which is what i want to know why did this come up way way sooner.
It honestly seems like they changed the rules on him just before the auction came up. Maybe because no one likes him or trusts him or wants anything to do with him, or maybe because the proposed land use is so high profile compared to most land auctions in the state, and the govt agencies just realized this would be one way to potentially avoid future headaches in terms of continued press etc.
All that said, I got smarter about this the past few days -- like you said before, getting these permits is a PROCESS. The way to think about is you're trying to build this really big expensive thing that will have tens of thousands of people in it 40+ times a year, so all of the water/sewer, traffic etc has to be approved by the various government agencies before you can build the thing you want to build. And because this land literally is on the border of Scottsdale, you likely have 2 sets of parallel competing govt bureaucratic nonsense to deal with for most of this stuff. As far as I understand this (and to be clear, I'm no expert on how zoning actually works in practice), it seems as though this sort of process would take multiple months just based on the number of people involved and the relative slow pace of governments involved.
It doesn't seem reasonable to request all of those permits get done before you even own the land. I think in most cases you'd have the auction first, then if the owner of the land can get his zoning great, and if the zoning can't come through no one would really be invested other than a few rich people. Here, it's a polarizing sports team so a lot more eyeballs on the process. And also Alex Meruelo.
Meruelo said in his statement something like "hockey is done in AZ because of this," that's a bit extreme, if he wants to play ball he could (and probably should) spend the next few months getting the permits etc, he would've had to do that anyway so it's essentially the same thing. I doubt he does this though, how long would it take / could he even get it done and even if he does, there's no guarantee he'd win the land anyway. But, for a guy so supremely confident ie repeatedly saying "we will bid on this land and win the auction," well if he was honest then, nothing's changed just the order of things.
We'll see if this ends up being significant. Personally I don't see how anyone would take AM at his word at this point, but if he honestly wants to / is competent enough to keep owning a big 4 North American Sports team, imo he should be able to overcome this
