SAN ANTONIO – At the corner of South Alamo Street and East César Chávez Boulevard, businesses are already looking East in anticipation of a proposed Spurs arena.
“We do specialize with French pastries. So this is actually for Wemby,” said Commonwealth CoffeeHouse General Manager Dario Flous on Friday, holding a croissant.
The cluster of bars and restaurants at the Southwest corner of Hemisfair is a little over a quarter-mile walk from the proposed site of the new arena, the former Institute of Texan Cultures building. Should the arena be built, they anticipate a bump in traffic and business.
“We get people from the Alamodome that come here, the Tower (of Americas),” said Arianna Casias, an employee at Paleteria San Antonio.
“I can’t imagine it would do anything less than 25-50% more sales,” said Andrew Bryson, the operations manager for Dough Pizzeria in San Antonio.
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and others have questioned how beneficial a downtown arena, a key part of the wider Project Marvel, would be for San Antonio.
An economic impact analysis on the arena done by a consultant hired by the Spurs, Stone Planning, estimates there will be $318 million more in net spending in a year within the city and $333 million countywide tied to a new Spurs arena and ongoing operations at the Frost Bank Center.
However, the city’s consultant, CSL International, only reviewed the summary findings of Stone Planning’s report and did not conduct its own analysis.
CSL is owned by a larger company, Legends, which investment firm Sixth Street holds a majority stake in. Sixth Street also owns a minority stake in the Spurs.
Heywood Sanders, a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, supported Jones’ call for an “independent” report, saying a look at the methodology and assumptions built into the Stone Planning report was “critical.”
“You have the time and you have the resources to make sure that those numbers are reasonable,“ he told the San Antonio City Council on Thursday. ”Otherwise, we’re just talking about whether or not we love the Spurs and whether we have some grand vision and whether as the seventh-largest city in the country we deserve to have two arenas."
Council members went on to approve a deal to fund the arena, however, after voting down the mayor’s proposal for a “strategic pause” until a new economic report by a firm not associated with the Spurs could be completed and numerous public meetings held.
The deal for financing the $1.3 billion arena includes the city kicking in up to $489 million and Bexar County contributing up to another $311 million.
Though the terms aren’t binding, they’ll be used as the framework for future agreements.
In the upcoming Nov. 4 election, county voters will be asked whether to use a venue tax on hotel stays and car rentals to help pay for the county’s share of the arena. The vote also includes raising the hotel portion of the tax.
If the venue tax election fails, the current funding deal would collapse.
San Antonio’s business community has been one of the project’s biggest cheerleaders and lobbied Thursday for the plan to go ahead.
“The cost of indecision will drive up the cost,“ the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Jeff Webster said during Thursday’s meeting. ”The cost of indecision will make projects go away. The cost of indecisions will kill economic development.”
To Bryson, the use of public money also makes sense.
“I think it’s a great idea, it’s going to be a boom to the area,” Bryson said, “it will overall affect San Antonio in a positive way, so I have no problem with that.”
The answer to whether voters see it that way, too, will have to wait until November.
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