HARTFORD – There’s a new idea to bring the Whalers back to Connecticut by buying them back.
John Q. Gale, an attorney and Hartford City Council member, proposed the idea in an opinion column in Sunday’s Hartford Courant.
“What if all 38 towns in the Capitol Region Council of Governments banded together to buy the franchise and brought it back to Hartford?” he wrote.
Based on an estimate in Forbes Magazine, the now Carolina Hurricanes franchise is worth $230 million. Gale proposes that each town in the region would pay a portion of the purchase price based on their percentage of the total grand list of all 38 towns. Grand lists are representative of the wealth in each town.
According to Gale’s calculations, that means each taxpayer would pay around $274 on average and would therefore own a part of the franchise. Gale hopes that would encourage more attendance at games.
“I’m not even a hockey guy. I probably went to a handful of Whaler hockey games and I’m a lifelong Hartford guy,” Gale told FOX61.
“Here now, every single person would have a stake in the Whalers and I know for me it would probably cause me to go to more than a handful of games.” For now, it’s just an idea and not one he’s seriously proposing.
He said, “I’m putting it out there, you know. If there’s interest people will pick it up and it might take on a life of its own. I have very little expectation that this could really come to pass, but I think it’s great fun to think about.”
Gale is serious however about getting the state to consider regionalization and how we can all work together. He says bonding over a beloved sports team is a place to start that conversation.
“I hope it causes people to think a little regionally and to think about what we can do regionally,” he said. “We need to start thinking as a region or we’re not going to be able to compete with the rest of the country.”