Posted Apr 13, 2018, 4:19 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Ottawa
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Garrioch: Work to be done before Senators move to LeBreton
Bruce Garrioch
Post Media
April 11, 2018
Eugene Melnyk and Pierre Dorion started and finished their day Wednesday with two more town hall talks with season ticket holders.
And, at the end of the session Wednesday morning, the Ottawa Senators owner indicated he’d like to do this two or three times a year to get the club’s message directly to the most important stakeholders in the team.
The reviews on social media on these town halls are mixed, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend to know how they went because I didn’t attend any of the three sessions and only the first one Tuesday night at the Canadian Tire Centre was open to one person from each media outlet.
You have to give the Senators credit for giving people access because that doesn’t happen in every NHL market, but it would have been nice to be able to see one these in person or online instead of having to rely on second-hand accounts or audio online to find out what was said.
Yes, there was focus on the future of captain Erik Karlsson, but the Senators repeated they’re going to make him an offer on July 1 and they’re going to do everything in their power to keep him. That question is going to linger until the summertime as much as people want answers.
Various people shared comments on social media, including audio posted by Mitch Brulé on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting topic was LeBreton Flats and the future for the new downtown arena because the Senators would like have shovels in the ground midway through 2019.
The RendezVous LeBreton Group and National Capital Commission reached an agreement in principle in January to finalize a deal to redevelop the land 10 minutes west of downtown, and the two sides are now working on finalizing that deal.
Speaking at the Ottawa Conference and Events Centre, Melnyk indicated the deal isn’t close, but let’s face it negotiations are still ongoing.
“It’s a very difficult, much more than I thought, process,” Melnyk said. “It’s not the NCC that’s holding it up. They’ve actually been very, very good throughout this whole process. The problems we’re finding there are much more complicated than I can describe to you.
“It’s a huge project with a tremendous risk … I’m a risk-taker, but this one is really rolling the dice, and if we’re wrong, we’re really bad wrong.”
Melnyk said it’s not easy to just leave Canadian Tire Centre, especially with federal government offices located downtown, and that’s partially because a Treasury Board policy precludes employees from receiving gifts of any type from suppliers.
“Are we leaving Kanata, where we’ve stabilized, we’re OK (and) are we moving to be closer to the very people that cannot get tickets or won’t buy tickets? Our challenge is to allow the complimentary tickets to get to people. We don’t have a big corporate base in Ottawa. We have a big employer who has now forbidden their employees to get a couple of tickets to a game.
“If you take a look at any other market, and I mean any other market, they have a corporate base and they give out tickets to their clients, friends, family and employees. You can’t do that here in Ottawa. That has to change here and I’d love to see it change.”
Melnyk said he will continue to try to get the LeBreton deal across the finish line.
“We continue to trudge along. It’s going to take time At one point, we’re going to decide we’re done, we’re going to stay in Kanata, we have a fan base there, and we have fan base here and I know the difficulty of going out there,” Melnyk added.
Later, Melnyk wondered aloud whether the city of Ottawa can support all the building that will take place and also noted one of his partners — without naming names — is developing land nearby, so he’s going over an impact study he had done to see what effect those will have.
Trinity Developments, owned by John Ruddy, who is a partner in RendezVous LeBreton, is working on a massive project near the City Centre.
“I’m now hesitating back and saying, ‘You can’t do all this development there and have LeBreton’ … I’m not in that business. I’m into the hockey business and it’s just one of my businesses,” said Melnyk. “That’s why I’m hedging on LeBreton … just hedging.
“If it doesn’t work out our way I don’t want to put the hockey business at risk over a development.”
Don’t get too caught up in LeBreton project going off the rails because Melnyk is in the middle of a long, difficult negotiation to finalize the deal and his best bet is not to show too much excitement about the project until it’s closer to becoming a reality.
The focus for the next few months is going to be on what’s happening off the ice with the hockey team as far as the roster goes. We’ll get some of those answers Thursday morning when Dorion holds his season wrap-up with the media at the rink.
There will be no shortage of questions.
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http://ottawasun.com/sports/hockey/n...ve-to-lebreton
I know the media keeps trying to explain these LeBreton comments away by saying it's a negotiation tactic, but it scares the hell out of me. Though Melnyk attacking one of his partners (possibly two, with Windmill building Zibi) is pretty terrible, he has a point. The market is saturated. But his comments about abandoning the Kanata fan-base to get closer to people who can't buy tickets is ridiculous (unless the Kanata high-tech companies represent a big percentage of the season ticket base).
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