Quote:
Originally Posted by SuperMatt18
Edwards and the Flames might have backed out anyways.
But I think that they did open the door for them to do so. And IMO now the Flames have a better deal, and the city has a slightly worse deal...so it feels like it worked out for the Flames but not for the city.
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Completely bang on. From my perspective what happened is as follows:
- First deal was city and Flames agreed to go 50/50 essentially, with the Flames paying the overrun. Typically overrun would be expected scope creep / ballooning of some costs.
- What occurred between when the deal was signed and when the Flames backed out (facilitated by the mayor trying to force some fairly minor incremental scope creep on them that fit her mandate) is that construction costs in general went up in a crazy fashion, even before and chance for overruns. In the old agreement, Flames were on the scope for that in the "overrun" bucket.
- Agree or not, likely the Flames felt like the fair deal was closer to 50/50 with the city than it was going to end up being because of the unexpected inflation even before shovels hit the ground, so they took the open door the mayor gave them to re-negotiate.
End result of the past time since then has been two parties (the city and the Flames) who both wanted this to get back to it and save face. Today, is how they went about doing that:
- Increase the "scope of the project" and bring the province in for infrastructure costs to blur the lines.
- Expand scope beyond the arena costs, allows the City overstate their contribution and hide the actual amount contributing to the arena which is probably more than the old deal, because they aren't reporting on just the arena costs.
I know people who think Edwards and the Flames should get 0 funding won't feel this way, but if you believe that the city wanted this too, and was going to contribute big dollars regardless (like they did in the 1st deal), I actually think the Flames agreed to take one on the chin here to get this done and allow some politicians to save face.
On paper, this deal looks like the Flames are contributing way less than the public funds, because they aren't isolating the arena costs. Makes the Flames look like the bad guy in the court of public opinion, and the only reason they'd do that was to give the Mayor the ability to not get destroyed for paying more (likely key if they wanted to get it done, because the mayor couldn't be seen to lose this I'm sure), by allowing the conversation to focus on the project beyond the arena, which really has nothing to do with them.