Carolina’s NHL team is sticking arounf for a while.
As a rule, hurricanes are a hit and miss sort of thing. Generally speaking, you’re very happy if they miss you.
The NHL Carolina Hurricanes are, of course, a different story. They aren’t going anywhere for a while. On Friday, they are scheduled to sign a lease that will bind them to playing hockey at RBC Center in Raleigh for 15 more seasons.
The team signed a 10-year lease in 1999, two years after moving to Raleigh from Hartford. For the past two years, the team has been involved in contract discussions with Centennial Authority, the public agency that owns RBC.
Under its current lease, Gale Force Holdings (the Hurricanes’ parent company) pays a minimum of $2.7 million in rent a year. If it makes more than $50 million in gross revenue, it pays 6 percent of the first $5 million after the $50 million, and 3 percent of anything over $55 million.
That is expected to change a bit. Gale Force is expected to get some money to handled such problems as rising utility costs, terrorism insurance (a sad sign of the times) and other game-day expenses.
The new agreement also calls for improvements to the RBC Center’s basketball facilities and parking lot that were requested by N.C. State University, which plays basketball games at the arena. NCSU will also have more say about how the authority spends $6 million earmarked for upgrades to the arena.
