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Originally Posted by Muta
I'm not saying I 100% agree with how the release of this project was handled, but it is clear you have no idea the type of back work that goes into creating a concept like this, especially of this magnitude. There were many, many players involved and multiple programming, planning and design schemes, legal ramifications, negotiations, contact talks, etc. before being released.
The South Health Campus, the $1.3B project, was in the planning stages for 10 years before the RFP came out in 2005, and subsequently completed by 2013. That's an 18-year span.
I understand people's expectations and anxiety on the CalgaryNEXT project to get going, but if you knew how the development / engineering / design / construction industry really operate, you wouldn't be surprised at the timelines. Not for a project like this.
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This is exactly the kind of work I would EXPECT to happen behind the scenes.
I've only been involved in one construction planning project (coincidentally though, it was for a small hockey rink). So I make no claim to any expertise. But before we could even get off the ground, we needed environmental impact assessment, energy usage estimates, parking layouts, traffic remediation studies, plans for how we were going to integrate traffic into the city's upcoming metro project, etc, etc, etc. And that was for only a 50 seat rink, on a pre-existing commercial site. I get that there is a lot of legwork.
Which is why it seems very odd that the Flames are most of a decade into a billion dollar project, and they're at the stage of "We want to put a stadium in the west village." Massive environmental remediation project which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars? Not part of the plan yet. Parking for tens of thousands of people? No parking. Infrastructure impact of dropping an 80,000 person facility into the downtown of a major city? They don't anticipate any infrastructure impact. Does the city even want an arena, which will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, be built on city land, be under their ownership, and have significant property tax implications? Don't know, we haven't really asked them yet.
18 years seems like a perfectly reasonable time frame to me for a project this big. But we're still at the stage of not even knowing whether the proposed owner actually wants to own it.
I wasn't expect all the i's to be dotted and t's crossed. But I was expecting an announcement about how the City and the Flames are hoping to get a new arena built, and what the scope of it is, and that they are working together towards an agreement based on some proposed framework which they've been hammering out for several years. Not "Here's a vague idea, it'll cost about a billion dollars but we don't have any realistic cost estimates yet. There is no Plan B, so take it or leave it", with the mayor's office replying "There's no money for this, it's not in our plans, and we're not committing to anything".
Maybe the Flames have done all this legwork, and are just keeping it close to the vest for negotiating purposes, but Nenshi pretty explicitly said: "This project was announced, frankly, without all of the homework being done". Which is the view from where I sit too. And it's pretty clear that the city did not have a major hand in the concept either.