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On Tuesday, a little more than a year after Leonsis and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin announced with great fanfare a deal to build an area in the Potomac Yards neighborhood in Alexandria, Va. — a plan that collapsed under fierce opposition a few months later — the D.C. City Council formally approved $515 million in public funding for Monumental. It will allow the company to transform the arena that has been the home of the NBA and NHL teams since 1997 and bring it in line with new arenas constructed in both leagues over the last three decades. The city will also buy the arena from Monumental for $87.5 million, in line with the city’s ownership of Nationals Park and Audi Field. Monumental would then immediately lease the arena from the city in what is known as a “sale/leaseback” arrangement. For its part, Monumental is pledging $285 million toward the arena renovation. Monumental currently manages the arena venue and will continue to do so in the new arrangement. Bowser said the deal would be a “catalytic” investment in the city’s future.
Two-time NBA slam dunk champion and Gate City native, Mac McClung visited Gate City Middle School. McClung returned to his former school to speak with Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who was also visiting the school. The pair even played basketball with two students.
One detail stood out to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on the December morning that the billionaire owner of the Wizards and Capitals, Ted Leonsis, announced he was moving the Washington teams to Virginia: He hadn’t signed a thing. There was no contract, “no real commitment,” Bowser (D) said — only a handshake with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) that in Bowser’s eyes meant D.C. still had a shot. From that point, Bowser said in an interview Friday, she decided, “we were going to put our foot on the gas.” Over the next several months, periodically over drinks at the Waldorf Astoria, Bowser would quietly work to bring Leonsis back to the negotiating table, sweetening D.C.’s offer just as Leonsis’s plans were falling apart in Virginia’s General Assembly. She insisted for months publicly that D.C. remained in the game. Few shared her optimism at the onset.
Bowser and Leonsis’s rekindled negotiations started with a chance encounter at the Waldorf Astoria in mid-January, about a month after Youngkin and Leonsis announced the move. Leonsis’s investment company, Revolution Growth, was holding its annual conference at the glitzy hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from Bowser’s office at the Wilson Building. After remarks from Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Leonsis stepped out of the ballroom into the lobby — “and I literally walk into the mayor,” Leonsis said. “Ted!” she exclaimed. “I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” Leonsis recalled. She’d come to the hotel for an unrelated meeting. “I said, ‘Oh, let’s sit down — I haven’t seen you in a while,’” Leonsis said — not since he told her he was moving to Virginia. As Bowser tells it, the two embraced before sitting down to talk.
Leonsis called Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and the mayor of Alexandria, Va., Justin M. Wilson, early Wednesday afternoon to inform them he had reached an agreement with Bowser, ending Monumental’s attempt to move the Wizards and Capitals to a large, undeveloped site in Alexandria’s Potomac Yard. The proposed move to Alexandria, which was announced in mid-December, met a significant roadblock in the Virginia Senate, where key lawmaker L. Louise Lucas, the chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, opposed the deal. “We made tons of mistakes,” Leonsis said Wednesday night when asked whether Monumental had made errors since the December announcement about Potomac Yard. “But we manage to outcomes, and the outcome is exactly the right one.” Bowser said: “We are the current home, and the future home, of the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards.”
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Wizards plan to move to Virginia in jeopardy?
Leading Virginia lawmakers have stripped plans for a new Wizards and Capitals arena from the state budget that the General Assembly is expected to approve on Saturday, blocking Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s best shot at bringing the teams to Alexandria and dealing a severe blow to a deal the governor has touted as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), who stood on the portico of the Capitol looking down on Youngkin’s news conference, said afterward that he was correct in his assessment. “I am a roadblock, yes,” Lucas said, adding that she does not believe the proposed arena and its $1.5 billion in public debt are a good deal for taxpayers. Asked if she would be open to a better arena deal, she said, “A better deal would be if they paid for it themselves,” referring to the teams’ owner, Ted Leonsis.
Though Youngkin has several options for reviving the plan — such as introducing a budget amendment or sending down a stand-alone bill — he indicated Thursday that he has no immediate plans to do so. “The next step is for the General Assembly and particularly the Senate to embrace the opportunity. It’s their move,” he said.
Iverson himself will attend the street dedication. Gov. Youngkin, Rep. Bobby Scott, James "Poo" Johnson, Marcellus "Boo" Williams, Jr. and Philadelphia 76ers Vice President Mike Goings will be speaking at the event.
In her negotiations to keep the Wizards and the Capitals from leaving, the mayor was hobbled by the city’s self-imposed limit on borrowing, which prevented her from offering the money Leonsis said he needed upfront. Not until six days before the meeting at his corporate offices did a major financial transaction allow her to offer hundreds of millions of dollars more upfront. This account of months of secret negotiations that culminated in Leonsis’s decision to leave the District draws from interviews with him, Bowser and Youngkin, as well as with more than three dozen political leaders, government officials and business executives. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. The Washington Post also obtained emails and planning and financial documents that figured into the discussions.
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Rob Damschen, communications director for Youngkin, said in a statement that the governor remains confident that the Assembly "will come together because this project is good for the entire Commonwealth." "It creates 30,000 jobs and unlocks billions in new revenue that can be used to fund expanded toll relief in Portsmouth, increased funding for I-81, and new money for education for rural and urban school divisions across the Commonwealth," Damschen said.
Legislation underpinning a plan to relocate the NBA’s Washington Wizards and NHL’s Washington Capitals across the Potomac River to northern Virginia easily cleared an early hurdle in the state legislature Friday. Lawmakers on the Virginia House Appropriations Committee voted 17-3 to advance the measure, a top priority of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, to the floor of the House of Delegates.
Advocates of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's plan to build a new professional sports arena and entertainment district in northern Virginia say the project would be a generational job-creator so lucrative it will pay for itself. Critics, meanwhile, argue the proposal to lure the NBA’s Washington Wizards and NHL’s Washington Capitals across the Potomac from the nation's capital will amount to an extravagant taxpayer handout to the wealthy owners of the teams' parent company. In the coming 2024 legislative session that kicks off Wednesday, Virginia lawmakers will have to make their position on that divide clear, as they take up complex legislation to enable the move.
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