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Originally Posted by johnnybegaudreau
can you really blame the city here. The WV land is potentially worth billions in reinvestment once the site is remediated and the road system is upgraded around there. Once the Crowchild corridor projects gets funded and completed there will be plenty of interest in developing the WV Lands by inner city developers. Plus the potential for high impact high density is there. This kind of situation if Calgary was New York, Toronto, or Vancouver would be snatched up by a billionaire in a heart beat. OFc They don't want to literally pay Murray Edwards to put his project on there. There's no doubt the city should remediate that land and they will eventually when it's prudent to do so but the private ROI for that area is much too valuable to piss away on a large footprint arena/stadia combo. I don't blame our mayor one bit here for playing hardball. You don't happenstance across prime river front property like that.
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I don't blame the city at all. They're making the right decision both for the long-term future of the area, and where it would be best to have the arena in the inner city. People acting like NEXT was anything more than the Flames saying "give us free land here" is bothersome, like the Flames really can make any demand for where the arena will go. They're in a position where the city will tell them where an arena can go, and they can agree to contribute or not.
The list of reasons the West Village was a bad spot for NEXT is long, and the reasons why the city wouldn't want it there are even longer. And supposedly (according to frinkprof, who I know is connected), this was passed on to CSEC before they ever made NEXT public, something that undoubtedly annoyed administrators.