Hey guys,
Just reading how depressed everyone seems about the state of the arena made me think of what happened to us in 1999. In Houston, we were in your shoes exactly. Our owner wanted to leave if we didn't get a new arena in downtown. Our mayor wasn't a big fan and in the end the referendum to build the arena failed by around 20%. After that, negotiations between the city and the Rockets died.
In response, the owners of the main rockets fansite (www.clutchfans.net) basically started a site called www.saveourrockets.com which basically was a large petition to do exactly that (save the Rockets) A lot of fans started posting and sending out letters and we got tons of support from the community.
It got so big that local news stations were doing stories on it. The Houston Chronicle was writing about it once in a while and eventually ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated did stories on the website and later credited the website for restarting negotiations with the city and building up local support for the arena referendum. Later the next year (2000), an arena referendum came up and passed by more than 10%.
The point is, just get together and start a campaign. If your referendum fails on election day, you guys should seriously try. It really worked before and most of the time we generally percieve these types of internet grassroots efforts to be worthless but in this case we got national media attention for the efforts we put out.
Just reading how depressed everyone seems about the state of the arena made me think of what happened to us in 1999. In Houston, we were in your shoes exactly. Our owner wanted to leave if we didn't get a new arena in downtown. Our mayor wasn't a big fan and in the end the referendum to build the arena failed by around 20%. After that, negotiations between the city and the Rockets died.
In response, the owners of the main rockets fansite (www.clutchfans.net) basically started a site called www.saveourrockets.com which basically was a large petition to do exactly that (save the Rockets) A lot of fans started posting and sending out letters and we got tons of support from the community.
It got so big that local news stations were doing stories on it. The Houston Chronicle was writing about it once in a while and eventually ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated did stories on the website and later credited the website for restarting negotiations with the city and building up local support for the arena referendum. Later the next year (2000), an arena referendum came up and passed by more than 10%.
The point is, just get together and start a campaign. If your referendum fails on election day, you guys should seriously try. It really worked before and most of the time we generally percieve these types of internet grassroots efforts to be worthless but in this case we got national media attention for the efforts we put out.