[heep223]

Originally Posted by Weitz

Do you have a study suggesting it will cost $500 million to clean up?

That seems excessively high.

I've heard that number quoted, there hasn't been a formal study done though they are in the midst of extensive testing. Fair enough. However, here's an article quoting a city councilor saying that it's going to be significantly more than the hundreds of millions spent on the East Village site cleaning it up. I believe the general thought is that it's going to be double that so that's where the number comes from: article

Brown wouldn’t estimate the cost of cleanup, however area Coun. Evan Woolley said it would be much more involved that environmental remediation done in East Village, which cost in the hundreds of millions.

Also note the article talking about how it sunk a massive amount of capital into the infrastructure in East Village, in order to attract billions of dollars of private investment:

Instead, city officials turned their attention to East Village, creating the CMLC as an arms-length organization to handle its land holdings, which poured more than $325 million of taxpayer supported money into environmental and infrastructure upgrades over the last 10 years through a Community Revitalization Levy (CRL), which in turn has attracted $2.5 billion in private investment into the area.

Taxpayers will be putting hundreds of millions into West Village just like they did East, regardless of the arena or not.

Lastly note the concern that it's difficult to develop without an anchor tenant in West Village. This is from the CEO of the CMLC. Note that the Bow tower was the anchor tenant for East Village.

Brown said they are now looking into whether a similar concept would work in West Village.


One advantage East Village had, however, was the inclusion of the Bow Building in the CRL area, ensuring financial stability.


Without a large anchor tenant, Brown said a CRL would be tougher in West Village, meaning involvement of provincial and federal government funding could be needed.

So the CEO of the CMLC is actually saying that without an anchor tenant in West Village, not only are we going to need taxpayer dollars at the city level to develop it, but provincial and/or federal taxpayer dollars would be needed as well.

This isn't a black and white issue, anyone treating it as such really is discrediting themselves.