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Raleigh Lands the MEAC Conference.......

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#1 ·
Raleigh has landed a three-year deal to host the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Basketball Tournament beginning in March 2006 at the RBC Center

The local bid includes contributions of up to $200,000 a year from both Raleigh and Wake County. The Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau is contributing $100,000 a year and the Centennial Authority, which oversees the RBC Center, is guaranteeing a $50,000 annual contribution.

Gale Force Holdings, which operates the RBC Center, is providing the arena for the MEAC Tournament.

Local officials began studying the MEAC tournament business late last year shortly after the Triangle lost its host city hold on the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament to a bid from Charlotte.

While a Division I conference, Greensboro-based MEAC's basketball tournament is smaller than the Division II CIAA event.

Hosting the event delivered a $3.2 million bounce for Richmond businesses in 2004. MEAC reported attendance of 41,000 that year.

Projections hint that the 2006 MEAC tournament will attract 55,000 fans, with a projected economic impact on the area of $4.4 million, including bookings for 5,500 hotel room nights.

Attendance for the 2007 Tournament is expected to reach 72,000, with 8,000 hotel room nights booked and an economic impact of $6.5 million. For 2008, the attendance should rise to 90,000, projections show, with approximately 10,000 hotel room nights booked and an economic impact of $7.8 million.

"Raleigh is one of the most progressive cities in the country and they have demonstrated that they know how to market and build a successful tournament," MEAC Commissioner Dennis E. Thomas said when the news was announced on Thursday. "The MEAC is on the verge of phenomenal growth and I think that the City of Raleigh and Wake County can surely help us achieve our goals."

MEAC received bids from Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Baltimore and Richmond, Va., which hosted the basketball tournament the last seven years. After visiting most of the cities, a committee submitted its recommendation to the MEAC Council of CEOs, who made the final decision in late May.

The MEAC Tournament is held during the first week of March and includes all 11 members in both men and women's basketball.


For the sake of this being a skyscraper thread site, I am surprised. Raleigh was up against some competition as far as skylines go.
 
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#2 ·
This is good news for African-American professionals in the Triangle because this event will have a lot of parties and help supplant what is being lost from the CIAA. However, as long as this tournament continues to follow the CIAA, they’ll never get more people in the seats. Personally, I’m “CIAA for Life”. After dropping major money the week of the CIAA, there’s no way I’m going to Raleigh the following week for another tournament. Historically, that's certainly been the setiment of most African-Amiercans in the Mid-Atlantic region when it comes to these two tournaments.
 
#3 ·
MEAC Conference is, by no means, comparable to CIAA, and even if numbers increase dramatically the former will always remain bigger. We had some discussion about the loss of CIAA tTournament, some time ago, and we pretty much expressed how unhappy we were about it. On the other hand, there is hope for some interest in the RBC Center area, as seen in this article:

Sites at RBC Center poised for takeoff
Amanda Jones

RALEIGH - Long-anticipated development around the RBC Center may finally be taking off, with veteran office builder Harold Lichtin staking claim to an elevated site at the heavily traveled intersection of Wade Avenue and Edwards Mill Road.

Lichtin plans to build about 250,000 square feet of office space on the site, which is part of a 168-acre tract owned by Forty Wade Investors Inc., a group led by Cary investors Tim Smith and Bubba Rawl.

"The office portion has the greatest visibility on Wade Avenue," says Karen Lichtin, director of leasing for Lichtin Corp. of Raleigh. "You can't ask for a better location to put a name on a building."

She says a contract to purchase the office site is close to being signed.

Smith is putting the finishing touches on a master plan for the entire 168 acres, which were acquired from the state in August 2004 for $14.5 million, or about $91,200 an acre.

Forty Wade Investors is not alone in seeing opportunity near the RBC Center:

* A group of private investors has started building the 59,000-square-foot Arena Centre office building on Sunday Drive near Trinity Road. It will open in February 2006.
* Medical Mutual Insurance Co. of North Carolina is building the Arena Place office condominiums on Sunday Drive. That project will include four buildings, two of which are under construction and presold.
* Starmount Co. has a building permit for a 72,000-square-foot office building on Sunday Drive, but the development group is waiting for a prelease tenant before starting construction, says Brad Rice of Starmount's Raleigh office.

Grubb & Ellis/Thomas Linderman Graham in Raleigh is marketing both Arena Place and Arena Centre. "There's enough market out there to accommodate both of those," says company President Rex Thomas.

Thomas also is bullish about prospects at Forty Wade Investors' property. "Demand for residential is already there. Demand is there for retail," Thomas says. "That area's beginning to take off."

The 168-acre site near the RBC Center was rezoned for mixed use in 2003 when Birmingham, Ala.-based Colonial Properties Trust had the land under contract. Colonial planned to build up to 1.2 million square feet of office, 225,000 square feet of retail and more than 700 single-family and multifamily residences.

The Alabama company abandoned the project, putting the land back on the market.

Smith's plan probably will include more residential development and fewer commercial properties. He is expected to file a new master plan with the city by the fall.

Another nearby site also is being gobbled up by Smith and his group. Forty Wade Investors has a contract to buy a 9-acre hotel site owned by the Charles Winston family adjacent to the Cardinal Gibbons High School campus, according to Wake County records.

Winston Hotels of Raleigh planned to build an upscale hotel at the site to accommodate visitors to the RBC Center. Bob Winston, chief executive of Winston Hotels, did not return calls for comment.

Smith was out of town and unavailable for comment, but he has said in the past that it was his intention to sell off the property in pieces to other developers.

Smith and Rawl followed a similar scenario in the 1990s when the duo purchased much of the property that is now the upscale Weston and Preston mixed-use developments in Cary with financing help from SAS founder Jim Goodnight. Smith and Rawl also were partners in purchasing the land for Wakefield Plantation, which they quickly sold to other developers for a profit.

As for the property near the RBC Center, it is in proximity to Lichtin Corp.'s Palisades office park on Trinity Road, which includes two Class A office buildings. The second Palisades building is under construction and is 50 percent leased, Karen Lichtin says. "I don't feel it will compete with this new project," she says.

Reporter e-mail: aljones@bizjournals.com.

© 2005 American City Business Journals Inc.


Many times we talked about how wrong the placement of RBC Center was; away from DT Raleigh. This will not be fixed today, tomorrow, or the day after. The ONLY thing we can do to make this center attractive to tournaments is by offering amenities for all budgets and tastes. The amount of land available is not endless, so anything built around RBC Center must be denser than the usual and truly mixed-use. The Western side of the county is about to go through another major construction boom, therefore it is of extreme importance that West Raleigh does not miss this opportunity, and get its share of nice urban developments around RBC Center.

Great opportunity for Raleigh to actually boost its image with recovering some of the losses from the CIAA's move to Charlotte. The ball is in our court and we can impress by doing the right thing. The plans for RBC Center have been solid since the first time they were put on paper. If the city leaders can't play the game by their own rules, we are in trouble.
 
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