[GreenLantern2814]

The owners could move the team to Houston tomorrow and make way more money. I don’t care how “passionate” we are about the team, we’re a market of 1.2M people with zero reach beyond our immediate geography.

The Houston metro area is 7M people.

They’d do it tomorrow if they weren’t from around here.

Make no mistake, the Calgary Flames are a luxury entertainment product (one of the things you need to keep high-value corporate entities in your city).

The city needs a new arena. For all kinds of different reasons, not just for the Flames, or the events.

An arena that hosts thousands of people a night for entertainment events year round needs to be structurally sound. It needs to have not been flooded with river water up to row 12.

We have neither. (It’s truly ridiculous this wasn’t fast-tracked in 2013 - how do you allow a flooded-out building like that function at full capacity indefinitely?)

Anyway.

The Flames special because they’re ours. Because they won a Stanley Cup in the era of the Gretzky Oilers. Because it was in.

Like, I don’t know how much of a tax increase this is meant to result in. Is it $5? A hundred?

Honestly, who cares.

People who are opposed to the arena never have a better idea for the money. It’s never “don’t build the arena, triple the snow removal capacity”. It’s just “do nothing”.

It’s just, do nothing. Don’t raise my taxes. I don’t care about the Flames.

Well, there’s 270 days of the year when the Flames and their properties aren’t in the arena.

Which means it can be used for basically anything else.

Something you might have interest in.

One of the many musical acts who never come here because the Saddledome doesn’t support their elaborate stages, perhaps.

And if you’re going to say “I’m not interested in going to any concerts, trade shows, performances, forums, assemblies or anything that could possibly take place in an arena and have no desire for any of my fellow Calgarians to be able to do so in a structure that honest to God could collapse at a moment’s notice,” maybe city life just isn’t for you. Maybe just #### off to Vulcan or someplace even more non-descript, if all you want is to pay no taxes and do nothing.

If the Saddledome is a car, it’s rusted out, missing a mirror, the suspension is shot, oil has been leaking for actual years, the heater doesn’t work, and all four tires are different.

And even though, yes, it does technically run, when you’re honest with yourself, it’s embarrassing to be seen in it.

Quit being ####in cheap and buy a new arena already.