Canes owner Dundon on historic PNC Arena deal: ‘Expectation was always to end up here’

Tom Dundon flew in Tuesday afternoon on a Southwest flight from Dallas, arriving at PNC Arena long after the morning’s hubbub had subsided and the politicians and reporters and television crews were gone.

His ambition to develop the vacant land around the arena had been approved in a special meeting of the arena authority, and the Carolina Hurricanes were now fully committed to remaining in Raleigh until 2044 — and, presumably, beyond.

The Hurricanes’ owner, who purchased the team in 2018, sat down for a Q&A with News & Observer sports columnist Luke DeCock after a long meeting with Centennial Authority chairman Philip Isley. Isley was the primary catalyst behind getting all three deals — the property development, the lease extension and $300 million in renovations to the 24-year-old arena — as well as authority executive director Jeff Merritt and CAA ICON consultant Dan Barrett, who was the authority’s primary negotiator with Dundon.

Dundon could have invested in any development, anywhere, and if he didn’t own the Hurricanes, it probably wouldn’t have been this previously neglected land in west Raleigh. But the longer he owned the team, the more he thought transforming these 80 acres of parking lots and scrub forest into something memorable and transformative would be, in his words, “fun.”

N&O: When did you start to look at developing around the arena as something you wanted to do? Before you bought the team? Or later? At what point did you say, “I want to do this.”

Dundon: When I was buying the team, it wasn’t part of it. Once we got here and you start to understand the market and the location, then you realize that it was a single-use facility, right? You have to want to come here. A lot of a lot of the other cities have an arena or stadium area where there’s other things to do. Then you find out that that’s what they had planned all along. But I wasn’t buying it because of the real-estate play.

N&O: So there was sort of a moment of awakening.

Dundon: There’s lots of places we can develop real estate. The reason this is interesting is because we have the team and it sort of enhances the whole experience.

N&O: So what’s your overall vision for what you want this to look like, outside the building? Obviously, inside the building’s kind of a different story.

Dundon: What you hope is that we can build, that the way we build it, it’s a place where people want to be every day, right? Whether it’s because of the shops, the restaurants, the green space. It’s just a place where you want to live, you want to work, you want to come shop. The same thing everybody does with a mixed-use development. If you’re coming here today — a lot of people come and they like to tailgate and go to the game, but there’s nothing else. We’d like to add that other piece.

N&O: Isley and Barrett have talked about all the stakeholders they’ve had to talk to in order for this to go through. You were willing to put in the affordable-housing provision and the tailgating stuff with N.C. State right off the top. Was this a difficult negotiation for you to navigate? How was the process for you, to get to this point?

Dundon: Once Phillip and Dan and everybody got involved, and there’s progress, it’s easier to sort of say, “What can we do?” You see people are trying hard and everybody was trying. So a lot of what we ended up agreeing to, I’m not sure I would have expected us to agree to, but I think people were working so hard and making progress and there was a finish line to get it done. They did a really good job putting it in a position where we can all say yes together.

N&O: I’ve written about the idea of a live music venue on the site, but for a lot of people this is the first they’re hearing of it. You had at one point a vision for sort-of indoor-outdoor hybrid venue with big acts. Is that still what’s in your mind?

Dundon: It’s going to be a 4,000-seat music venue. We’ve got a major partner. We’re working hard on that as we speak. That’ll be one of the first things we announce. I like the indoor-outdoor idea. I’m not the expert on building music venues, so we’ll have to decide.

N&O: That’s something you’d like to do if you can? Just because it’s cool?

Dundon: I think so. The thing that you can do, also, that I’m working on, potentially, is a festival here, using the parking lots and everything. The outdoor part of it, it might be more – because we’re going to have some green space and plazas, it might be that you rig it that way, but it might not be every day.

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N&O: This is obviously, in a lot of ways, a huge commitment to Raleigh and the arena through 2044, through 2096. Initially, when you got here, you had some legitimate skepticism about the market and whether it could support an NHL team. Is it crazy to you to think how much that’s changed, to the point where you’re willing to dive in like this?

Dundon: I never did it thinking – I didn’t buy the team expecting to move it, although that might have been written. It never came from me. We thought we’d win. But I couldn’t know what would happen if we started winning until we did.

And so I don’t know if it was skepticism as much as just, you just got to know, right? You just got to know. I don’t think it’s unique to Raleigh. If you see something that’s not working, you want to see it work. But yeah, I would say that the expectation would have always been — because in most cases if you win, people care — the expectation was always to end up here. But it took a long time. And so, you always have some doubt, but I would have been surprised if this didn’t work out, I will say that.

N&O: I remember telling you when you bought the team that this market was dormant, not dead. It just needed a jolt of energy.

Dundon: Everybody said it. And it’s not that I didn’t believe it. It was just like, once you start building buildings and investing all this capital, you’ve got to know. The lease was always easy. Because if we were going to do this whole project, part of it was the team and everything together.

So I would have been surprised if we didn’t end up here and I would have thought we’d end up here a little sooner. And that’s where Philip gets a lot of credit. Since he got here (Isley was elected chairman of the authority in December 2021), everything started unclogging.

N&O: Gary Bettman helped with that too, when he gave that come-to-Jesus talk to the Centennial Authority (in May 2022). He’s also committed now to an All-Star Game and another outdoor game here, even more outdoor games potentially, “in a timely manner,” to use his words. What does that mean to you? The outdoor game was such a huge success, and now you’ve got the league behind you on this other stuff.

Dundon: I’m a big believer you get what you deserve, or you learn, right? So it’s good that if we as a team, as an organization, have success, that we get to do some of the things that are life experiences and interesting.

That’s the reason I do it, because I want to enjoy it, and I thought that was fun. And so yeah, of course getting to do it again is pretty exciting. I don’t know if we can do another one like that, though. For everything to work that way? It couldn’t have gone better. Other than the traffic. We’ll do a lot better next time.

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