Speaker Recap for November 28, 2011

What a pleasure it was to hear from Sacramento native and entrepreneur Gregg Lukenbill as our keynote speaker at this week’s meeting.  Gregg reportedly picked up his first paycheck at age 7 and worked in construction for his dad, Frank.  They became partners in 1976. In 1983, he and investors bought the Kings and moved them two years later from Kansas City to Natomas, where he built the old Arco Arena and then the current one to house the NBA team. He sold the team in 1992. 

If you think about it, without Gregg, we'd have no passion for purple, we would never have heard the likes of radio game caller Grant Napear yelling “Oooooooooohhhhhh Boy! If you don’t like that, you don’t like NBA basketball!”  Without Gregg, we would never have been one game away (one free throw away?) from a local NBA finals playoff series.  In many ways, as John “Photo Op” Frisch pointed out, Gregg changed the landscape of our region and helped put Sacramento “on the map” worldwide.

Listening this week to Gregg was interesting but also a bit disheartening.  Gregg recalled how he and others built old “Arco I” and now ancient “Arco II” out of their pocket with no help from the city.  After they sold to Jim Thomas, the latter was forced to beg for a loan from the city to keep the Kings afloat in Sac while calling for a plan to get a new arena. Then the Maloofs bought the controlling interest in the franchise while calling even louder for a new arena.  He blamed the likely loss of the Kings almost entirely on the City of Sacramento and its “do nothing politics” with “zero vision.”  He lamented how it appears many on the council could “care less about pro sports in this cow town.”

He also pointed out how fractured the political system is with a city of less than half a million calling (or not calling) the shots - yet the metro area spans over 2 million with little or no regional cooperation. He firmly believes that without an immediate broad regional approach to raising private capital to fund a new arena, the team will surely move on and Sacramento will once again sink into relative obscurity in the valley fog.  Will the final buzzer sound this spring be the end of the trail for our local team?  Let’s hope not.  We thank Gregg for sharing his insights with us and join him in his vision of a more unified, cooperative region.