CANTLON’S CORNER: XL CENTER FUTURE FRONT AND CENTER 

BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings

HARTFORD, CT – The proverbial puck is in the state’s corner.

The XL Center last week officially placed the XL Center in Ned Lamont’s bonding package for $27.5M per year ($55 million total) over the next two years when the Governor of Connecticut announced his State of the State address unveiling his $22.5 billion dollar state budget.

The Finance committee has four sponsors of the bonding issue that placed the request on the agenda for review and those four includes some political heavyweights, House Majority leader, Matt Ritter (D-Hartford), Speaker of the House, Joe Aresimowicz (D-Berlin), Senate Majority leader, Bob Duff (D-Norwalk, Darien) and President Pro Tempore, Senator Martin Looney (D-New Haven).

For CRDA Executive Director Mike Freimuth this is the culmination of an eight-month protracted process that has had many starts, stops, pauses, and plenty of acrimony to get to this point.

“We have three pretty powerful people behind it, the Governor, Minority Speaker Ritter, and Rep. John Fonfara (D-Hartford, Wethersfield and the chair of the Finance committee) and several other prominent legislators. But that being said, I am cautiously optimistic this will get through. There is a long process still to go through. It’s hard to predict.”

The bonding issue must first pass the Finance committee, and it has, and then it must be approved by the General Assembly before officially going to the Bond Commission.

The General Assembly has been very reluctant, as a whole, especially the delegations from the big cities; New Haven, Waterbury, New London, Bridgeport, and Stamford, to allocate any public money for the XL Center considering its age and poor financial performances over the years.

“I think it’s a tough sell, always has been. We have the votes to pass and I think the authorization could get done in 60 days, but the bonding is gonna take a bit more time. There is a lot more questions that will be asked of us in this process as it plays out. We have to rationalize the equation to the dollars being put in and the dollars generated both with respect to taxes and to revenue generated inside the building.”

The Governor controls the agenda and the priorities of the Bond Commission.

Last year, a $60 million dollar proposal was never even considered.

In the last seven years, proposals for renovating the XL Center started at $250 million and then was lowered to $100 million. Both proposals were quashed and never received approval during the Malloy Administration.

Ritter, in an interview with WNPR, seemed confident that in the next 60 days this long-stalled project will come to life.

“I think it’s an issue of getting this done quickly. That’s the biggest issue because if it languishes for four-or-five more years, you won’t [have] a building that can be used anymore,” He said. “We have to get this done very, very quickly, and I think we will.”

A Fact…The project is already five years behind schedule

The number still falls short of the overall goal of the new Lower Bowl Strategy ($100 million) that is needed desperately to overhaul the aging building as the marketplace passes Hartford by everyday regionally and nationally.

New buildings are being built while older ones are getting necessary retro-fits they need to remain viable, marketplace entertainment assets.

“We have to get this thing started because once we do we have to then look to renegotiate contracts with UCONN and MSG because the revenue stream will change. The whole equation hinges on a whole set of factors, just one or two, hence the complexity involved which adroit political and financial maneuvering.”

The XL Center loses roughly $1.5 to $2 million per year with the state taking care of the shortfall.

The CRDA is set to unveil a fifth new study that was commissioned from CSL International about the economic viability of the XL Center in the marketplace.

The Lamont Administration insisted on it in order to seek support for the bonding and requiring public-private financing to fill in the other half of the economic equation to get the ball moving on a project four-to-five years overdue from when it should have started.

But that raises the question that asks if the study has put the CRDA into a position to start making pitches in boardrooms in the state, the region, or nationally?

“It’s still too early until we release the study next Thursday, presenting it fully before the (CRDA) board. Part of doing all of this, what will premium seating be and other price points. I think we’ll have better concessions and better revenue and that will factor in those future negotiations with UCONN and MSG. All of this will be simultaneous with Big East basketball coming back,” said Freimuth.

This comes amid new financial numbers at the XL Center which are a mixed bag with team operators in the building in the red, while concessions and the all-important per cap from food and beverage sales are in the black.

The numbers are quite shocking in some cases.

At the end of the fiscal year, the Hartford Wolf Pack is drawing only about 2,800 fans. UCONN hockey is faring worse with a meager 2,100 fans per game in December.

“Those were December numbers. The January numbers were much better of a month and trending upwards. Both teams are above those numbers right now. We hope with UCONN hockey and the Wolf Pack continue playing well those numbers will go up. Playoffs traditionally don’t draw well because you don’t know what the calendar is, but you hope a good run helps out.”

The AHL attendance figures list put the Wolf Pack at 25th out of the league’s 31 teams at 3,828 per game.

Basketball in their last year in the AAC conference, before they returned to the Big East, were not drawing very well either. The men’s side of the coin had two big games with Wichita State and Baylor.

Hockey operations are running even with the budget, but the XL Center as a whole as the third quarter was set to begin was operating with a $275K budget shortfall or unfavorable to the budget in the accounting parlance.

These numbers will accompany any proposal to a potential private partnership rise another question of if it could sink any possibility before you enter the foyer or elevator of any corporate office?

“It’s a bit too early for that. We’ll be releasing the study and then we can examine the best direction to move forward on is, to the rebuild of the arena. There is going to be public dollars however way you slice it. How we get there? That is what we’re working on and why we had the study done.”

The atrium portion of the building, owned by Northland Corporation, remains at a stalemate after nearly three years of negotiation. The chasm in pricing has not been bridged with the Northland, the property’s titleholder.

In the last go-round, Northland was seeking as much $10 million to the proposed $4.5 proffered by the CRDA in their last proposal that was rejected.

Eminent domain has hung in the air like an impending summer thunderstorm cloud and everyone still wonders if the CRDA will pull the trigger on the move this year or is it still being held in abeyance at the request of the Governor, Speaker of the House Aresimowicz, and Minority Leader, Len Fasano (R-North Haven)?

”Nobody wants to do it, but we have been begged off on it. It has been a topic of conversation there have been multiple discussions. Everybody is aware the atrium is critical to this whole process in the rebuild of the building. We’re gonna have to come to some kind of a solution to that,“ said Freimuth.

If the bond package passes as currently written will the atrium have to be resolved shortly thereafter?

“Absolutely, at that point to go forward the issue will have to be addressed.”

In that WNPR interview Chris Davis (R-East Windsor, Ellington) offered an alternative that has been aired in this column and other venues making a smaller arena near the Dunkin’ Donuts ballpark to create a sports and entertainment zone on the beginning of the North End of Hartford.

The current XL Center location and setup is not something Davis, a bond committee member, would support.

“We keep hearing that there are talks of potentially doing private partnerships, but I fear that we’d be throwing this money at it, basically putting the cart before the horse.”

Is this feasible, in any form of preliminary discussions, a Plan B, or is it a pie in the sky theory?

“Nothing at all,” said Freimuth succinctly.

Part of the backdrop in the state sports landscape that UCONN athletics is running a $42 million deficit. Then a public announcement of the gargantuan financial sinkhole that is Rentschler Field that is bleeding enormous financial red ink into the nearby Connecticut River at the clip of one million dollars by the conclusion of this fiscal year.

Its largest loss since the stadium opened in 2003.

The realization of that stand-alone issue and its long term viability UCONN football will be now as enter an independent Division I schedule with an average attendance of just 9,675 a game in a 40,000 seat stadium could have an adverse effect on the XL Center future discussions.

Toss in the disaster of the rebuild of Dillon Stadium that diverted time and resources last summer and where red ink oozes from underneath the brand new field and stadium

One positive note is the installation of a long-overdue chiller system seems to be on target this summer after a year delay.

The RFP (Request For Proposal) packages have gone out and they received responses and a bid is expected to be selected next month and contract signed to begin work sometime time in May.

“Right now, they’re out on the street. They’re due to be turned in in about two weeks or so. Bob Saint (CRDA Construction Manager) has been hard at work on it. We’re relocating the chillers based on a new building concept. They’re not going into the place where the current chillers are. We hope to get it done this summer.”

Should the Wolf Pack have a long Calder Cup playoff run into May and several other scheduled events at the XL Center, the work won’t start until events so as to not impact either the event or the installation project.

“We’re gonna wait till the hockey season ends and the way the Wolf Pack playing, it could be a longer-season and we have the Cirque de Soleil Ice Show in June and several to still be announced concerts

They’re too many things to move around. Better to wait until everything is done.”

Will the new chiller system be hooked up to the existing system and disconnecting the current outdated system?

“We’re gonna hook it up as soon as we can. We’re gonna transition to it we’re not going cold turkey on the old system. We’ll do it when the new system is ready. There is going to be a transition period to work things out. When we get the chiller system put into shape and ready to go will do it. To be honest, they’re not too many more rubber bands left that we can put on the chiller system that we have now. We’re running pretty thin on the line as it now, we gotta get this thing done.”A