The Sacramento Region has arena fever.

There’s a 4,000-seat venue planned for Sunrise Mall; a proposed 7,500-seat indoor arena is on the table in Rancho Cordova; the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians wants a 5,000-seat arena next to Red Hawk Casino. UC Davis has “Aggie Ascent,” a $265 million privately funded master plan that includes an arena; and, Sacramento Republic FC has a 20,000-seat soccer stadium being built at the Railyards. More recently, Sacramento Pitch proposed a larger ballpark in West Sacramento. Less certain is a plan announced with much fanfare back in August 2025 to bring Sacramento State football to Cal Expo. 

But, Sacramento’s stadium history is less civic triumph and more comedy of grand promises, flimsy financing and renderings that rarely meet a shovel. Forty years ago, Gregg Lukenbill dug an actual hole for a 53,000-seat stadium near Arco Arena, a fitting monument. In the late 1990s, Paul Crawford and Burger King franchisee Abe Alizadeh pitched a Natomas sports hub with a ballpark, soccer stadium, six fields and an aquatics center — because ambition pays contractors. Then came Bruce Portner, purveyor of outrageous promotional stunts, and his 1999 “Modular Stadium on Wheels;” and who can forget the many Maloof-era arena meltdowns. The recipe has never changed: threats, abandoned plans and taxpayers clutching their wallets.

With all these current plans in the air, I keep thinking about the one that got away.

Back in 1971, developer George R. McKeon proposed a 10,000-seat indoor arena alongside a 35,000-seat outdoor stadium at Stonelake, on Elliott Ranch in south Sacramento. That land is now part of Elk Grove. He envisioned the stadium attracting a Major League Baseball or an NFL franchise. He planned a golf course, a hotel and a master-planned, lake community around it.

Plenty of developers arrive with glossy renderings, fancy presentations and big promises but have very little to show in terms of past work. McKeon was the exception. Unlike most dreamers, he came with the receipts, and his track record made the plan hard to dismiss. McKeon was chairman and CEO of his own construction company and had built several master-planned communities. He was also named 1971 Professional Builder of the Year for building homes people could afford. Most importantly, he offered to pay for everything himself, including the roads and public works improvements associated with the ballpark. McKeon had the cash to back it up.

It was a batting-practice fastball just sitting there, waiting to be hit.  Local government missed it. Worse, they missed it on purpose.

Environmentalists warned of traffic, noise and runoff in the fragile Beach Lake and Snodgrass Slough ecosystem. McKeon offered to meet many of their demands, but it didn’t matter. The Sacramento County Planning Commission killed the plan before it ever reached a full vote of the Board of Supervisors. The Sacramento City Council had no authority to vote it down, so it aggressively lobbied the county to reject it instead.

Council members argued that a stadium that far south would feed sprawl and hurt downtown’s entertainment district. Apparently, protecting downtown meant making sure nothing big happened anywhere else.

The land eventually became the Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. The remaining parcels were downzoned and turned into Laguna Stonelake. It can be argued that the projects have turned out to be worthy of the time, money, and effort…but, they are definitely not a professional sports franchise. 

McKeon had owned a majority stake in a newspaper chain, the Sacramento Suburban Newspapers since 1964. It was known as “The Green Sheet.” I was a new sportswriter and then sports editor there and I often heard our publisher, Reinhart Knudsen, bellow about “…the short-sightedness of our politicians,” when speaking about the McKeon plan. “We could have had a Major League team right here,” he’d say, pointing to Sacramento’s baseball history and the Stockton-Sacramento corridor. In his “Stadium Experiences” columns in late 1976 (the same year of McKeon’s passing from Leukemia), Reinhart mocked city and county leaders for their sudden, frantic push for a municipal stadium. Just years earlier, they had turned away a free one. Now they were working out how to make taxpayers pay for another. 

Reinhart Knudsen was right. Demographers and sports executives now take the corridor he described for granted. Sacramento’s baseball history runs from the Pacific Coast League Solons at Edmonds Field to generations of local talent, and Stonelake could have reshaped West Coast sports. He would continue to write about the missed opportunities even after McKeon passed 

In the fifty-five years since, no one has put forward a plan quite like McKeon’s. That includes today’s crop of proposals, save the Railyards which is already under construction. The Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians may have the most viable one, since Red Hawk Casino is giving the tribe the money to build it. But no current plan matches the scale, the ambition or the offer to pay for everything that Stonelake had.

As the new proposals line up, today’s leaders should remember the lesson. But, they won’t. Oakland seems a case in point. In Sacramento, the most expensive stadium is really the one the old leaders wouldn’t let someone build for free.