AN ORDINANCE related to KeyArena; authorizing the renovation of KeyArena into a world-class, multi-purpose sports and entertainment arena at Seattle Center, including its design, construction, lease, financing, and future operation; authorizing the Mayor to execute agreements with Seattle Arena Company, LLC, for the renovation and lease of the Arena, including a lease agreement, a development agreement, an integration agreement, and other related agreements; exempting the renovation and future operation of the Arena from the requirements of Chapter 20.47 of the Seattle Municipal Code; authorizing the Seattle Center Director to execute future joint purchasing agreements with Seattle Arena Company, LLC, notwithstanding Seattle Municipal Code Chapter 20.60; and ratifying and confirming certain prior acts.
The Report of the Select Committee on Civic Arenas. Agenda Item one Constable 119 345 relating to key arena authorizing the renovation of Key Arena into a world class, multipurpose sports and entertainment arena at Seattle Center, including its design, construction, lease financing and Future Operations Committee recommends the bill passes amended. Councilmember Suarez. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Before I go to my more official comments, I want to thank everybody who are here today who have been coming to all of our public hearings, our committee meetings, to provide public comment on this very important piece of legislation. Again, I just want to remind everyone that. It is 2018. Let's not live in the past. We just celebrated our third WNBA national championship. Go Seattle Storm. Thank you. Owners of Sales Storm. I guess sometimes when I hear people just go on and on about oh eight and their hearts being ripped out, I get a little annoyed because that was ten years ago, so you kind of gotta let that go. So we are starting a new day here in the city with a new partnership and a new partnership, and I'm very, very happy and excited. The Select Committee on Civic Arenas made a unanimous recommendation on September 14th, 2018 that the City Council passed Council bill as amended. This, as you, many of you know, is a few years in the making. The dozens of committee and committee in city council meetings, private briefings, community events, individual briefings and tons of paper and notebooks. But we're finally here. I want to thank my co-chair, President Harrell. I want to thank the client group who worked with me closely. Councilmember Bagshaw representing District seven in Council Member Johnson. Your participation and willingness to work with me as well as your staff was invaluable. I know we spent a lot of time together and you're probably tired of me and all the notebooks. A special thank you to my amazing five team in my office. Both both past and present. Brendel Nagy, Tyler, Mercedes, Sabrina and Shaina. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of putting together notebooks and reading and highlighting and collating and making sure that my colleagues had all the information they needed to make the right decision. And a very particular wonderful thank you to our director, Kirsten Anstead. Where are you? Kirsten, please raise your hand. This woman is amazing. Want to go a little bit off script here. I don't think people realize how hard and I think I can say Kirsten Kirsten. Is the is the glue that makes it. Happen. She's the one that makes sure all the charts, all the analysis. That it takes it much very sophisticated. Complicated ideas and all these transaction documents and boils it down. And we all work together to make sure they got done. And I could not have done this job without her. So I told her, when I leave this job some day, I'm taking her with me. So I'll leave it at that. I also want to be a special thanks to Ovg and their team. Your commitment, both financial and civically, to our great city is very, very much appreciated. We appreciate the time you took for us in the last about 18 months to work with us through many drafts and many documents. And I cannot tell you it was a labor of love, but it was well worth it. I want to thank the leadership and the cooperation of the executive team, particularly Mayor Jenny Durkin, Robert Nelms, Marshall Foster, the two Carls Carl Carl Steckel and Carl Hersch, Ben Noble. Thank you, Ben, for all your hard work and of course, our legal team, Greg Nava and our experts, most notably for me anyway, it was Mr. Abrams from NYU. Mr. Abrams again spent a considerable amount of time who the Legislative City Council hired to walk us through the most difficult documents, making sure that we understood due diligence , equity, financing, backstops, all that stuff. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We are all proud of the hard work everybody contributed to deliver us here today. And in particular, I want to thank the city of Seattle and all the dedicated public servants who I did not list off today, who spent countless hours in time. And of course, all my colleagues and their legislative staff that came to meetings and took the time to meet with me and Kirsten and anyone who would listen about any material or any information or anything that they didn't understand. And one last thank you to the wonderful community groups that reached out to me that we met with so we could accommodate all of the needs of the residents, not only within the development zone, but those outside of the development zone. And I believe that this is just the beginning of a wonderful new era. 2018 is our year to make our city. And we said that line, and I'm going to say I almost said, make city Seattle great again. No, that's not what I was going to say. Seattle is already great. We are going to make it greater. And this is a phenomenal partnership. Thank you. Thank you. Chair, where's Councilmember Bagshaw? Thank you very much. And thanks to all of you who are here. Many of you were here with us two and a half years ago, and I think I opened up my comments with something like, sometimes you have to stand up what's right, even if you have to stand alone. And fortunately, I had a number of my colleagues who were willing to stand with me. And notwithstanding some of the stuff that we heard over the last year and a half, we have really been heartened by the support that we have received from all of you and from Oak View Group and Kirsten and Robert and Marshall, all of my own. Deborah has already sung your praises, but I just also want to say that when we first put this out in an RFP, the goal was to say Seattle and the Seattle center and the key arena are assets that are worth saving and not just saving, but revitalizing. And I am so excited today that the objectives that we had laid out included provide the world class civic arena that will attract and present music, entertainment and sports events, potentially including an NHL and an NBA. We know the NHL is within our grasp. I believe we'll see NBA by 2025 that we're going to integrate and connect with Uptown and Debbie FRAUSTO recoup are many of you who have been leading this charge. This is so important to me as a person who represents District seven. This is an incredible opportunity for us to design and permit, develop and construct again with minimal financial participation from the city. This is a big deal. It is a different deal than we were looking at two and a half years ago. And I, too, want to extend my thanks to a few group for the work that you have visioned and envisioned, because it's going to be very exciting to see what Seattle Center can become. And I'm also thrilled that our Bicycle Network is going to be extended. Thank you to Cascade Bicycle Club to Neighborhood Greenways for the work you've done and also for those who want to see the pedestrian connections. So, you know, just want to also say thank you to our labor community. Daryl Bright, Nicole Grant for the participation and what you showed us that we are standing together here that is not an us versus them city, but having the community development agreement, the local hire. And then we've also heard from our arts we uptown is an art and culture overlay neighborhood now. So connecting that with Uptown and with Belltown is important. And also I just want. To know that then to remind folks that the neighborhood was involved in the neighbors were heard. The notion of building affordable housing units right in Uptown and Belltown establish an innovative mobility strategy that puts pedestrians first. This is what we're going to be doing. And I don't know if Alan Hart is in our audience today or not, but he's the one that introduced me to this mobility action plan, the map, and making sure that we are connected. I'm excited about what we're doing. I'm very grateful to my colleague, Councilmember Suarez. I just appreciate so much your leadership on this. And you're putting the stake in the ground and saying we are going to have a deadline. I love what Debbie FRAUSTO said. It's that dreams with deadlines. And your goal is was that to bring us here today, get us moving. And I'm so hopeful that we have the NHL team soon so we can start the construction. So many thanks again to all of you that have been here. I'm just very grateful to be working with you. Thank you. Councilmember Cast Member O'BRIEN Would you like to say a few words? Just briefly, I want to thank the folks that have worked on this when less than a year ago when we considered the agreement. And the more you to move forward, I had some concerns of those time and voted no on that. And I want to say that those concerns have largely been addressed. I'll speak to the specifics around transportation when we get to the resolution, but proud to be supporting it today and look forward for the next couple of years. There's still work to do, but I think we can get there. Thank you. Comments from Brian. So we have item one in front of us, but any of my colleagues like the Chairman Castro Johnson, please, just briefly. Since there's a lot of things on the agenda today and everybody else's speeches have been really short in the interest of time, I just want to say how proud I am to be here. We have had a long road to get to this point. But Councilmember Suarez's suggestion earlier, you know, it has been really incredible experience to work with so many different and great people on this project. We've got an agreement where we all share in some risks and some rewards, but we are going to build a world class venue that is going to be home to some world championship teams . And ideally one of those will be a basketball team from the men's side to join the great basketball team that we have from the women's side. And. You know. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, you know, I brought my little bobblehead friends today, thanks to a friend of mine who gave that to me after the last unsuccessful vote and said, stick with it. This is an important thing to a lot of people in the city. And and I'm really proud that we have a commitment not only to build a new arena, but also that that ARIN is going to contribute two and a half million dollars into our mandatory housing affordability program that it's going to commit $10 million to youth care and another $10 million in the Giving Fund, a three and a half million dollars in public art. And it's going to be part of a community in Seattle center where we have intentionally set up a lot of really incredible arts and cultural institutions. And it's going to respect and work with those arts and cultural institutions. My significant other spent six years on the fundraising staff for PNB, and I'm a big believer in the culture that we've created at Seattle Center, and I'm grateful to you, Director Dellums, for continuing that culture. So I'm just really excited. I'm going to get a lot less harassment from my taller, more athletically inclined cousins at Christmas this year. At six foot three, I got made fun of a lot for being one of the shortest members of the family and for for them. I am very grateful to you all for your vote today, because I think this is going to be a really, really incredible project. And I'm so proud of them both. Thank you, Kasper and Johnson. Now, the comments from many of my colleagues and we say a few words I just like to start off saying by that my heart was torn in 2008. Oh, God. I'm just joking. Oh. Yeah. In all seriousness, this is just a great deal for the city, for the residents, for the businesses. So I'll view hopefully with the success voters, it's no longer our adversarial in a contractual way. They are our partners and I think they've already proven through this process they've been outstanding partners. So just a few things councilmember worries really drove the process your thoroughness is was remarkable so thank you for that. Director Kirsten Aristide and your team were phenomenal. Robert Nel I'm sure team we, we had high expectations and you rose to the occasion as you always do. So we think. Thank you for that. And I just enjoyed Mike McQuaid's description that this is this is world class, this is a legacy project. And in the midst of, you know, we just got off a big Seahawk win and a big Husky win. So we're riding high in the midst of all that sports stuff. We're not forgetting about the people that matter the most the communities, the neighborhoods, the homeless, the housing needs. So this is a good deal for the city and I'm very honored to support it. So and with that, councilman was really like saying, are you ready to vote? Despite being called a bandito today? Yes, I think I'm ready for a vote. All right. We good? Okay. Here we go. Please call the roll on the passage of the bill. Gonzalez. I herbold. I Johnson. Hi. Suarez. Hi. O'Brien. Sergeant Bagshaw. Hi. President Harrell. Hi. Eight in favor and unopposed. All right, Bill passes. I know this. That's got to be. A record in terms of the size of the bill. My goodness. It's called the next agenda item when you are ready.