Quote:
Originally Posted by Empire
This multi purpose stadium would be used year round as outlined in the overpriced consultants report. If we back out of this venture we are just adding to our current bad reputation as a waffling indecisive city. MacKay made it clear from the beginning that he was still very displeased with the way the ciy/province handled the bail out of the CWG when he was offering $400 million.
It is hard to believe we are doing it again.........if we can't build a stadium when there is a reason to do so you can be assured we won't be building a stadium for no reason. We are now letting two reasons to build a stadium slip by.....shame on this city as this decision will be regretted far more than any financing costs .
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Although tournaments and other sports events do produce more of a reason to build a stadium, the main reason must be for the city in which it's built. This needs to be a development fitted for HRM in a cost-effective manner -- and there are many in Halifax who are strongly opposed to building a stadium because of a lack of explaination with regards to its affordability.
I support a stadium, which is community-based and is as centrally located as possible; however, as I've been reading media, blog, and facebook comments pertaining to this topic I'm discovering many people whom are against a stadium -- and this one lengthy rant by someone named John Wesley Chisholm, posted in a debate on facebook, caught my attention because of how full-loaded it was. While some argue a stadium will be an asset to our economy, he argues against:
If I believed even one of those many statements in the classic leisure economy crowd-think line of talk were true I would help build the stadium myself.
The shipbuilding contract is a big number but on the ground in Halifax we're talking ...about 2500 jobs at the maximum output phase. Not enough to sustain us against loses in other areas of the provincial economy.
In finance it sometimes makes sense to borrow money to invest because the return is quantifiable greater than the cost of borrowing. It can also match the cost of an income producing asset to its useful life there by fairly sharing its total cost. But that's not this. This is government as consumer. It's spending plain and simple. Just like ringing up your credit card for a week at an all-inclusive where you swear you're going to work out everyday and connect with your muse.
The space around stadiums are wastelands. Would you want to live or work near a giant, noisy party space?
Ubanizing to increase carbon neutrality and all those lines of talk are great but they are the same - exactly the same - for all kinds of course of action. You could make all these same arguments for building Canada's largest prison on the site.
No one ever as ever suggested that a stadium would make money. Never. The whole thing turns on the notion of 'spin offs' - a very little understood concept about the real economic impact of any course of action being greater than the sum of its parts due to the effect of money exchange multipliers.
You're exactly right about there being no incremental health benefit to this stadium but the exact same logic applies to tourism, local entertainment (as opposed to traveling stadium rock acts that only will come if they think they can leave with more than they arrived with) and tourism. Why, if every decent place already has a stadium would tourist come to see ours?
The truth is the hawkers, pitchers hard and soft sellers and spin a line of talk to justify anything. That was the joke of the Simpsons monorail episode. IT's been going on for thousands of years. And the truth is that we're fabulously wealthy and we can afford, over generations, almost any crazy scheme.
We need some kind of critical method to decide who and what to believe and to what degree.
Here's what I propose. Let's say that stadiums and concerts and games are luxuries that we should be able to afford in good times. So that's what we want - real good times. LEt's define good times as times we can consistently look after everything we already have without increasing debt.
So... the simple question becomes what is the very best thing we can do to invest our limited resources and possibly more debt to create the wealth required to bring on those good times. Looking at it this way it is not possible to get "stadium" even on to the top 100 list of ideas for good ways forward.See More
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