re: New LSU Arena? - EBR Metro Council Agenda

It's an interesting idea but I suspect they are just trying to establish the River Center's arena (which sucks BTW) as an alternative home while the PMAC gets renovated or maybe even expanded. I think there was a state appropriation to do that recently.

Years ago a proposal was put forward to rework the River Center. It was going to be paid for by the EBR taxpayers entirely. Kip Holden proposed it and it failed because of the costs and the city's focus on dealing with post-Katrina traffic issues at the time.

The plan was to replace both of the parking decks at the River Center with two new, larger decks with spaces for hotels to be built on top of them. Then the arena would be either replaced or significantly expanded/reworked. IIRC, the arena would have been significantly larger than what is there and would have housed concerts, basketball games, ice hockey teams, etc. The expansion would also have added a huge amount of convention space too.



Would be neat if a really cool arena was built from the ground up though. I think University of Memphis still plays in FedEx Forum right? I don't think we could swing that here without an NBA team.