Commissioners raise questions about arena

By Fritz Klug
News Editor

For over three hours and countless glasses of water and cups of coffee, Kalamazoo County commissioners grilled the vetting committee about the feasibility of building an arena in the Arcadia district of downtown Kalamazoo.

Jo Wei Looi/Western Herald | The Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners held a special meeting to discuss the proposed downtown arena Tuesday.

The Board held a special meeting Tuesday night to discuss the second vetting report for the proposed $81.2 million downtown arena.

The commission still has to decide whether to put a one percent food and beverage tax and an accommodation tax on hotels and car rentals on the Aug. 3 ballot.

The board has until May 25 to vote on the measure.

If the vote passes and the arena is developed, it would be owned and managed by the county.

The projected cost of the arena would be paid for mostly by taxes as the report has different funding models that would use a mixture of bonds and private funding.

Some commissioners were concerned about the $4 million the taxes would provide every year. The report predicts that would grow 1.75 percent annually.

Bob Beam, chair of the vetting committee and retired chief financial officer at WMU, said that the committee used conservative estimates for construction costs, the number of performances, and income generated by the tax to make sure the plan was feasible.

“Maybe we were more conservative than we should have been,” he said.

Beam said many of the specifics of the project, such as exact construction costs, and a firm commitment from Western Michigan University and the Kalamazoo Wings to play games at the facility could not be addressed at the moment because they are still in the exploratory stages of the project.

County Commissioner Jack Urban, (D-Kalamazoo), asked if the county could stop the process if the vote is passed.

“We want some insurance we can pull the plug if things don’t match up,” he said.

They could, Beam said, because a vote doesn’t mean the tax has to be levied.

Beam added that he was immediately chastised by his friends in the economics department at WMU who pointed out other facilities that had failed.

“A bunch [of those examples] can be taken out,” Beam said.

Some didn’t have strong tenets, were poorly managed or the professional sports team moved out, he said.

The second half of the meeting had downtown restaurant owner and WMU Trustee Ken Miller and KVCC President Marilyn Schlack give a presentation about the Arcadia Commons West district.

In his presentation, Miller emphasized the success of Arcadia Commons East in transforming the area around the Kalamazoo Valley Museum.

While Arcadia Commons West and the event center are one in the same, Arcadia Commons West is, according to Schlack, “a natural people magnet, an event center as the hub, alongside other places… where people want to go.”

Miller said that while he would like every commissioner to agree with the vision, he knows they won’t, but hopes they allow their constituents to vote on it.

“Let those people who trusted to put you in office to have the same opportunity to vote on this project,” he said.

County Commissioner John Taylor, (D-Kalamazoo) said he is in support of the Arcadia Commons West vision of developing the desolate area of downtown, but not with the arena, and not using tax money to fund it, when there are other, higher priorities to fund like public schools.

“I’m just not convinced that the heart of that project should be an arena,” he said.

Miller said that in the 14 years that the area has sat there, no one has come up with a viable plan for the property.

“This is what we’ve come up with. If there are alternatives, where have they been?”

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Posted by heraldstaff on Feb 25 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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