Transit fees hurting Bombers’ bottom line

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This article was published 20/04/2018 (3064 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Football Club president and CEO Wade Miller isn’t thrilled the Bombers continue to pay for public transportation to and from Investors Group Field on game days.

“That’s an ongoing issue that needs to be resolved. We’ve talked about it every year,” Miller said in an interview with the Free Press on Thursday. “It’s part of all the agreements when the stadium was built, and that’s now coming out of the operating budget of the football club, which isn’t right.”

For a fifth straight year, the football club has alone funded the public transportation program’s cost associated with the fees paid to Winnipeg Transit and other third-party providers for bus service to and from IGF. Since 2013, the cost has totalled more than $3.8 million, all coming out of the team’s operating budget.

“Our fans need to get to the stadium, and right now it’s the fans and the Winnipeg Football Club paying for this,” Miller said.

Progress has been made on the issue, albeit slowly, Miller said. Triple B Stadium — a non-share corporation that manages the stadium and which the Bombers are a member of — formally acknowledged its legal obligation to fund a portion of the program, retroactive to 2013 and on a go-forward basis. Hence, the Bombers recorded a receivable of $3.4 million from Triple B for the cost recovery, written in its 2017 financial report released Thursday.

Although Triple B has acknowledged its duty to pay, the football club worries it won’t be able to recover the money, so much so that it recorded an allowance for doubtful accounts equal to the full recovery amount of $3.4 million.

“We’ve tried to work with the City of Winnipeg — they have not been receptive to us working on this,” Miller said. “Everyone is aware that there is a written agreement on this and it belongs to Triple B, and that’s where it’s getting resolved and it’s going to take time to do that.”

jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @jeffkhamilton