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Public Peeved at Portland Pirates’ Parting

Fred Bever
/
MPBN

Businesses, officials and sports fans are struggling to make sense of news that the Portland Pirates hockey team is leaving town. And some are upset that they financed a multimillion-dollar renovation of the arena where the Pirates played for two decades, only to see them take a walk.

Daniel Steele owns the Brian Boru Irish Pub, a landmark red building a short walk from the Cross Insurance Arena where the Pirates, a minor-league hockey team affiliated with the Florida Panthers, played for more than 20 years.

For most of those years, Steele has also managed the surrounding parking lots, which fill to capacity on the 30-plus winter nights when the Pirates played home games.

“The Pirates are very important economically. But also not having them takes a huge fan base out of the area and it just affects the general mood of things,” he says. “It was always great to be able to say when tourists were coming to town — ‘Hey what’s going on at the civic center,’ ‘Oh, that’s our pro hockey team,’ ‘Oh my, you guys have a pro hockey team.’“

Not any more, apparently. The arena’s board members say they have yet to get formal notification, but many sources say the team will move to Springfield, Massachusetts.

Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno issued a statement saying a “broad-based local investor group” has signed a letter of intent to purchase the Pirates — although he added that hurdles remained.

The whole situation left Portand mayor Ethan Strimling wishing he and the city had been given a heads up, and an opportunity to try to negotiate for the team to stay put.

He notes that taxpayers in Cumberland County, which owns the arena, voted to finance a $34 million renovation just three years ago.

“When taxpayers put up this much money we we ought to at least be asked to the table to have a conversation about what’s going to happen next,” Strimling says.

And some, like Steele, are left wondering whether they were sold a bill of goods when they campaigned to help pass that renovation bond — over the objections of some county residents outside of Portland.

“My expectation was that the Pirates, once we did this deal with them, would be here to stay,” he says. “And they are not, and I feel kind of used. And I’m sure their fan base feels kind of used also.”

He’s particularly peeved that the contract negotiated with the Pirates included a seemingly minor penalty for breaking the lease — $100,000.

Board members who helped negotiate that contract did not respond to requests for comment. But board chairman Mitchell Berkowitz says the “liquidated damage” clause is standard in such contracts, and had been carried over from previous team leases.

“It never changed, to my best knowledge and what, if anything, we may do in the future remains to be seen. That’s a negotiation process,” he says.

With the contributions that professional hockey has brought to the area’s economy and culture at stake, leaders such as Chris Hall, CEO of the regional chamber of commerce, are looking ahead. He says securing another minor league hockey teams is not the only possible solution for the arena, which has been struggling to stay in the black even with the Pirates on board.

“Obviously we probably ought to put every option on the table. The community will have to come together to find a way to fill the void. Because that’s the one thing we wouldn’t want to have happen. We don’t want that to stay dark,” Hall says.

Berkowitz declined to speculate on possible next steps, pending formal confirmation that the move is, in fact, going to happen.

A Columbia University graduate, Fred began his journalism career as a print reporter in Vermont, then came to Maine Public in 2001 as its political reporter, as well as serving as a host for a variety of Maine Public Radio and Maine Public Television programs. Fred later went on to become news director for New England Public Radio in Western Massachusetts and worked as a freelancer for National Public Radio and a number of regional public radio stations, including WBUR in Boston and NHPR in New Hampshire.