you go, Washington, and their arenas are downtown.
This comes naturally. The Battery in Atlanta is the big one everyone's talking about. They built the stadium in the middle of nowhere, but they surrounded it with all of this stuff. You can't bring this arena downtown. We can't afford to build a new arena. You want to talk about taxpayer money. Nobody wants that, right?
That's the beauty of this. It's not like David Tepper asking for a giant handout because he doesn't have enough money. This is kind of paying for itself. A new arena downtown would have cost a billion dollars once you get into the land and the construction and materials and all that. We can't bring this arena downtown.
We are bringing downtown to this arena, and it should have happened 25 years ago. If Peter Carmanos had any interest or any money, it would have happened, but he never left Detroit. He was broke.
He could barely afford to keep the lights on at PNC. He never had any interest in being a developer. Tom Dundon can develop stuff wherever he wants. Money and capital are not his problems. He's choosing to do this here instead of in Texas where, Lord knows, there are a lot fewer bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles because it will help the team.
It's fun, and it will be cool to look back and say, hey, we took this arena and turned it into not just an arena sitting by itself, but an arena that's the center of a place people go every day, whether there's something happening at the arena or not. Tom has been saying for as long as I've known him that this is what he wants to do. He hoped he'd be able to do it. I know in conversations with Philip Isley, who you recognize as the chairman of the Centennial Authority, he said to me that this will either be the greatest thing I've ever done or it'll be a monumental failure.
And it does look like it's the former, not the latter. Let me ask you one more thing before we let you go, Luke DeCock of the News & Observer. So this has been a crazy couple of weeks for college football. And again, I keep saying it, we have to stop calling it college sports. This is entirely about football and money. I know you're not surprised that Florida State allowed the deadline to pass on Tuesday, so they did not opt out of the ACC next year. But where is the league, do you think? Should they have voted to accept Stanford, Cal and maybe SMU?
No, no. First of all, I get what you're saying, that football is driving all this. But the reality is this is about college sports. All of college sports is affected by this. Every sport is affected. Every sport gets knocked off the table. I understand there's an impact on all sports.
I get it. I'm leading into my next point here, which is, so if football is driving everything, why on earth would you be looking at Cal and Stanford? They bring nothing to the table from a football perspective other than Notre Dame likes to play Stanford. And Lord knows that's not going to be enough to get Notre Dame to get into the fold and get out of this 20% arrangement.
No, it would be a disaster. If you look back at the other two big cycles of ACC expansion, the first one had a very distinct purpose. Get to 12 teams, upgrade football with programs like Miami and accidentally Virginia Tech, which worked out okay at the time.
And the second one had a distinct purpose. We've maybe gone a little bit toward the football side. We need more markets to get a television network. Let's add Pitt and Syracuse and upgrade basketball a little bit while spreading our fabled footprint. There's no plan here.
This is completely reactive. It's panic. And it's just another indictment of the people who run college sports, which are the university presidents who are completely unequipped to run a billion dollar business. They keep making terrible decisions.
They all came up as fundraisers. That's how you advance in academia now. All they look at is where can we squeeze out another nickel? And they're doing it to the detriment of college sports.
There's no question about that. So when you look at Cal and Stanford and SMU, unless SMU is just going to give the money straight to Florida State to shut them up, I don't see the point in this. I think it makes the ACC weaker and more fragmented. One argument as well that the schools that want to stay need these votes to keep the ACC together. If you're telling me that you think in a year, Cal and Stanford are going to be voting with the best interests of the original eight ACC schools that are left in mind, you're out of your kazoo.
I mean, none of this makes any sense. I give Jim Phillips credit for exploring it. I think the due diligence was smart. I think the four schools that allegedly voted against this, including NC State and UNC, did the first smart thing that anyone's done in expansion in 10 years. And if Randy Woodson, who I've blasted for being on the NCAA board of directors and extending Mark Emmert's contract before they fired him, not to mention all the other sort of crazy, ludicrous decisions that have been made in NCAA governance. If Randy Woodson really voted against this and did the smart thing, I'll give him a ton of credit because it's hard to be that guy in the room.
Same thing for Kevin Guskiewicz. It's hard to be that guy in the room saying, no, this is a bad idea. You guys are making a huge mistake. It's easy to go along and tell everybody how smart and proactive you're being. But the reality is the ACC is being extremely reactive.
It's acting out of fear, not out of any sort of plan. And if this just goes away, it'll be the best thing that can happen with the ACC. I feel bad for Cal and Stanford too. They're great schools. They have great traditions. It's very nice that Jack Swarbrick thinks that adding those two schools would help the ACC. We're all waiting to see Jack Swarbrick in the hot dog suits and we're all trying to find the guy who did this.
But the reality is they don't help. Hey Carolina Panthers fans, Chris Lee and Dennis Cox here. We're excited to offer you all the inside information on your team with the newest member of the Capitol broadcasting podcast network Panthers playbook twice a week.
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Follow pack therapy wherever you listen to podcasts or listen on wrelsportsfan.com. I think there is an economic benefit even though it doesn't add to the football product. I get it and first of all I should say and I said this many times. I agree in not adding those three schools but I agree from this standpoint. I am still looking at this as a college conference and I think we can get lost and get burned by looking at these as college conferences because the Sharks in Chicago and in Dallas and in Birmingham do not look at them as college conferences and that's why there is no longer a pack 12 and while the ACC is protected for the most part by that grant of rights the three commissioners of those other leagues are not looking at them as college conferences. They are looking at them as money-making endeavors and there are benefits to having a larger league which is the only the big 12 didn't make themselves more money by adding Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado.
They didn't. They made themselves bigger which gives them a little bit more power and the ACC I agree they don't add anything but there is something short-sighted about not making that decision that way and I wish and you are right about the ACC reacting they have always reacted after the first the first edition of Miami which they probably should have stopped just at Miami and then lobbied for the threshold to have a conference championship game to be dropped to 10 that would have been fine. They could have just added Miami and gotten to 10 and who cares anyway about it. A championship game isn't worth that much money anywhere except the SEC.
All the others are just kind of there. Maybe the big tens is worth more money now but for the most part none of them worth that much money except the Southeastern Conference but the ACC has always been behind the curve. They should have pushed harder for Texas and Oklahoma a dozen years ago and when Southern Cal and UCLA jumped the ACC should have pushed harder for Oregon and Washington who do have value and maybe Oregon, Washington, Cal and Stanford would have made a lot more sense back then but right now the ACC is reacting and this has kind of been a pattern over the last 10 years.
Yeah I disagree. I mean I just I think the first two expansions had a clear purpose whether you agree with them or not they're you know just like adding Florida State if you want to go back that far. They all had a goal in mind. They had specific things they were designed to do.
I don't think this has anything it's designed to do. I don't think it makes the ACC more powerful or a stronger conference and I think USC, UCLA in particular in the big 10 are really going to come to regret that agreement. I think the schools the PAC 12 schools that joined the big 12 had a little more geographical continuity but I think USC and UCLA in particular are really going to regret that and we're going to see a lot of think pieces 15 years from now about how they chased the money and destroyed themselves. I'm sure they will. I'm sure they will in a lot of levels.
When they won't is when the check's clear. That's when UCLA and USC won't because. Have we learned nothing from Florida State?
Money does not buy success. Florida State says more than any other public school in the ACC. They win all their ACC titles and track. They haven't been relevant in football in 15 years. They got one basketball title in the last decade. It was literally handed to them on the floor of the Greensboro Coliseum because a pandemic was descended.
I'm with you on that. That is called mismanagement and mismanagement will affect any. Look, Alabama went through the dark ages before Nick Saban got there. We know the run of coaches between Gene Stallings and Nick Saban. It wasn't very good there. Tennessee should be set up to win post Phillip Fulmer. It didn't go so well. So look, it's all about who you hire in all levels of your organization, whether it's pro sports or college sports, but the ACC still treats the ACC like a college conference, which I agree it is, but I don't think the others.
I don't think the competition is doing the same thing. I appreciate just the give and take with you, Luke. I will see you very soon.
Appreciate your time. Next week, we talk college football only, actual games. No, we're skipping right ahead to hockey. Okay, we can do that too. The week one games are other than USC, USC.
We can skip right to hockey. You're probably right. All right, man. I'll talk to you later. All right, bud. Take care. Luke Tkach of the News and Observer.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-08-25 15:22:40 / 2023-08-25 15:30:36 / 8
