[Halifax] Nova Centre | 65-58-58 m | 16-15-14 fl | Completed

[sdm]

Originally Posted by DigitalNinja

I think the cogswell lands would be better used for pure office buildings to integrate the rest of the business area with it.

Agreed, however i would have accepted a new trade centre there before the proposed location. At least then the costs of the interchanged could be absorbed into the new development.

The problem is if places like International place can't get off the ground the land in the cogswell interchange area will sit empty for decades until something is built (based on the historical absorbtion rates of new office downtown over the past 15 years).

The province would need to do the opposite of what it is doing now, by lowering taxes, promoting new businesses to come here and make this place a more affordable place to do business. We are currently going to opposite way .

[DigitalNinja]

I agree with you.
Also don't blame the government for this, blame the voters. People should have enough knowledge about the NDP and they would know this was going to happen. That's what you get when you live in a society where people want everything for nothing.

[Phalanx]

Out of curiosity - would the proposed library site be big enough to hold a convention centre? Just wondering what would happen if they traded locations.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by Phalanx

Out of curiosity - would the proposed library site be big enough to hold a convention centre? Just wondering what would happen if they traded locations.

The Province owned the SGR/Queen library site until a few months ago when they did a land swap with HRM. But forget the idea; HRM Chief Librarian Judith Hare demanded that she get the best retail corner east of Montreal for her monument to herself, and no other options were ever seriously considered. It would be a poor location for a CC anyway due to lack of hotel adjacency.

[halifaxboyns]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

The Province owned the SGR/Queen library site until a few months ago when they did a land swap with HRM. But forget the idea; HRM Chief Librarian Judith Hare demanded that she get the best retail corner east of Montreal for her monument to herself, and no other options were ever seriously considered. It would be a poor location for a CC anyway due to lack of hotel adjacency.

Not to mention that the site is painted by 2 view planes; so you'd never be able to get the building height.

[Phalanx]

I wasn't thinking of the current design, just wondering if a convention centre that would meet requirements and future needs could be placed on the site. The towers wouldn't be necessary, would they?

[worldlyhaligonian]

Originally Posted by Phalanx

I wasn't thinking of the current design, just wondering if a convention centre that would meet requirements and future needs could be placed on the site. The towers wouldn't be necessary, would they?

The towers are necessary... honestly, I'm saying this for the last time... the WTCC isn't just a convention centre, the acronym stands for World Trade and Convention Centre.

They are partly responsible for trade promotion and education (delivery of the FITT program) in the region and offer a variety of services. Also, the offices for Tourism Nova Scotia, and related governmental organizations are housed in there.

Basically everybody thinks this is just a convention centre when really the new facility will also be the heart and soul of active investment and tourism attraction. Its actually a joke how little we do in the way of this because of our lack of resources (i.e. no facility).

If you are against this trade centre than you are actually against economic development in Nova Scotia.

Straight goods... its like arguing against a stadium automatically means you are against having a pro sports franchise... you can't have one with out the other.

[worldlyhaligonian]

Jesus, I didn't like Rodney... but we better see this through... or get left in the dust...

[fenwick16]

Originally Posted by worldlyhaligonian

The towers are necessary... honestly, I'm saying this for the last time... the WTCC isn't just a convention centre, the acronym stands for World Trade and Convention Centre.

They are partly responsible for trade promotion and education (delivery of the FITT program) in the region and offer a variety of services. Also, the offices for Tourism Nova Scotia, and related governmental organizations are housed in there.

Basically everybody thinks this is just a convention centre when really the new facility will also be the heart and soul of active investment and tourism attraction. Its actually a joke how little we do in the way of this because of our lack of resources (i.e. no facility). Personally, I would like to see it go ahead on budget so that there is money for other facilities.

If you are against this trade centre than you are actually against economic development in Nova Scotia.

Straight goods... its like arguing against a stadium automatically means you are against having a pro sports franchise... you can't have one with out the other.

I am personally for the Trade/Convention Centre based on it being a convention centre alone. I didn't know that much about the trade centre portion (however attracting trade to Nova Scotia is extremely important).

I hope it goes ahead (at the estimated $100 million). Then I hope a stadium will also go ahead in the near future (for under $40 million).

[halifaxboyns]

Wasn't part of the reason of including a hotel and office tower to recoup some of the cost that the NS government would have to put into it?

I seem to recall reading somewhere that as part of the agreement with Rank was that the money would be recouped not only through the economic spin offs but a portion of the income from the hotel and office rentals?

[fenwick16]

I think by allowing them that height at that location they can generate more income from the development, so for that reason they can keep the convention centre price down. This is why it is considered to be beneficial to the public and is included in the HRMbyDesign document. However, I don't think that the HRMbyDesign height limits should have been so low in the first place. It just reduces the incentive to develop many areas in the downtown core.

[halifaxboyns]

Originally Posted by fenwick16

I think by allowing them that height at that location they can generate more income from the development, so for that reason they can keep the convention centre price down. This is why it is considered to be beneficial to the public and is included in the HRMbyDesign document. However, I don't think that the HRMbyDesign height limits should have been so low in the first place. It just reduces the incentive to develop many areas in the downtown core.

What didn't impress me with HbD was that it seemed the height maximums were actually lower in many areas where they should've been higher (because they actually could go higher under the viewplanes).

What worried me (and still does) is that in order to achieve any great investment in downtown - HbD will end up being subject to amendment applications; which for something so important may be 'death by a thousand cuts' (so to speak). It may also end up showing some shortcomings with the document.

[fenwick16]

Originally Posted by halifaxboyns

What didn't impress me with HbD was that it seemed the height maximums were actually lower in many areas where they should've been higher (because they actually could go higher under the viewplanes).

What worried me (and still does) is that in order to achieve any great investment in downtown - HbD will end up being subject to amendment applications; which for something so important may be 'death by a thousand cuts' (so to speak). It may also end up showing some shortcomings with the document.

There must be some better way to protect heritage buildings in Halifax than by enforcing such strict height controls. Perhaps strong protection for heritage buildings and also have part of the tax from the taller buildings go towards subsidizing the shorter, economically unfeasible heritage buildings.

[someone123]

The problem with HbD is that it only took developer requirements into account in a very abstract, distant way.

Height limits don't protect heritage buildings. It's important to make this clear in discussions. Wind is also basically a solved problem - a developer can avoid wind problems with a good building design and wind study, so it makes no sense to talk about this as a drawback of all highrises. Shadows and blocked views are sometimes a problem but it really depends on the proposal. With this proposal, for example, neither is a major concern.

[fenwick16]

More bragging by Tim Bousquet (some reader figured out how to read a couple unimportant blacked out sections in the convention centre reports and he reported it) and inflation of the convention centre square footage again by Tim Bousquet at "The Coast" (source: http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/conventio...b7ab38026de55e8&sort=desc#readerComments )

Conventional tactics
A laughable failure at censoring documents shows that convention centre advocates aren't interested in informed debate.
by Tim Bousquet

Last week, provincial infrastructure minister Bill Estabrooks nearly made good on his pledge to release uncensored versions of the four reports that supposedly make the business case for a new convention centre---one of the reports, by Criterion Communications, was redacted in two places, and another, by the consulting firm Deloitte, had a redacted table in it.

Earlier, Estabrooks' communications manager Cathy MacIsaac had warned me that "small portions" of the reports would remained censored in order to protect "trade secrets" ---information that might hurt the competitiveness of crown corporation Trade Centre Limited or of Rank, Inc., the company picked as the private partner in the convention centre arrangement. I was skeptical, but there wasn't much I could do about the censored parts of the documents anyway.

That is, until a reader alerted me to a laughable failure on the censor's part. The reports had been put online, and the censor had simply changed the background colour of the censored portions to black, so that at first glance the documents looked like a typical blacked-out hard copy document. But the censor failed to remove the text, so I found that if I copied the "censored" text in the Criterion report and pasted it into a Word document, I could read it.

Turns out both redacted parts said the same thing: "recent costs in North America have been in the range of $400-$500 CDN per square foot for a typical combination of spaces, which suggests a very rough estimate between $120 and $170 million CDN for construction of a 300,000- 340,000-square-foot facility, exclusive of design, furnishings and equipment costs."

How exactly this is a trade secret? Any number of trade publications report the same information on a regular basis, so it appears the censor wanted to keep the information not from potential competitors, who would surely already have the info, but from us, the public, in order to keep us from having informed debate about the convention centre proposal. (After we reported the redaction failure, the online redacted Criterion report became un-redacted.)

This incident is once again proof that Nova Scotian governments and crown corporations have a culture of secrecy and consider government information the private property of bureaucrats. I don't know how else to say it: They hate democracy.

With yet another example of government secrecy run amok, on top of MLA spending scandals, P3 scandals, hidden $600,000 expenditures for Paul McCartney and who knows what other chicanery, it's a wonder that anyone at all would trust the bullshitters and backslappers who run this circus with the $100 million the convention centre will supposedly cost us. (I guarantee you that figure will go up.)

But, amazingly, there are still plenty of convention centre supporters, and they point at the reports to argue their case.

To be sure, the four reports are internally consistent, and they make the case for a new convention centre. But they rely entirely on information provided by Trade Centre Limited.

Which brings us back to the Deloitte report, which was censored by someone with slightly more knowledge than that provided by an Idiot's Guide to Censoring book---the copy and paste trick didn't work in this case. The censored table lists $6.5 million in "lost business" for the existing World Trade and Convention Centre---60 groups that were going to bring 75,955 delegates to Halifax. But the group names are censored, so we have no way of verifying the information---we're supposed to take Trade Centre Limited's word for it.

But like the construction cost info, this is hardly a trade secret, and making the names public would hurt no one at all.

Again, I simply don't believe TCL. I think they're lying, or at least stretching the truth: I'm guessing that any group that made a single call asking for information and didn't subsequently book a convention was considered "lost business," and used to inflate the case for a new convention centre.

It's not like this group of clowns has a good track record for being forthright. Why should we trust them?

[beyeas]

Just as a side-note FYI, the conference I was just at was at a fairly new/modern large conference centre that interestingly was placed way the heck away from the city centre. There were 6000 people attending, almost all of whom had to take public transit to get to there from their hotel.

Of course the reason why they could do that is the HUGELY better transit system compared to anything we might have in the next generation. Not even like the specific system was anything more than average for Europe, but LIGHT YEARS ahead of most north american systems (had bus systems that linked with subway and regional train systems out of a central and regional hubs).

The airport was also way way out of the city (ala Halifax), but again, the difference was that there was an express train that took you at 200 km/h to the city centre in a matter of minutes. One person asked me if Halifax had something like that, and I just laughed and told them we recently had the major step forward of replacing the coin-fed meters with a parking garage. /sigh/

[halifaxboyns]

I attended the Americian Planning Association's conference in Las Vegas a couple years ago at Balley's and Paris hotels on the Strip. While most things I needed (restaurants, small shops) were within walking distance - the main LV convention centre was quite difficult to get too from the strip - even though the event wasn't actually held there. I tried to get to it, just out of curiosity.

The traffic on the strip was bad, most of the day. Added to that, the 'BRT' (and I use that term as loosely as possible) called the Duece was a joke on the strip. Each stop typically took about 10 minutes mainly because of people asking questions, not prepared with fares or just slow in offloading or traffic.

Once it got off the strip and closer to downtown - it was okay. The benefit of the hotels on the strip was that most of them have major conference facilities, so you can stay on the strip and not really have to go far for what you need (since Walgreens was equi-distant in either direction of my hotel, the Planet Hollywood).

The shuttle from the airport was quick, but any decent shopping at the outlet malls was not easy to get too - it was 2 buses (the duece and then another bus) away and the schedules weren't great.

I wasn't able to attend the world planning conference in Vancouver in 2006, but had fellow planners who did and they said it was well setup - good access by public transit and good distribution of hotels.

Now the APA event I went too was about 10,000 planners, engineers, designers and architects from all over the US and the globe. I know the world planning conference was about the same magnitude of people as well.

I really see Nova Centre as providing the possibility of a similar size conference being held in Halifax; not just as a planning conference, but anything really. The only concern I have would be if Halifax were to get to that level - are there enough hotels within easy walking distance. For me, Planet hollywood worked because the conference was at Paris next door. But if I were attending a conference in Halifax, depending on the circumstances - Dartmouth hotels might be getting a bit too far away. For example, the hotels out in Burnside and Dartmouth Crossing (or even the airport and Sackville) might be too far because of poor transit connections; where as the ones in Dartmouth (including the Holiday Inn by the bridge) would be easier because of access to the Bridge Terminal or the ferry. Same with the hotel on Robie/Quinpool - since it's within walking distance.

[fenwick16]

This sounds like a tier 1 event. With 10,000 delegates, I don't see how Halifax would be able to hold it since it simply doesn't have that many hotel rooms. I think that the goal of the new Nova Centre is to be able to attract tier 2 events at best. But you never know, maybe once in a while Halifax will get a major international event.

[kph06]

This Website has great aerial photos of Halifax, the image directly linked shows this site from a few weeks ago. Really shows how big the hole in the downtown it currently creates. There's some other great photos from around HRM.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by fenwick16

This sounds like a tier 1 event. With 10,000 delegates, I don't see how Halifax would be able to hold it since it simply doesn't have that many hotel rooms. I think that the goal of the new Nova Centre is to be able to attract tier 2 events at best. But you never know, maybe once in a while Halifax will get a major international event.

Halifax has in the range of 5,000-5,500 hotel rooms (for comparison's sake, Las Vegas is over 100,000, although not everybody there is going for conferences ). There are probably over 1,000 proposed but it is unlikely they would all be built.

Of course, some delegates would be from the city it is held in. Something else to keep in mind is that I think they count visitors per day in many cases, so it's possible that hosting a conference with 10,000 visitors means putting up 2-3,000 in hotel rooms or something similar, which is doable in Halifax.

Many of the hotels in the city are downtown because that is where most visitors want to stay and where the convention centre is currently located. It doesn't seem hard to imagine that there will be something like 2,000-3,000 rooms nearby if the Nova Centre is built. The Lord Nelson and Westin Nova Scotian together are around 500 rooms.