datxdiva

This looks like an action hero logo not a basketball team logo

Have you ever been to OKC? Its not rural.

I wonder what the new name will be. SEATTLE (AP)—Clay Bennett finally found a dollar amount that would sever his contentious relationship with the city of Seattle—$75 million. As a result, the SuperSonics are headed to Oklahoma City with Bennett leading the way, leaving behind the team name, colors and 41 years of history. Oklahoma City will have an NBA franchise for the 2008-09 season after a settlement announced Wednesday between the team and the city of Seattle, ending the clashing bond with the city that culminated in a six-day federal trial over terms of the team’s KeyArena lease. The judge was scheduled to rule Wednesday afternoon. “We made it,” Bennett said after stepping to an Oklahoma City podium featuring the NBA logo and the letters OKC. “The NBA will be in Oklahoma City next season.” The settlement calls for Bennett and his Professional Basketball Club LLC to pay as much as $75 million to the city in exchange for the immediate termination of the lease. The team’s name and colors will be staying in Seattle. Bennett said the move would start Thursday and the first focus would be on the SuperSonics’ players “In a perfect world I would have liked to see Clay Bennett leave, without the team at all,” said Steven Pyeatt, the co-founder of Save Our Sonics. It’s a victory for Bennett, who purchased the Sonics in 2006 from Starbucks Corp. chairman Howard Schultz for $350 million, and will take the franchise to his hometown. Bennett faced harsh criticism in Seattle for his efforts in trying to build a new arena as a replacement for KeyArena, and the presumption he wanted to move the franchise all along. “It was a tough experience for all of us that were involved in it. There was just so much that happened on both sides, so much misinterpreted, miscommunicated and misunderstood that it was difficult,” Bennett said. Bennett announced that the settlement calls for a payment of $45 million immediately, and would include another $30 million paid to Seattle in 2013 if the state Legislature in Washington authorizes at least $75 million in public funding to renovate KeyArena by the end of 2009 and Seattle doesn’t obtain an NBA franchise of its own within the next five years. The settlement could become a victory for Seattle as well. In a statement, NBA commissioner David Stern reversed his previous stance and said that a renovated KeyArena could be a suitable venue for an NBA franchise in Seattle. But the time is short. “We understand that city, county, and state officials are currently discussing a plan to substantially rebuild KeyArena for the sum of $300 million,” Stern said in a statement. “If this funding were authorized, we believe KeyArena could properly be renovated into a facility that meets NBA standards relating to revenue generation, fan amenities, team facilities, and the like.” However, Stern added, “given the lead times associated with any franchise acquisition or relocation and with a construction project as complex as a KeyArena renovation, authorization of the public funding needs to occur by the end of 2009 in order for there to be any chance for the NBA to return to Seattle within the next five years.” Bennett said he and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels signed a binding agreement Wednesday, which would be formalized later, that keeps the SuperSonics’ name, logo and colors available if Seattle gets a replacement franchise. Bennett said his franchise would create duplicate championship banners and trophies, leaving one set in Seattle and using the second set for undetermined purposes in Oklahoma City. “We have 30 million reasons why we have support for a future NBA team,” Seattle city attorney Tom Carr said. In April, the NBA Board of Governors approved Bennett’s application to move the team to Oklahoma City, pending the outcome of the trial between the team and the city. The settlement came six days after the trial concluded. “A really exciting day. We had been gearing up for the 2010 season, and to find out the team’s coming two years early is a bonus,” Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett said. The settlement doesn’t cover a pending lawsuit filed by Schultz, who is seeking to regain control of the team. Schultz claims that Bennett didn’t follow through on an agreement to negotiate in good faith for a new arena in Seattle for one full year before seeking relocation options. “We believe it’s baseless, has no merit. We will fight it vigorously,” Bennett said of that lawsuit. Schultz’s attorney, Richard Yarmuth said his client’s lawsuit will move forward. As part of the settlement, if the PBC is prevented from playing in Oklahoma City during the next two seasons because of Schultz’s lawsuit, the city will be required to repay Bennett’s group $22.5 million for each season. If the team is required to play in KeyArena for those two seasons, Bennett’s group is released from the additional $30 million it would owe the city. “We’re not a party to this settlement and in fact we chose not to participate in it,” Yarmuth said. The trial between the team and city was centered on the lease agreement that called for the Sonics to play at KeyArena through the 2009-10 season. Sonics lead attorney Brad Keller contended that Bennett should simply be able to write a check to satisfy the final two years of the lease. Keller argued that the “specific performance” clause the city rested its case on should not apply in a garden-variety dispute between tenant and landlord. Bennett and his ownership group previously offered to pay the city $26.5 million in February to buy out the final two years of the lease. They were rebuffed. Nickels noted that Wednesday’s settlement would cover lost rent, tax revenue and pay off the remaining debt on KeyArena. “I believed all along enforcing our lease would allow us time to come to a better arrangement,” Nickels said. “We now have that deal.” AP Sports Writer Jeff Latzke in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.

BATON ROUGE — The tables are dressed in crisp, white linen. Many of the signature dishes that made Galatoire's restaurant an institution on New Orleans' Bourbon Street — the Oysters Rockefeller, the Salad Maison, the Trout Amandine — are on the menu. But outside this Galatoire's, there's no bawdy street scene. Instead, Galatoire's Bistro — opened hastily in late 2005 after the flooding from Hurricane Katrina forced the Bourbon Street location to close for several months — is the unlikely anchor of a shopping center in suburban Baton Rouge. It's a taste of New Orleans wrapped in suburban sprawl, a symbol of the post-Katrina migration that continues to redefine daily life in this city 80 miles northwest of New Orleans. Perhaps no other city was affected more by the hundreds of thousands of people who fled New Orleans after Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005. Within days, Baton Rouge, a city of 225,000, was an overwhelmed mass of about 500,000. Many evacuees were just passing through, but city officials say that today, Baton Rouge's population remains 275,000-325,000. From the Los Angeles-style gridlock on Interstate 10 to the overcrowded schools and the escalating real estate prices that have fueled a housing crunch, Baton Rouge has the look and feel of a place grappling for control of its direction. And although the influx of new residents hasn't dramatically increased crime rates, many residents sense that Baton Rouge has lost some of the small-city civility it enjoyed during what they call "Pre-K" — before Katrina. Last spring, a Louisiana State University survey examining Katrina's impact found that 30% of Baton Rouge residents believed that "rude and unfriendly" people were a serious problem in the city. Residents' most common complaint? The traffic, by far. More than two-thirds of those surveyed by LSU said it was a serious problem. Baton Rouge's population has reached the mark that pre-Katrina projections estimated for the year 2030. Government officials say their planning for a range of projects has had to be accelerated by up to a quarter-century. Since Katrina, voters have approved a $500 million road-building plan that is being funded by sales tax receipts. Meanwhile, the police department is scrambling to add 100 officers to its 600-member force at a time when police and fire units are being stretched by emergency calls. The expansion of public safety units is being funded by a benefit of Baton Rouge's growth: a $25 million surplus from sales tax revenue from 2005 and 2006. The financial picture isn't as clear in the Ascension Parish and East Baton Rouge Parish school systems, which need dozens of buildings to handle the addition of more than 4,000 students since Katrina. It's unclear when the schools could be built or how they'd be funded. "We'll never be the Baton Rouge we were prior to Katrina," Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden says. Evacuees "changed the landscape of this region forever," Baton Rouge police Sgt. Don Kelly says. "None of us really knows what the long-term impact will be." Heavy traffic becomes the norm The message on the electronic billboard on westbound I-10 on a recent afternoon warned drivers that a 3-mile stretch toward downtown would take nearly 20 minutes to travel. On Baton Rouge-area highways and roads where congestion was rare less than two years ago, lengthy, grind-it-out trips often are the norm — regardless of the time of day. To make sure she arrives at her Postal Service job in New Orleans for the start of her 11 p.m. shift, hurricane transplant Kathleen Lucien sometimes leaves her home in Baton Rouge at 8 p.m. Unlike many other urban areas, Baton Rouge does not have a highway loop around it to help ease congestion on local streets. Holden credits his election in November 2004 to a campaign that emphasized transportation improvements. However, it wasn't until after Katrina that voters approved the $500 million plan to improve roads. Three dozen congestion spots are targeted for improvements; about 80% of the work will be done in the next decade. Holden says the city needs at least another $1 billion to rebuild 50 miles of the sewer system, build and fix sidewalks and expand I-10. "The city has changed," Holden says, adding that state and federal assistance will be needed. A change to 'booming suburbia' Ascension Parish schools Superintendent Donald Songy says he'll never forget the scene at Dutchtown Middle School when students returned to the suburban Baton Rouge campus after the summer break last September. The first day of school always involves some chaos, Songy says, but this was ridiculous. Nearly 2,000 children converged on a campus that normally had about 1,100. A gym was converted into three sixth-grade classrooms. "We got hit with 10 years of growth overnight," Songy says. Before Katrina, school officials in Ascension Parish had estimated the area's deliberate growth would put their system's enrollment at about 16,000 students from 2010 to 2015. In the fall of 2006, a year after Katrina, 18,000 students were registered in Ascension Parish schools. Songy says the growth occurred so quickly that the "personality of the district" changed instantly, from rural to "booming suburbia." Next year, the first of five new schools is scheduled to open. Songy says that even if it could open now, it would be overcrowded. A similar surge in enrollment occurred in the urban East Baton Rouge Parish school system, on a much larger scale. After Katrina, enrollment jumped from 46,212 to 52,923. It has declined since then, as some families who fled New Orleans for Baton Rouge have moved on. Enrollment in East Baton Rouge Parish now is about 48,465, Superintendent Charlotte Placide says. To help the school system handle the growth, Placide says, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) built 78 temporary classrooms on 39 campuses. Placide reopened two schools that had been closed. She says that when the schools opened less than a month after Katrina, every student and teacher in them was an evacuee. The FEMA classrooms helped, but Placide says the district needs more permanent buildings. She says that even if more classroom space can be arranged, she worries about the system's ability to help students scarred by the trauma surrounding the flooding and evacuation of New Orleans. "Many of these children had difficult experiences in that hurricane," she says. "How that will play out as they get older, I don't know. I'm concerned about the unknown." Many feared a crime wave When the first wave of evacuees washed into Baton Rouge, fear spread across the city, Kelly says. There were reports — nearly all false — of looting, rioting and armed gang members running wild, he says. "There was a genuine fear that the city would be overrun," Mayor Holden says. To Holden's relief, fears that Katrina evacuees would spark a sustained crime wave in Baton Rouge have not been realized. The month after the storm, robberies and car thefts did rise by nearly 50%, according to Baton Rouge police records. Homicides increased from 47 in 2004 to 56 last year, but given the rise in Baton Rouge's population, the total from 2006 actually represented a lower homicide rate per capita than the city had the year before Katrina. The experience has been different in other cities with significant numbers of hurricane evacuees —notably Houston, where an estimated 150,000 evacuees fled. Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt says his department linked evacuees to 24% of the slayings there during the first five months of 2006. In Baton Rouge, Kelly says, perhaps a few of the 56 slayings last year involved evacuees. "There is a perception to this day that evacuees are driving (an) increase in crime," he says. "That is not necessarily so." Kelly says there is anecdotal evidence that evacuees who settled in Baton Rouge were likely to have family or friends here, perhaps making the evacuees less likely to resort to crime than those who went elsewhere. Even so, the police department is rushing to boost personnel to keep up with the demands of the population increase. The 100 new cops planned for the department will be hired over the next four years. The hiring is "related to the population increase," Kelly says. "We're still seeing growth." A crisis in affordable housing In Springbrook, a new subdivision of homes southeast of Baton Rouge, move-in days have a non-traditional look. Many buyers show up to take possession of their new homes without any moving vans or trucks loaded with furniture. Eric Dudley, a salesman for KB Homes, says that generally, a car pulls up with all of a family's possessions packed in a few suitcases or plastic bags. "A lot of the people we see are people who have lost everything," Dudley says. "They are just trying to get their lives back together." At least 40% of the people moving into the 55-acre development were displaced by the storm, says Clint Szubinski, KB's Gulf Coast region president. Those who settle there are fortunate: Because of the rising demand for homes here, prices are escalating beyond the reach of many potential buyers, creating what real estate analysts say is a crisis in affordable housing. The average home price in East Baton Rouge Parish in 2006 was $15,000 more than in 2005. In Ascension Parish, the average home price was $201,846 last year, up from $161,673 in 2005. Rents increased after the storm by about 12%, according to D. Wesley Moore, an adjunct professor at LSU's Real Estate Research Institute. Before the storm, a typical two-bedroom apartment rented for $627 per month. Afterward, the average was $703. David McKey, incoming president of the Baton Rouge Board of Realtors, says the most urgent need is for affordable homes costing $100,000-$150,000. The city's goal is to boost the supply of such housing by 5,000 units within five years. In Springbrook, where homes sell for $160,000-$180,000, the price was right for Kathleen Lucien, her daughter, Nina, and Lucien's 6-year-old grandson, Jadon, all formerly of New Orleans' heavily damaged 9th Ward. Lucien says she bought in Baton Rouge so "we'll never have to run from a hurricane again." She still thinks of rebuilding her home in New Orleans, if she can reach a settlement with her insurance company. On her daily commute to and from New Orleans, she often drives by her old place. "A lot of people I know are staying here," Lucien says. "The people of Baton Rouge greeted us with open arms, mostly. I like it in Baton Rouge. But I still love New Orleans." Posted 2/21/2007 11:20 PM ET

Parcells has yet to call T.O by name. He says him, the player, that guy etc.

I think a lot of hotels are pulling out of the program . I know one chain said they had too much microwaves stolen to continue

on the news they say trucks should be in tomorrow with more supplies. folks bought up everything this morniing. gas is low in some areas too.

So is everyone accounted for??

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