Taken from Halifaxexaminer.ca
Some $2.4 million in public money went to design this 25,000-seat stadium at Shannon Park, and a half a million dollars more to study building a 10-14,000 seat stadium at Shannon Park, and then another million dollars to study building a 20,000-seat stadium at Shannon Park. Now the city is being asked to look at another stadium proposal.
“The likely stadium sites are Dartmouth Crossing and a property behind the Kent store in Bayers Lake business park,” reports Francis Campbell for the Chronicle Herald.
Sigh. I’ve been opposed to a stadium, but if we’re going to get one, I’d prefer it be somewhere in the urban area, not out in the suburbs. It’s like we’re stuck in the 1970s.
Campbell quotes Halifax Mayor Mike Savage, as follows:
“We think it has to make sense for the municipality but we also want something that’s transit oriented,” Mayor Mike Savage said of a potential stadium after regional council met in camera with the Maritime Football group last month. “I don’t think anybody is interested in building an old style stadium with 20,000 parking spots.”
This, folks, is someone who doesn’t know the first thing about how transit works in this town. It’s beyond obvious that Savage has never had to navigate a bus schedule. I’m guessing he’s never been on the bus except for the odd photo op.
Both Burnside and Bayers Lake are about as transit-unfriendly as you can get in Halifax. I’ve found it easier (if that’s the word) to walk from my house near downtown Dartmouth to Burnside than to take the bus:
I could’ve taken the bus, but you need a couple of graduate degrees to figure out the bus scheduling (seriously, you try to figure it out), and then impeccable timing to make it all work.
And Bayers Lake? We’ve been through all this before when the province sited the Outpatient Centre at essentially the same location:
Meanwhile, the report says the Banc site [in Bayers Lake] is supposedly serviced by the 21 and 52 [bus routes]. But saying the Banc site is served by bus routes is true only in the most technical sense; anyone who actually rides the bus knows this is not a meaningful statement.
And no, we cannot simply change the entire bus schedule for six or eight home games a year. Even if Halifax Transit added special shuttle buses to the stadium on game nights, no one much would take them because the kind of people who are going to shell out $40 to $100 per ticket and another $50 for beer and swag are not going to take the bus, and even if they do, who’s going to pay for that?
Speaking of costs, Campbell continues:
The question of funding for the stadium, which would seat about 25,000 people and likely cost in excess of $200 million to build, remains a bigger riddle than a potential site.
“We certainly think it’s the right way to go,” [team owner Anthony] LeBlanc said of the stadium redevelopment plan at Landsdowne Park in Ottawa that was part of the successful strategy to bring the CFL and the expansion Redblacks to Canada’s capital four years ago.
But Landsdowne is a “successful strategy” only so far as the governments were suckered into it; it is yet to be seen that the financing for Landsdowne is successful, that is, that it will meet projections.
We’ll get the details a week from tomorrow (at the July 17 council meeting), but it looks like we’re going to be sold a bill of goods about tax increment financing and such. As I’ve written before:
My informed guess is that we’ll soon see a proposal that includes a mix of government funding for a stadium — I don’t know if the federal government will play along, but I suspect there will be some provincial funding and a lot of municipal funding. Total costs are going to be something on the order of $300 million, give or take $100 million.
The whole thing is going to be wrapped in financial smoke and mirrors: a district around the new stadium will be defined, and as a result of the new stadium, tax assessments in that district will rise, we’ll be told. The increased property tax receipts from the district will supposedly “pay back” the city’s portion of the stadium costs over time, 10 or 25 years. But this isn’t how property taxes are supposed to work. All tax money received is used across the municipality for a vast range of purposes, and not just to service the property where the taxes are generated. And commercial property tax receipts in particular are used to offset residential rates, so setting aside a portion of commercial tax receipts to pay for a stadium necessarily means that either residential rates will need to increase to make up the difference or that services will have to be cut. Moreover, even if you agree with the “pay back” logic, as we’ve seen with the Nova Centre, which was premised on the same scheme, it doesn’t work. In the first 10 years alone of the Nova Centre, we’re losing at least $25 million from the property tax scheme.
This stadium thing feels like a freight train coming right at us, and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it.