[timun]

Originally Posted by Beatle17

The City has NEVER built a top line sports facility. The McMahon family built the football stadium and the Federal and Provincial governments built the Saddledome for the Olympics. Any renovations done to the Dome, including clean up after the flood were done by the Flames ownership group.

1. The McMahon brothers did not build the football stadium, they donated $300,000 toward its construction. It was developed by the City and the University of Alberta at Calgary (became the UofC in 1966). It is still owned by the UofC. The McMahons otherwise had nothing to do with the construction of the stadium.
2. The federal and provincial governments helped to fund the construction of the Saddledome, but they were otherwise not directly involved in its construction. The province and feds gave grants to the City, and the City managed the purse strings. Construction was managed by the Calgary Olympic Coliseum Society. The cost split was ~30% federal money, ~32% provincial money, ~32% City money, and the remainder nominally from the organizing committee (OCO '88). OCO '88 also paid an additional $1.5M to install seats at the press level before the Olympics; from the '83-'84 to '86-'87 NHL seasons there were no seats up there, and seating capacity was only 16,605.
3. Renovations done since 1995 have been done by Flames ownership because they paid $20M to buy out the rights to operate the facility from the Stampede board. The major renos in '94 which added the luxury boxes at the 100 level were paid for by the Flames (~2/3) and government grants (~1/3), and the Flames managed the reno. (They're the ones who demanded it in the first place...). Prior to the '94-'95 season the Stampede board managed concessions, the parking, and received a cut of the gate receipts from the Flames, and the Flames found that untenable so they paid the one-time $20M fee and have managed the facility ever since. The Flames get all the revenue from the Saddledome, and in consideration of that they're on the hook for renos. As such, if you have any complaints about the current state of the arena, it's the Flames' fault.