The Junkies got both sides of the coin on the Monumental-DC deal Thursday, with the former coming from fried of the program and Monumental President of Business Operations and Chief Commercial Officer Jim Van Stone.
And like Mayor Bowser and Ted Leonsis Wednesday (and Bowser later Thursday with the Junks), Van Stone was feeling the excitement.
“A great credit to the mayor and the city council and everyone – we're a standings and memories business and at the end of the day, the city won and they stood on top of the standings, and we're excited,” JVS said. “We've got 27 years of great history here at Capital One Arena and we're gonna have many, many more. At the investment levels of what we're talking about, we’re basically gonna have a brand new building within these four walls, and the opportunity to expand with 200,000 square feet at Gallery Place, and that's the equivalent of five acres, so we're not talking about that big of a difference in terms of both projects. This deal came together the last couple days, I think it's been an epic moment for us and, and we're happy to be here in the district moving forward.”
On the memories side, JVS pointed to Cap One having the Capitals’ playoff run, an exciting ACC Tournament won by underdog NC State (who is still dancing), and a handful of other big events this month alone, and those memories will only get bigger and better once DC City Council votes on the plan next week and the $515 million starts to get disbursed over a three-year period.
“We’ve been in kind of the planning and visioning phase for really the last couple of years, both at Capital One and some of the conversations in Virginia, so we always had a huge focus on the fan experience and what we could do to better with a modernized building from that standpoint,” JVS said. “So we've been having these visioning sessions the last couple of years, working with an architectural firm and our construction partner, and we've always had thoughts of how we can transform this building, and really make it a world-class experience for us. We think it’s going to be a three-year process for us, and we're hopeful that we can start to do some demo work over the next 12 months as we’re gonna be doing our planning, and we think we're gonna be able to really transform some things.”
Like Bowser said on her side, Monumental wasn’t hurt by the backlash and what happened with Virginia, giving that side of the ledger nothing but praise.
“We know that everything is a process, and there's ebbs and flows of every negotiation you have,” JVS said. “We can't thank the governor enough, and Mayor Wilson and the Alexandria City Council were tremendous. They saw the vision of new jobs in Virginia and the opportunity of new tax dollars and they were all in. But it’s a process, and we were going at it very hard along with having the same conversations in the district, and we feel really good about what the outcome is.”
Van Stone reiterated Leonsis’ statements from Wednesday about how it was never over for DC, and went back to how memories – like the Caps’ Cup run – can be powerful things, and they can get the right blend of nostalgia and the future right where they are.
“We think we're gonna have a perfect amount of land, and we're gonna be able to do some things that we had planned on doing over there in a really robust and different way,” JVS said. “The one thing that we can’t change is the ZIP code of where this arena is gonna be – we’re a mile from the hill, a mile from the White House, three blocks from the mall. We can make this, I think, the pre-eminent building in the country, and that's gonna be our goal. We've got a lot work ahead of us from that standpoint, but I think we've got the space that we needed, and that was a big driver in terms of our decision to stay here. Things really started to shine for the district, and we're able to capitalize on some of the things that we really desired and we ended up getting the outcome that we needed.”
Take a listen to JVS’ entire segment above, where he goes into what some initial improvements might be, where Maryland played into all this, and more!