Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
Seattle is three times the size of Calgary (and growing rapidly), and the new arena will likely have two major-league tenants, not one. These facts should suggest to you some reasons why it's easier to justify $600 million in private money for an arena there.
Building an NHL-quality arena with your own money in a city of a million and change is a good way to throw your money away, and significantly more entertaining than flushing it down the toilet. People keep mentioning privately financed arenas in places like New York, Toronto, and now Seattle. Well, boys and girls, we're not in that league, and an arena here won't draw that kind of cashflow. The closest parallel for us is Ottawa, where they built an arena with private money, and it promptly went broke.
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I'm not sure this is true.
http://www.northlands.com/rexall-pla...d-by-pollstar/
Rexall was the 5th busiest venue in North America in a 2014 poll.
Now around 30 of these dates would have been junior games which probably don't come close to making the same money as other events, but I think that an arena in Calgary would be very profitable.
The Alberta cities aren't really equatable to Ottawa that can't sell out the building when their team was just in the conference finals.
I'm also not sure that you can group Calgary's ownership which is worth billions to the situation in Ottawa, where Rod Brydon didn't appear to have net worth of anywhere close to a billion. I can find one article that puts his personal net worth at under $10 million in 1990 after the collapse of another one of his businesses.
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/rep...l.com&page=all
I would think that the Calgary ownership group could easily afford to finance their own rink without financial peril.
When the the other privately funded Canadian arena owners were having difficulty in the 1990s you had skyrocketing player salaries. That's not the case anymore. The cost inputs are much more stable now.
Edmonton's politicians should have held out for a better deal, but Mayor Mandel was looking for a legacy project and did his best to push the council into accepting Katz's sweetheart deal.
Calgary's politicians can do better and still have a new arena built.