It's crazy how much misinformation is out there on the arena deal, but sadly that seems to be CSEC's gameplan.
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Originally Posted by wired
I am expecting the team to be sold and moved before an agreement for a new arena is set in stone. Nothing to do with the fans, and everything to do with the city.
Owners should foot the bill for an arena outside the city limits. that way they have 100% ownership and no interference from the city.
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Owning the building is not a good thing.
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Originally Posted by GullFoss
The CSEC and City of Calgary had a deal pre-covid in which the flames were responsible for 100% of cost overruns. Before construction started, covid hit. And then cost overruns we're going to be 20%-40%. Which is valued at close to $100m-$200m of additional costs for the flames.
People who think the deal died over some solar panels are missing the obvious.
The new deal is going to be split exactly like the old deal, but will reflect the new higher, post-covid cost. And the flames will accept some $10m-$20m in clown climate items to make the deal more palatable from a political perspective.
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Solar panels are a nothing burger. They pay for themselves over the lifespan of the building. It's a totally reasonable requirement for the city to have. It's just a bad faith attempt at a wedge issue.
Your other timeline is not quite right - the original deal had 50/50 cost overruns up to $25M total. Beyond that was ambiguous.
Through COVID costs obviously blew through that provision. July 2021 is when the Flames agreed to take on the cost overruns, in exchange for removing CMLC (ie. the public interest advocate) and IIRC value engineering away things like the community rink.
Municipal election was October 2021. It's interesting to speculate what lead to the July 2021 change; one would think there wasn't a lot of appetite from city councillors to announce further corporate subsidization so close to the election, so it was probably CSEC's only option at the time aside from hitting pause/cancel.
And then the election would inform their next moves. I haven't done a deep dive into voting records and how the new council compared to the previous, but there were definitely some new councillors tripping over themselves to help drive CSEC's narrative and get the ball rolling to 'save' the deal. I would guess that CSEC would have tried to collaborate more or gone with a mutual pause-button message if Jeff Davison won instead of the Gondek = evil strategy. Hard to say what they would have done with a Mayor Farkas.
I also wonder if CSEC miscalculated their longterm leverage by hitting the nuclear option while the team was playing well. Public appetite would look a lot different if they managed a better playoff run last year or continued the trajectory into this season.