History
It is owned by the City of Oklahoma City and opened on June 8, 2002, three years after construction began. It is located adjacent to the Robinson Avenue exit of I-40 Crosstown Expressway in downtown Oklahoma City. The original 'Ford Center' name came from a naming rights deal with the Oklahoma Ford Dealers group which represents the marketing efforts of the state's Ford dealerships, rather than the Ford Motor Company itself.
The facility was the premier component of the city's 1993 Capital Improvement Program, known as Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS), which financed new and upgraded sports, entertainment, cultural and convention facilities primarily in the downtown section with a temporary 1-cent sales tax assessed. Despite the "metropolitan" moniker of the improvement program, the tax was only assessed inside city limits.
Originally billed and marketed as a "state-of-the-art" facility, Oklahoma City Arena was actually constructed to minimum NBA and NHL specifications. The arena was built without the luxury amenities because of local concerns on expenditures on an arena without a major-league tenant, with the ability to create "buildout" amenities and improvements to the arena if a professional sports team announced it would relocate to the city.
A plan for such buildout improvements began in 2007 in the wake of acquisition of the Seattle SuperSonics by an Oklahoma-City based ownership group in October 2006. Originally, city officials had hoped to include Oklahoma City Arena buildout improvements as part of a planned 2009 "MAPS 3" initiative. However, given the impending relocation decision of the Sonics ownership group in late 2007, the City Council of Oklahoma City placed a sales tax initiative on the city election ballot on March 4, 2008. This initiative was passed by a 62% to 38% margin, and extended a prior one-cent sales tax for a period of fifteen months in order to fund $121 million in budgeted improvements to the arena, as well as fund a separate practice facility for a relocated franchise.
Subsequent to the ballot initiative, City officials and Sonics ownership announced a preliminary agreement to move the Sonics franchise to Oklahoma City and the Ford Center. The deal included a provision for $1.6 million in annual rents to the City for use of the Ford Center (including marketing rights of luxury seating areas for all NBA and most non-NBA events), and a $409,000 annual supplemental payment in exchange for a transfer of arena naming rights and associated revenue to the Sonics franchise. The franchise move was approved by NBA ownership on April 18, 2008.
Read more about this topic: Chesapeake Energy Arena
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