Virginia Beach Pulls Out Of Arena Deal

The City Council of Virginia Beach, Va., Nov. 7 voted to end its contract with a developer to build an 18,000-seat arena.

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Virginia Beach Arena Rendering

The council voted 9-1 to terminate the contract with Mid-Atlantic Arena, LLC, after deciding conditions of the deal had not been met, The Virginian-Pilot reported.

The deal was not necessarily dead though, as Mayor Will Sessoms reportedly said at the meeting that “if they could come back with I’s dotted and the T’s crossed and everything in place, perhaps it could still move forward.”

The reasoning provided for the vote was that Mid-Atlantic had not sufficiently confirmed that it had received $70 million in private investment or secured a loan from JPMorgan Chase to finance the project by the Nov. 7 deadline, the paper reported. President of Mid-Atlantic Arena Andrea Kilmer disputed this at the meeting, saying that the developers had complied with the agreement, though nitty-gritty details of the situation were reportedly not shared by either the council nor the developer.

Private investor Stephen Ballard told the paper that AEG was the potential manager of the arena, and that he had put $5 million into the project as equity, meaning the project was now “too big to fail.”

While reliant on private capital without an anchor tenant, the deal would have seen Virginia Beach reimbursing $476 million over 33 years with various forms of tax revenue, according to the paper.

Pollstar reached out to AEG for comment for this story.