A new Seattle arena? Fine, but don't make us pay for it

Seattle SuperSonics fans reacted rightly with indignation back in 2008 when owner Clay Bennett, enabled by the National Basketball Association, lassoed the team to his hometown of Oklahoma City. Now no one's complaining that a prospective new arena could lure a team from elsewhere -- Sacramento, most likely -- to Seattle.

We'll just leave that one right there.

Seattle also could land a National Hockey League franchise in the deal, fulfilling an almost four-decade struggle. The city actually won an NHL franchise in 1976, pending the sale of the Pittsburgh Penguins to a Seattle-based group. Financial issues intervened, and the Pens stayed in Pennsylvania.

The financial end appears to be covered by the key figure who has emerged, a San Francisco hedge-fund manager named Christopher Hansen. He's a 44-year-old Seattle native who has approached the city about buying an NBA team and building an arena for it south of Safeco Field.

The Sonics left because their home, KeyArena, was deemed inadequate less than 15 years after an upgrade, and the city didn't want to shell out the money to meet whatever standards Bennett and the NBA demanded. It never was an NHL-friendly building, with only 9,000 or so seats with unobstructed views of the ice. The minor-league hockey team Seattle Thunderbirds left for an arena in Kent soon after the Sonics headed south.

The Seattle area and the state no doubt suffered from sports-palace fatigue after contentious public votes in King County on a baseball stadium and statewide on a football stadium. In 1995, King County voters actually rejected a sales-tax increase for what is now Safeco Field, but elected officials went ahead anyway with a different financing setup. A funding mechanism for the football stadium, now CenturyLink Field, passed narrowly in a 1997 statewide referendum.

Correspondence obtained by The Seattle Times under a public-disclosure request finds Hansen, the San Francisco hedge-fund manager, citing arena deals in other cities "that don't require incremental taxes or direct public funding." That's the aspect that should be of greatest concern of those of us in the Yakima Valley and the rest of the state. Governments have too many fiscal problems to accede to any demands by well-heeled owners to house well-paid players.

If Seattle -- or whatever municipality an arena may call home -- believes a modest outlay would bring a return on its investment, then have at it. But financially, keep the rest of us out of it.

When the NBA left Seattle, it left behind bad feelings but also the SuperSonics name for any prospective future club. The Sacramento Kings franchise already has changed its name from the Royals in a series of moves west from Rochester, N.Y., Cincinnati and Kansas City, where they became the Kings. So resurrecting the Sonics moniker could come quickly.

NHL talk focuses on moving the Phoenix Coyotes north. Sure, coyotes abound hereabouts, but as a nickname we'd suggest playing off a different vertebrate entirely: Call 'em the Sockeye. That's a singularly Northwest reference, and outsiders will simply assume that's what hockey players do while pursuing the puck -- recall the late Rodney Dangerfield's "I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out." Those outsiders don't need to know it's a cold fish.

Call 'em what you will. Just don't call any new arena a money pit that we'll all have to pay for.

* Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Sharon J. Prill, Bob Crider, Frank Purdy and Karen Troianello.