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The University of Kentucky will not be leaving Rupp Arena anytime soon.
The Lexington Center and UK have agreed to a 15-year lease to keep the men;s basketball team playing in Rupp Arena.
Rupp and UK have reached an agreement on a 15-year lease agreement. Base rent for UK will be $1.9 million annually for 28 events.
— HL Cityhall (@HLCityhall) December 15, 2016
The agreement is in principle but is not the final lease agreement. "It's a fair agreement," said Brent Rice, chairman of LCC.
— HL Cityhall (@HLCityhall) December 15, 2016
The announcement is being made Thursday at the Lexington Center, and the deal will be signed sometime today. The lease was originally set to terminates at the end of the 2017-18 basketball season.
It’s unclear is this new deal will include more major upgrades for Rupp, but one has to think those will be coming. It may not be the massive upgrades originally planned back in 2014, but you can expect Rupp to remain one of the best arenas in college basketball.
It looks like new suites and chair-back seats will be included in the agreement:
LCC has agreed to replace some bench seats with chair-back seats and instruct 4 Club Suites for a cost not to exceed $15 million.
— HL Cityhall (@HLCityhall) December 15, 2016
Rupp just added a new state-of-the-art center-hung scoreboard, and more smaller upgrades will be implemented over the next year. Rupp Arena opened on November 28, 1976, and has been housing UK home games ever since.
We’ll update this post as more details come out today.