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City of Glendale will pony up $25 million again to keep Coyotes for another year

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After the City of Glendale paid up their bill to the NHL earlier this week taking the hit for $25 million in operating losses last season, the city is prepared to go to the mat once again to buy more time to save the team from leaving Arizona.

The Glendale City Council is set to meet on Tuesday night and on the docket for discussion is a vote to see whether or not they will approve the same $25 million earmarked to pay the NHL for operating losses. According to Rebekah Sanders of The Arizona Republic, if the council votes to approve that money the team will stay in Arizona for yet another season.

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly had this to say about the impending interim deal between the City of Glendale and the NHL to keep the team locked into Jobing.com Arena and the city once again.

“As we have for the past two-plus years, we have been working very closely with the City of Glendale to do everything possible to ensure the Coyotes’ future in Glendale,” NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly told NHL.com. “At the City’s request, we have agreed to pursue another one-year interim arrangement while we jointly pursue a long-term ownership solution. We remain confident that one exists, and we intend to continue to pursue it.”

That makes it all sound easy. The hard part, of course, is justifying a probable cost of $25 million being tossed down the drain once again. The money is ponied up with the expectation that the NHL will get a deal cut with Matthew Hulsizer and his group to sell the Coyotes to him and keep the team in Arizona for good.

After Hulsizer stepped up to be the man, the dealings have run cold and even led to rumors from Forbes today that he was having cold feet about the deal in Glendale and was turning his attention towards St. Louis to invest in. Inside sources have told PHT that those rumors are unfounded and that Hulsizer and his group are continuing to fight for the Coyotes and keep them in Glendale.

Making this situation all the stranger are some of the statements coming from members of the Glendale City Council. The Globe & Mail’s Eric Duhatschek heard from city councilor H. Philip Lieberman about what going ahead with this extra $25 million is all about for the City and his thoughts are curious given that there’s one big problem to all this yet to be squared away.

However, Lieberman noted that “we do not have a signed deal with Hulsizer -and there is some discussion as to whether we will ever get one or not get one. I don’t personally want to give him $110-million.

“In my mind, this (proposal) will give us a year to find somebody else who may be willing to buy it and come up with much more money. Real money – instead of city money.”


So let’s chalk all of this up here. The City of Glendale wants to take another $25 million hit to buy another year of negotiations with Hulsizer and fighting the Goldwater Institute to try and carve out a deal, meanwhile the team continues to lose money but the city won’t have a barren arena that they’re still paying off for having it built in the first place.

Got all that?

The situation is a mess and one that makes every part of this deal a gigantic mess. The City of Glendale opting to pony up another heaping amount of taxpayer money is the part that really makes me feel uncomfortable about everything, however. From the deal that Hulsizer is trying to work out with the city, one that’s being challenged vigilantly by the Goldwater Institute, in which the city wants to put up even more taxpayer money so Hulsizer catches a break not having to put up all of his own money to buy the team - nothing at all about this is neither normal nor seems right.

What’s most unfair about this is that it’s the fans stuck holding the bag here. More directly, it’s the citizens of Glendale that are taking the hit. It’s their tax money that’s going to pay for Jobing.com Arena and it’ll be even more of their money that goes to paying the NHL just to buy more time to negotiate a deal with Hulsizer that may see even more tax money put up as collateral so he can just purchase the team.

Nothing about any part of this deal feels right from a civic perspective. Asking a city to keep coughing up this much money to cover for a money pit of a bad original deal cut by the previous owners of the team comes off as a hostage situation. The City of Glendale suffers big time without the Coyotes, but the franchise and the city suffer with a team that continues to sit in limbo. David Ellman, Jerry Moyes, and the NHL have helped make this mess and now they’re doing anything in their power to fix it or cover it up. Here’s to hoping they don’t turn this situation into something out of The Simpsons when Lyle Lanley sold Springfield on the monorail.