ScareCrows' negotiations fail

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, May 6, 2003 by Kurt Caywood Capital-Journal

By Kurt Caywood

The Capital-Journal

Lease negotiations between the Topeka ScareCrows and the Kansas Expocentre have collapsed and, for the first time in six years, hockey likely won't be played at Landon Arena during the 2003-04 season, Expocentre general manager H.R. Cook said Monday.

Cook said he already had been in contact with parties interested in putting hockey back in the Shawnee County-owned facility in subsequent seasons. In fact, as soon as word filtered out Monday afternoon that the junior-level ScareCrows were finished in Topeka, Cook was invited to the Central Hockey League meetings scheduled for June in Phoenix.

But the current incarnation of the team, which was a success on the ice but a failure in the stands, apparently was over Monday, a day before the deadline for negotiating a new lease agreement.

"They're the ones who pulled the plug," Cook said. "We may end up looking like the bad guy here, but there's only so much you can give before you say, 'Enough.'"

Managing partner Mark Stephens said he and the eight-member St. Louis-based group that bought the ScareCrows wouldn't comment until the extension of the lease had expired after today.

"What we're going to do is give you a schedule of where the lease was prior, developments with the lease as we've gone through it up to the point where we are today," Stephens said. "We'll lay out the facts. People can decide for themselves."

The ScareCrows, originally a professional team playing in the CHL, agreed to a five-year lease that began in 1998. Wisconsin businessman Butch Johnson, who bought the team and turned it into a junior team in the United States Hockey League, renegotiated the lease last winter, reducing rent on the facility to $3,300 per game and a $2 service fee to cover parking and debt service. When Stephens and his group bought the team in January, they sought again to renegotiate.

"It was to the point where they gave us an offer on their terms, and we tweaked it a little bit and said, 'OK, we can live with this,' " Cook said. "We bumped up their rent by $100 a game, and they said no. They offered us a $1-a-ticket service fee. We asked for $1.25 ... and they backed away from that."

Negotiations, however, progressed far enough that last Thursday, when the original lease was to have expired, the deadline for an agreement was extended through today.

"The sticking point at that time was not the rent; it was the concessions and the beer sales," Cook said. "So our concessionaire and their ownership group met and came up with an agreement that both parties seemed to be agreeable to, and yet here we are today."

Cook said the Expocentre had offered the best terms it could to the team, "and then it becomes a substantial subsidy to try to keep the team in the building."

"Literally, hard costs, it costs us $5,900 to have a game with 1,500, 1,600 people in the building," he said. "If the rent structure had been the same as the past contract and we looked at our past games throughout the year, by the end of the year we would have lost $93,000."

Cook couldn't say whether hockey ever would make money in Topeka, but he said interest was strong from several parties to try again.

"It opens another opportunity for us," he said. "Enough people are interested, something is up."

Kurt Caywood can be reached at (785) 295-1288 or kurt.caywood@cjonline.com.

See CROWS, page 8A

Continued from page 1A

Crows: Concessions, beer sales sticking point

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