Quote:
Originally Posted by mikephoen
Seattle metro area is three times the size of Calgary. London is 10 times bigger. That’s why buildings there can be privately financed. Try to find an example of a metro area with less than 1.5 million people with a privately financed arena. I did some research and found nothing. I did come across an article that states that the city of Winnipeg pays the Jets a subsidy every year (16.3M in 2018).
And this deal is easily better than the Edmonton one. Katz only put up 19.7 million of his own money according to the City of Edmonton website. Even CalgaryNext wasn’t that greedy. CSEC is putting up 275M upfront for this one. It’s a fair deal.
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Is it the size of the market that we're concerned about though? The Flames have no problem selling tickets last I checked and this is one of the healthiest markets in the league. Just because these places are larger (despite the fact that this stadium in London is not the "one" place to watch football), doesn't mean that we have no option other than public funding.
And this morning, hearing from Brett Wilson just makes me realise the sales pitch that we're getting here. Now the new event center is going to be worth $1.5bn in 35 years and the city gets that today for the low low price of $275m It's incredible really how generous these people are to the city. We all know, if that was actually the case and actually an amazing deal, private money dive in an invest the cash. It's not though, so they aren't.