Nearly 700 workers put in more than 250,000 hours to renovate the Spectrum Center, and on Thursday, we got a first look.

The $245 million in taxpayer funding for the renovations is expected to pay for all the planned work on the arena this year and next. Julian said that as work wraps up this month, the Hornets and the city will have a better sense of precise spending forecasts for the second phase.

Spectrum Center reopens this week after being closed for months of renovations. Why it matters: It's the first round of a major facelift for the Uptown arena. Spectrum Center will close again in 2025 during the NBA offseason.

The 90,000 Wi-Fi access points will be located in public areas (like parks or main city streets) and will be active until Oct. 7. You can find an access point near you with Spectr

Spectrum customers across the U.S. have been experiencing outages over the past couple days as a result of Hurricane Helene, according to a company spokesperson. The outages began several days ago in Florida and have since spread to other parts of the country, including to the Cincinnati area.

Spectrum, a subsidiary of Charter Communications, has now thrown in a total of $1 million worth of relief support for storm recovery. About $250,000 of that is going directly to support organizations helping with recovery efforts. Another $750,000 will go toward in-kind services.