Stockton Arena to get scoreboard, video, audio tech updates

The Stockton Heat may be on their way out of town, but that hasn’t stopped the city from making investments in the downtown arena.

At the May 24 Stockton City Council meeting, the council unanimously approved $1.5 million from the city’s $78 million American Rescue Plan Act pot to update the Stockton Arena’s 17-year-old scoreboard, video and audio technology.

“The current technology in the arena is well beyond its useful life and very near critical failure,” City Manager Harry Black said at the May 24 council meeting. “This would remedy a lot of that.”

Technology updates would include updating the scoreboard and installing ribbon banners for electronic advertising and upgrading back-end sound and video equipment. The total cost is estimated at $2.5 million. Black said the city will come back later with plans to produce the rest of the money. Updates to the arena are expected to take at least a year.

Aaron Morales, vice president of operations for the Stockton Kings, recalled an incident where a Stockton Kings game had to be delayed because the scoreboard got stuck halfway retracted from the ceiling.

“From an NBA and G-League standpoint, that’s unacceptable,” Morales said. “People are walking away with that type of experience of that’s what’s expected of Stockton — that’s not the vision we want. That's not the representation that we want.”

Stockton’s 12,000-seat waterfront arena opened in 2005, and technology inside is still mostly original, older than the first iPhone. About 30 minutes up the road sits Golden 1 Center, home of the Sacramento Kings, which opened in 2016 with state-of-the-art technology.

With the Heat leaving, the city can look to attract more events to the arena. Jason Perry, General Manager at ASM Global, the company that manages the city’s public venues, said having a high definition scoreboard is a requirement to solicit NCAA events.

It's official: Stockton Heat is relocating to Calgary next season

“(For NCAA events) they’re here for a week. You're talking about 1,600 hotel room nights,” Perry said. “The tax revenue base that comes with a certain event will exceed what we actually need to fund this when you look at the economic impact.”

As Mayor Kevin Lincoln highlighted in his State of the City address last week, the city is adding three hotels to the city’s inventory for the first time in 15 years: 102-room Studio 6 at 33 N. Center St. opened March 2022, the 114 room Hampton in at 3651 Arch Road will open in fall 2022 and the dual branded 141 hotel suite Fairfield Inn and Suites and TownePlace Suites is expected to break ground in the coming months.

Professional Bull Riding events are popular at Golden 1 Center, and Perry said about 30% of the attendees in Sacramento’s 17,600-seat arena are from San Joaquin County.

“We know it's going to be a slam dunk here,” Perry said. “This is part of the technology that’s needed for us to be able to actively as a company, recruit these events to the city of Stockton to fill out restaurants, fill parking structures and really bring Stockton to life in the downtown area.”

The city expects the Heat’s departure from Stockton to be budget neutral. The city’s projected operating cost for the arena in the 2021-22 fiscal year is $4.5 million, more than triple the cost of any other public venue in the city. Stockton will no longer have to pay the utility costs of producing and holding ice for 8 months of the year, which include maintaining appropriate temperatures in the arena.

Black said the Heat were aware that the city intended to make upgrades to the arena and he believes the decision for the team to move to Calgary was not about Stockton, but about a trend in professional hockey.

“I think professional hockey is sort of falling behind, like what major league baseball did back in the mid-2000s, they consolidated, they pulled their teams closer to home,” Black said. “Two and a half years of not being able to operate the way an enterprise like that needs to operate generates problems. Canada was very strict with respect to the border as it related to the pandemic … great corporate partner, they did a lot of good and we wish them the best.”

Record reporter Ben Irwin covers Stockton and San Joaquin County government. He can be reached at birwin@recordnet.com or on Twitter @B1rwin. Support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at recordnet.com/subscribenow. 

This article originally appeared on The Record: Stockton City Council passes $1.5 mil for Stockton Arena tech facelift