NEW MOGUL: Budding real estate entrepreneur Tim Remy stands in front of his Regal Plaza after the announcement that the Tulsa 66ers will move to the SpiritBank Event Center next season.
Bixby Breeze photo
The meeting held Feb. 12 at the SpiritBank Event Center in Bixby signified new beginnings. The Tulsa 66ers have signed an agreement to play future games at the center, which can hold approximately 4,500 fans for a basketball game.
Developer Tim Remy’s Regal Plaza, which will surround the Center, will offer benefits the 66ers couldn’t have gotten at the Expo Square Pavilion, where they played their first three years in the NBA’s Development League.
At the SpiritBank Event Center, patrons will be able to park the car, be surrounded by restaurants with a wide variety of eating choices and part of the family can even take in the game while other members go to the nearby Starworld 20 for a movie.
Many people doubted Remy when he first started talking about building a complex such has evolved as the Regal Plaza. The whole idea of an event center in Bixby carried with it the kind of costs that would give city fathers the shakes. Remy at first saw a need for small volume commercial storage units and succeeded in building them, then went on to Regal Plaza with its $50 million budget covering dozens of eateries and upscale commercial establishments. He is already thinking in larger terms.
Suites of Ravenwood, on 111th Street between Sheridan Road and Memorial Drive, will offer 56,000 square feet of luxury office suites as part of an $8 million project.
Aspen Pointe is underway at 101st Street and 145th East Avenue (Aspen) in Broken Arrow. The $10.5 million project will ultimately offer 100,000 square feet of mixed-use accommodations for retail shops, luxury office suites and office warehouses.
Crosscreek, a retail and office warehouse at 128th Street and Memorial Drive, costs $8.5 million and will offer 130,000 square feet. Approximately 10 percent of the land will be retail space and it will be followed quickly by Phase II.
But the brightest star on the Remy horizon may well be South Village, another $50 million project due at 146th Street and Memorial Drive. It hasn’t been completely thought out, says Remy, but he wants a hotel with at least 100 rooms, a movie theater, some kind of entertainment center such as a bowling establishment, restaurants, banks, condos and lofts.
“I expect the design to be completed by May with construction to begin by late summer. I think it will take about two years to complete.”
All this while Regal Plaza is still getting off the ground. What kind of thinking went into building a major event center in a Tulsa suburb when not even the city thought it was fiscally feasible?
“I started thinking about it when I found a Bixby committee of businessmen called ‘Make it Happen.’ They had come up with the wish for a new hotel and the event center.
“I studied event centers in other Oklahoma mid-sized towns and found all of them were money losers or, at best, broke even. But all of them simply rented a big box; an attraction would come to town, pay a certain amount to hire the hall and keep the proceeds. On empty nights the facilities produced no revenue.
“I came up with the idea for the SpiritBank Event Center. In addition to having space for everything from games to concerts, it would have revenue-generating retail stores and office space. I would get a percentage of any event’s gross. We would have enough revenue streams for the building to pay for itself.”
The mere fact that the Event Center is there and the 66ers are going to be in it has started to change the entertainment lineup of Tulsa. A handful of years ago anyone living in far south Tulsa had to go north to see anything from a ballet to a baseball game to a movie. Over the past few decades, choices have slowly been drifting south. Tulsa no longer seems to stop at 71st Street. The Tulsa Drillers baseball team, in a holding pattern while investigating the possibility of building a new park downtown, may yet opt for an offer from a Jenks developer.
The 66ers are now entering a new building giving it new opportunities. The team, which was slow to build a following at Expo Square, is looking at the opportunities the newer venue is offering.
The Remy model is expanding, and the cities that are involved are changing with it.
