The hard part culminated on Monday. The fun part begins today.
In a 12:15 pm ceremony at the Seattle Center’s Fisher Pavilion, Mayor Jenny Durkan and Tim Leiweke will sign the Memorandum of Understanding between the city and the Oak View Group. The agreement, which was approved on Monday with a 7-1 council vote, is for OVG to renovate KeyArena into a state of the art NBA/NHL arena.
You can watch the ceremony live by clicking on the picture above.
Once the ink hits the paper, the focus will shift to managing construction, producing transaction documents, and acquiring teams. OVG is pushing an aggressive timeline that completes environmental reviews in time for construction to begin in October of next year and to complete by the fall of 2020.
It is widely expected that the NHL will arrive in Seattle soon enough to open that arena. It is further expected that the arrival of the NBA will require a longer wait.
The NHL Board of Governors is scheduled to meet this Thursday and Friday, Seattle is likely to be discussed.