Quote:
Originally Posted by GullFoss
It's not about public subsidies for all teams. A large number of teams are located in areas that have sufficient population bases to make arenas work without the need for public subsidies. They get enough concerts and conventions. Many of them have overlap with an NBA team. The private economics work. The threshold seems to be around 2m-2.5m people.
Calgary is not one of those cities.
So if you want flames ownership to build this without public money, you are asking for a private subsidy. You're basically asking private actors to finance a non-economic investment. No one is going to do that. This isn't a charity.
Likewise, if the flames demanded the City of Calgary pay for the entire facility, that wouldn't be fair to the public, because we'd be asking the public to subsidizes a private business so they can make excess profits.
The solution is to have cost sharing where the flames pay for the most that can be economically justified via private business case. And the public picks up the rest.
This isn't rocket-science. While I cared less about this 10+ years ago when the dome had a good amount of life remaining on it, that is no longer the case. There is now an urgency to get a new arena built as the Saddledome reaches the end of it's useful life.
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This is incorrect. The flames more or less break even with roughly a 80 million dollar payroll. A 30 million dollar payroll cut pays for the arena quite easily. Just change HRR to 20% arena, 50% owner, 30% players.
I am asking the flames and the NHL as a business to manage their payroll so they don’t need public subsidies. Now you might argue that the demand for players makes them worth what they are paid but in that case we shouldn’t have any cap whatsoever. So if you are pro cap then the cap should be set such that competitive balance is achieved and the league can afford the run it’s business.