In the not-too-distant future, thousands of people will flock to watch concerts, hockey, basketball and more at a $250 million arena coming to downtown Palm Springs. The building of the arena certainly feels inevitable, but that has not stopped one local “group” from buying newspaper ads calling for the Governor of California to halt the project, which they call the “Son of Staples Center”.
Via KMIR:
But not everyone is excited about the prospects of an arena downtown, in fact one group, Palm Springs Together is calling for the governor of California to shut down the project before it gets underway, taking out this full page ad in the LA Times, calling the project “Son of Staples Center”.
“This project is more or would be more than half the size of Staples Center, so that’s where the son of Staples Center comes from,” says Cary Brazeman, the founder of Palm Springs Together.
The open letter to the Governor Gavin Newsom addresses environmental, traffic and safety concerns, ones they claim have not been considered by the Tribe.
It’s interesting that the “group” thinks that relating the Palm Springs arena to Staples Center in Los Angeles would be a bad thing, as the center and LA Live have been major successes and led to a huge resurgence of downtown Los Angeles and had an economic impact of over $32 billion – but, then again, this is the same valley that saw residents protest an In-N-Out Burger over crime just a few towns over last year.
Anyway, here’s the ad in which “Palm Springs Together” which calls the arena a “major threat” and threatens lawsuits because that is clearly what together-ness is all about:
The “group”, which kinda seems like its just the one guy at this point, calls for the arena to be half the size on its website, which would put it at 5,500 seats and doesn’t seem like enough seats to be home to a minor league hockey team or host A-List entertainers and also just seems like a random number thrown out there by someone who doesn’t know much about arenas.
Undoubtedly, the arena will lead to “a totally different Palm Springs experience” – but, with golf dying, the Boomers unable to sell their giant homes to anyone, and the desert desperately needing new sources of jobs and revenues, that’s probably a good thing.
