Call me crazy but I still believe we will move forward with a new downtown arena.

Hope to see you on Feb. 14th at Sac City Hall and I'm still waiting to hear from everyone.

NBA and OC IDENTITY

Now I’d like to change gears and spend a few minutes talking about something that all of my buddies want to talk about these days—and that’s bringing the NBA to Anaheim.

Anaheim made headlines when the owners of the Sacramento Kings announced their desire to move their team to Anaheim. However, the NBA gave Sacramento more time to build a new arena for the Kings, but they set a March deadline. That deadline is approaching and we’ll know more in the next month or so about where the Kings future stands but, regardless, there is no doubt that Anaheim is NBA ready. I’m confident that we will get a team.

In pursuing a NBA team, we faced the argument that Los Angeles already has two teams and doesn’t need a third. This argument is wrong and, I’ve got to tell you, it really bugs me.

Why? Because we’re not LA.

Everyone in this room knows that Orange County is not Los Angeles. We have our own unique identity and population. A county of three million people can easily support an NBA franchise. By the way, three million people is more than the population of the city of Chicago.

However, unfortunately, much of the world looks at Orange County as part of Los Angeles. Being looked at as a suburb of Los Angeles not only hurts us with the NBA process, but also with federal and state government spending and business relocation.

Three million people in the County of Orange should not be suburb to anybody. One of the challenges we face, however, is that in our great county there is no place one can point to and say, "There’s the center of the county." It’s vague… LA doesn’t have that problem. When you look at Los Angeles and say, "where’s the center of Los Angeles?" you naturally point to downtown L.A.

I would argue that Anaheim is, in many people’s minds, the center of Orange County. Disneyland, the Convention Center, Angel Stadium and the Honda Center together attract more than 25 million people every year. There are few places in the world where so many people flock to such a small area. In the next couple of years, I intend to work with the Visitors and Convention Bureau, with Disney, the Angels, the Ducks and a new local NBA team to bring recognition to Orange County as its own entity—not a suburb of Los Angeles.