First I want to say thanks to our own John Wallingford for doing an excellent job of maintaining the blog the past few months. His contributions have been both informative and entertaining, and hopefully they have quenched a little of your thirst for Sonics-related stuff.

With my new duties on the Seahawks blog I’ll be checking in less frequently here, but I still will attempt to provide regular updates on what’s happening with the City of Seattle’s proposal to obtain funding for the KeyArena remodel.

As of right now, everything that I’m hearing is not good. I talked to state Rep. Ross Hunter for a story I wrote for today, and he seemed uncertain as to how the Sonics project would be received in Olympia this session – or if it would be heard at all. You can read about it here, but the quick version is the task force has not met since the Dec. 1 meeting and does not plan to meet until the Legislative session begins Jan. 12. Because of the budget shortfall of over $5 billion, state lawmakers have other things to focus on, and the KeyArena project will once again be a low priority.

Brian Robinson over at SonicsCentral provides a good rundown of the players involved and what is happening behind the scenes here.