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Seattlest Pix 09Nov08
Weekly Around the -Ists
Seattlest Pix 09Nov09
Can't Miss It: Monday
Save Our Sonics and Citizens For More Important Things' Chris Van Dyk are working together to keep NBA basketball in the city…until 2010.
Owner Clay Bennett is going to try and move the team to Oklahoma City at the end of the season, even though the team has a lease with the city that runs through 2010. Bennett could buy his way out of the lease; a prospect that the city may like considering that they (and by "they" we mean "the city's taxpayers") will be paying for Key Arena well into the future.
Save Our Sonics realizes this and are taking a page out of Van Dyk's play book by looking to start an initiative that wouldn't let the city break the lease. According to their statement the initiative will, "mandate that the city not be a partner to any agreement in which a professional sports team relocates prior to the expiration of their existing lease."
Van Dyk is on board endorsing the plan, claiming that sports owners are jerking cities around and telling the PI, "The Sonics committed to play at KeyArena through 2010, and a lot of businesses made decisions based on that. The Sonics need to pay in full for all the possible impacts they have on the local economy. It seems imminently reasonable and fair to us."
The group would need 25,000 signatures for a shot on the February ballot.
In a related story Bennett and Howard Schultz are complete assholes.
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The Key hasn't regularly made enough money on the Sonics to retire significant debt. Chris Van Dyk is more interested in keeping his name in the paper than saving the Sonics or money. If they're going to end up leaving anyway, the city would be a lot smarter to accept a hefty buyout which it could use to retire debt than to drag this through the courts and make piddly for the next three years.