Contracts, staff, operator, money, governance. How the Arch becomes a public commons without touching the convention center's bonds.
Four exclusive national contractors control the Arch's revenue model and make the building unaffordable for anyone who isn't running a multi-day convention: Aramark for food, Encore for AV, Smart City for WiFi, Edlen for power. They're why a hundred-person half-day conference costs $100 a head before anyone touches the slides. Room rental, catering minimums, mandatory AV, $95-per-device WiFi — the local nonprofit that could afford the room can't afford the room plus the contracts. So they don't book. The building stays empty.
Aramark alone is $38 million a year in food service revenue — the SCC's single largest line item, bigger than building rent, bigger than parking. Their contract expires January 2, 2027.
The other exclusive contracts — Encore, Smart City, Edlen — have their own timelines. They unwind as terms expire or are renegotiated. But Aramark is the opening. Once the food monopoly breaks, the building becomes a different kind of space.
The Arch has union staff — security, maintenance, operations, the people who keep the building running. A Commons needs every one of them. It needs them full-time.
Right now, the Arch's workers are on event-day scheduling — shifts tied to convention calendars, underemployed in the gaps between bookings. Year-round programming means year-round shifts. That's more union hours, not fewer.
What goes away, over time, is the contractor layer. What replaces it is a food hall with independent operators, built-in AV, and open WiFi. The union jobs stay and get better. The contractor monopolies end.
Seattle Center runs the Armory food hall, McCaw Hall, KEXP, MoPOP, and the Space Needle campus. They program events, manage vendors, handle crowds, maintain public buildings 365 days a year. That's the job.
The Arch is a better building for it than anything Seattle Center currently operates — horizontal, transit-connected, adjacent to Freeway Park, with commercial kitchens, loading docks, and 68 meeting rooms already built. Seattle Center doesn't need to build anything. It needs to open what's there.
Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market proves the model inside a convention center: a public market that serves convention attendees and locals from the same building. The convention gets the foot traffic. The market gets the customers. Nobody had to choose.
The convention center's $1.9 billion in bonds are secured by lodging tax revenue — 7% on hotel rooms in Seattle, 2.8% in King County. The bondholders' claim is on the tax stream, not on the Arch. Separating the Arch from the PFD's operations doesn't impair their collateral. The tax is collected on hotel rooms whether the Arch hosts conventions or a food hall.
What the bondholders get is safer paper. A convention center burning $38 million a year in net position, with reserves dropping from $200 million to $25 million, is a deteriorating credit. A restructured operation — Summit handling conventions, the Arch's operating costs off the PFD's books — stabilizes the balance sheet. That's better for the bonds.
It's also better for the city. Right now, if the SCC can't service its debt, the public is on the hook through the lodging tax backstop. Fewer buildings on the PFD's books, less exposure. Yes, the city takes on operating costs for the Arch — but Seattle is already paying for a dark building through lost tax revenue and a dead neighborhood. The question is whether you'd rather pay for an empty one or an active one.
And the hotels paying 7% on every room night get a return on their money. A Commons that puts daily foot traffic on the Pike Street corridor gives them something the convention model never has: a neighborhood worth visiting on the days between conventions.
The PFD is an independent governmental entity governed by a nine-member board. The same political actors who would need to approve the Commons are the ones who appoint the board.
| Appointing authority | Seats | Incentive |
|---|---|---|
| King County Executive | 3 | Rationalize two publicly funded facilities competing for the same market |
| Governor | 3 | Restructure before the state backstop expires in 2029 |
| Seattle Mayor | 3 | A 435,000 sq ft civic space on Pike Street, no new bond required |
There's precedent in Washington State: in Tacoma, a PFD created a convention center and then delegated operational authority to the City of Tacoma through an interlocal agreement. The PFD retained ownership. The city operated the building. The same structure works here — PFD retains ownership of the Arch, satisfying bond covenants, while the city operates it through Seattle Center. No asset transfer. No bondholder trigger.
Seattle can't do this alone. The mayor appoints three of nine PFD board members. That's not a majority.
The only authority that sits above both Seattle and Bellevue is the King County Executive. King County created the PFD by ordinance in 2010. The county's hotels — Seattle and Eastside — pay the lodging tax that backs the bonds. The KC executive appoints three of nine board members and has a relationship with Bellevue's leadership that neither the governor nor the mayor can replicate.
What the KC executive sees: two publicly funded convention centers in the same county, taxing the same hotel base, connected by a 25-minute train ride, competing with each other for the same mid-size bookings. One runs 300 events a year and stays solvent. The other is burning through reserves at $35–38 million a year. The county is funding both sides of a competition neither side can win cleanly.
The answer is to stop competing. King County Conventions: one regional entity, one sales team. The Summit handles national-scale conventions that need 400,000 square feet — events Bellevue physically can't host. Meydenbauer handles the mid-size market where Bellevue's hotels, tax advantage, and Crosslake access make it the stronger pitch. A planner calls one number and gets directed to the right venue.
The Commons is what makes that regional pitch work. A living Pike Street corridor — daily foot traffic at Westlake, daily visitors to Pike Place, daily customers for every hotel on this walk — is an amenity that enhances Bellevue's convention business. The train connects them. The Commons gives the connection a reason.
Count the votes: KC executive's three appointments plus the governor's three is a majority. The governor's incentive is straightforward — restructure before the state backstop expires in 2029, or face a legislative fight over a facility the market is abandoning. The KC executive brokers the deal not as a favor to Seattle but because the county created this structure, is paying for both sides of its dysfunction, and is the only level of government with the authority and the incentive to fix it.
Summit stays a convention center. The Arch becomes a commons. Seattle Center operates it. The bonds get paid. The corridor comes alive.
The PFD was created in 2010 for a world where Seattle was the center and Bellevue was the periphery. The region spent $3.6 billion building a train that connects them as equals. The governance has to catch up.