At this month’s meeting of the Downtown Arena Committee, we learn that the bestest, smartest way to insure the $360 million in bonds needed to build the arena is to hire a company from Bermuda to do it.
I don’t feel so reassured with the quote from Jim King, a banker who ought to know what […]

[Read more →]

Jim King says there’s a big difference between the stalled Museum Plaza project and the Louisville Arena — the Arena has plenty of time to get its financing together and it has siginficant state and local guarantees.
So the Metro Council president is optimistic that the Arena is on track, even as another monthly meeting passed […]

[Read more →]

What this country needs. . . is another holiday, one that comes every four years, like Leap Day!!
Trying to keep up:
We’re BAD, and We’re MANY: Kentucky leads the nation in incarceration, not something we’ll be advertising in our city’s “Possibility City” campaign. It’s also breaking the budgets of local governments. The local jail houses 2,100 […]

[Read more →]

We’ve been telling you about the $2.8 million the Arena Authority is paying a Cincinnati demolition firm to clear the site of the Humana Building and the LG&E substation. You know that a local company bid $1.2 million less to do the work, but the Arena’s manager didn’t even consider its bid.
So Louisville’s CRS Demolition […]

[Read more →]

I just caught WAVE-TV’s coverage of this morning’s arena meeting, which led with a good news-bad news scenario, all orchestrated by arena committee chief Jim Host. The building’s $254 million price tag has been trimmed to $249 million, thanks to “lower steel and concrete prices” and of course, “careful oversight by the authority” i.e. Host […]

[Read more →]

NEW ORLEANS — That’s right, the V.V. is on the road in the only city that displays more Fleur de Lis than Louisvillle. The city seems to be enjoying a revitalization 30 months after Hurrican Katrina, reflecting in the glory of the NBA All-Star weekend.
“We have reaffirmed our position as a special-event city,” said one […]

[Read more →]

If you have ever been around Jim Host, you know that the only way to stop him from paying $1.2 million more than is necessary for the demolition of the Louisville Arena site will be an action of a court. In this morning’s C-J, Host gave Marcus Green a quote that shows just how egotistical […]

[Read more →]

A local contracting company president claims the Louisville Arena Authority is spending at least $1 million more than necessary to demolish two buildings on the arena site. Furthermore, it claims the Authority ignored the only bid from a qualified local contractor in favor of a Cincinnati company.
In January, the Authority announced it would pay O’Rourke […]

[Read more →]

We’ve been watching local coverage of the Louisville Arena Authority with some interest. Today, the Authority held a meeting in which it announced plans to tear down the Riverview Square building, and it looked at drawings for the new luxury suites.
Fox 41 and the Courier-Journal covered the meeting, but reported things quite differently. Now, if […]

[Read more →]

Which would you prefer first, the good news or the bad news?
Mayor Jerry Abramson’s 19th State of the City speech offers the good news about downtown projects, Parks initiatives, employment, Every1 Reads, neighborhood projects that add to the city’s quality of life. Geez, if he’d stopped right there, you’d get the idea that we’re in […]

[Read more →]

What to do on a slow “not really a holiday morning” at City Hall? The Mayor is trotting out a Top Ten list for the media — with each item one worth following in 2008. How many of these accomplishments will come to fuition? How many will be successful? And where’s the Library in all […]

[Read more →]

This week’s LEO weighs in mightily on some important issues around here: the fate of local radio, the fate of the downtown arena, the fate of Panhandling and Dog Ordinance issues, the fate of the city’s bonding issues. No one else has given a fair shake, media-wise, to issues like 8664.
As for the fate of […]

[Read more →]

As we first reported here Sept. 14, the Major Indoor Soccer League has its eye on Louisville’s new arena, and Arena Authority chair Jim Host believes the MISL can account for 15 dates per season.
What we didn’t know then was that the potential soccer team has a local supporter with the bucks and desire to […]

[Read more →]

The defeat of the library tax by such an overwhelming margin has the folks at City Hall scratching their heads. The $16.5 million windfall for the city’s budget won’t happen. In fact, there will be pressure to raise the library’s budget, starting with the $1.5 million annual boost suggested by Hal Heiner’s proposal. It puts […]

[Read more →]

The University of Louisville’s Cardinal Athletic Fund has begun its campaign to extort cash from fans to pay for the football stadium expansion and the downtown basketball arena. The brochure mailed yesterday was pretty cool — photoshop-ed images of a basketball and football huddle with “Redding” and “Jeanine” placed realistically on the backs of Edgar […]

[Read more →]

E-mail Warning: C-J environmental reporter James Bruggers, who may be the best over at Sixth & Broadway in keeping up a blog, learned a lesson about e-mail correspondence with readers this week. When Bruggers thought he was exchanging information with a reader, he was actually being interviewed by a blogger and activist on the global […]

[Read more →]

At the University of Louisville, Tom Jurich has had the golden touch. We won’t repeat the man’s accomplishments since his 1997 arrival, but it’s an impressive list. But now that he’s facing some adversity, things aren’t so rosy — in fact the bloom’s completely off the rose. A few losses on the football field, […]

[Read more →]

Critics of the new downtown arena say the math doesn’t add up. If the University of Louisville mens’ and womens’ basketball teams take up about 30 dates a year, and with facilities like Freedom Hall, Louisville Gardens, the Kentucky International Convention Center all capable of hosting events, how will the new building possibly host enough […]

[Read more →]

In Oklahoma this week, a guy walked into a bar wearing a Texas Longhorn shirt and nearly got castrated for it. You might have expected similar treatment for Jim Host, wearing a business suit and an Arena Authority cap, when he strode confidently into the UAW Union Hall on Fern Valley Road Tuesday to address […]

[Read more →]

In Sunday’s C-J, John Schnatter gave reporter Chris Otts an inside look at his empire, and the good folks of Anchorage chimed in with a chorus of hallelujahs that painted Schnatter as an angelic town patron, a Mr. Potter who has the town’s best interests in mind. He does own 6 percent of the land […]

[Read more →]