EHM The Blue Line

So to describe situation: I´ve been playing as CBJ for 14 seasons so far. They didn´t own arena at the beginning but owners bought it. Issue is that although I got very positive win/loss ratio and attendances have been raising continuously and I got to the point that during whole last season I had just one seat empty in average, board still considers it´s not enough. I also checked through editor, it seems there are 3000 seats arena can still expand and as I wrote I own arena. I really see no reason why not to expand. I know I can set higher number of seats manually through editor, but i really want to avoid it, as It seems like cheating to me. So my question is, does anyone have experience with any similar case and were you able to expand naturally, just had to wait several years or what, or is editor really the only way?