Fair-ly smart
Calgary praised for dropping Expo bid against Edmonton and avoiding huge debt
By MICHAEL PLATT
CALGARY --
Expo 2017 is dead -- long live the West Village.
And so Calgary's city council can hold its collective head high for avoiding a massive public debt, while retaining the renewal and redevelopment that is the expected legacy of a major event like the world's fair.
It's a rare double bow for the mayor and aldermen, but well deserved.
Killing off the Expo bid, which pitted Calgary against Edmonton for the right to host the world, saved Calgarians something in excess of a billion dollars in debt.
Love Expo or loathe it, the idea was a money-losing proposition, and it had to die. Council correctly killed it.
"You had to look at it and say, 'I don't believe from a Calgary perspective that's being responsible' ," said Mayor Dave Bronconnier.
"We're not prepared to ask taxpayers to cover a potential $1-billion shortfall."
Calgary council was told that hosting Expo west of downtown, on the land currently occupied by car dealerships and a bus station, would have cost Calgarians too much, more than the fair would have paid back.
There was too little financial support from the province and federal government, and a best-case scenario, said Bronconnier, was a billion-dollar deficit.
Even the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a group that routinely slams Calgary city council for its wasteful spending habits, had nothing but praise for this decision.
"The City of Calgary seems to understand what the City of Edmonton does not, that hosting Expo 2017 could cost taxpayers of that city billions of dollars," said Scott Hennig, Alberta director of the federation.
"Kudos to the City of Calgary for getting out of the bidding before it wasted another cent."
And so, Edmonton can have its Expo bid. Calgary is out.
It could have ended there, Calgary $300,000 in the hole after investing in plans, research and blueprints for the failed Expo site, but council then played an unexpected ace.
Instead of letting development plans for the land west of downtown wither on the vine, city council agreed to push on with redevelopment, paying for the project with a special tax levy as it did in the East Village area.
The city will borrow the cash to buy out the remaining land owners and develop the site's infrastructure, and then pay the loan back through property taxes raised through new tenants. Just like the East Village, in fact.
Indeed, the plan is so similar in financing and direction to the project on the east end of downtown, that they've even echoed the name, calling it the West Village.
It's a long-term plan, obviously. But two decades from now, it's anticipated 12,000 people will be living in the 45-hectare site, north of the CPR tracks to the Bow River.
If this scheme works, Calgary will finally have a riverfront worth visiting. That alone makes the decision to proceed with the West Village worthy of Calgary's praise.
MICHAEL.PLATT@SUNMEDIA.CA
http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/albe...14706-sun.html