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Originally Posted by Table 5
That's great, they are successful business men...but that's still not a valid excuse for giving them hundreds of millions of public dollars. It should be the exact reason not to.
You wouldn't be ok if Suncor or Agrium or Stantec came asking for that type of money (and I'm sure they provide more economic benefit to this town than the Flames), so why is it ok with a hockey team?
The Flames and the NHL need to find a solution in house. Cut that $70M salary cap to $40-50M, and they can build themselves a new arena every 2 decades.
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Why don't we stick to real world concept.
Basically the Flames put out their opening position, and I wasn't a fan of the Calgary Next proposal. But the idea behind that is then working with the city on coming up with a fair compromise that leaves both sides happy.
The Flames are far different then the companies that you talk about and I don't see the link here. The Flames are a massive part of this cities culture and there's a price to be paid for that prestige of being a major sports city.
Nenshi didn't come out with a position that could be seen any way but negative towards getting a new building.
I would expect that this will be done at some point and there will be some public money provided for an arena. It might not be with this mayor in place though because Nenshi for all of his good deeds and there are a few, is not one that plays well in the sandbox with others.
Again the Flames would be irresponsible if they didn't look at projects like Edmonton and Vancouver and Regina and say that there has to be public money put into an arena and saying that the owners should just pony up and pay for it is going to be a non starter, because if that's a fact then they might as well look for relocation and look to see if there's a better deal for them and their franchise in a city that's either going to give them public money, or has a more up to date building with higher revenue potential.
Frankly I knew that this thing was going to have a public blow up when Nenshi fired a opening heavy rhetoric negative salvo.