Anthony LeBlanc: Coyotes have chosen site for new arena

Coyotes president and CEO Anthony LeBlanc announced Friday that the team has identified a site for its arena project, but further details will have to wait for legal documentation.

"We're not at liberty to disclose the site at this point, but we are moving forward and are actually in the process of trading  legal documentation between us and the organizations that we are working with," LeBlanc said. "And we anticipate getting that done over the next several weeks. I'm not going to put a firm date, but we are moving forward with a site."

The Coyotes have one more year on their lease with the city of Glendale at Gila River Arena. LeBlanc said the team will need to extend their agreement for another two seasons beyond that while a new arena is being built.

Among the potential sites that have been speculated as homes for the Coyotes are a pair of locations on the Salt River Pima Indian Reservation: near the Diamondbacks spring training facility on the 101 corridor, and near the Intersection of the 101 and 202, at the former site of the Scottsdale Drive-in; on the ASU campus where Karsen Golf Course is located; and in downtown Phoenix.

"It's morphed into more of a real estate project that just an arena project," LeBlanc said, adding that the arena would be financed "in a public-private fashion, but more than 50 percent of the financing will be privately done by the Coyotes."

He said the team is not seeking taxpayer dollars up front.

"Are we looking for some sort of refund of sales taxes generated? Perhaps," he said. "Those are the preliminary discussions we had with the state legislature a couple of months ago. It's a very fluid situation, but what needed to happen was the site selection. That allows us to move forward and start all these  ancillary things in a more progressed manner."

LeBlanc said he expects the team will be able to announce the site before the end of the summer and also said there are "backup plans if things somehow didn't work out."