Stadium ain’t dead yet

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/09/2010 (5532 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Now that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have proved their ability to get things done on the football field — at least at home — Peg City football fans must be wondering about the brain trust off the field.

It’s been more than a month since Creswin Properties suggested mid-September would be the time when the city, province, Winnipeg Football Club, the University of Manitoba and Creswin itself would hash out the final design for a 30,000-seat football stadium and begin the actual construction on a project whose final price tag is now unknown.

But Sept. 15 came and went with only a column by Gary Lawless marking the occasion. In case you missed it, the Freep sports scribe implored all the stadium-building players to come clean about a situation that appears to be unravelling and tell the public what the heck is going on.

But that didn’t happen last week. Premier Greg Selinger was out of the country. Mayor Sam Katz was on the campaign trail and then took time off to observe Yom Kippur, the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar. Creswin’s David Asper was similarly occupied.

And the club itself and the university weren’t about to speak up, seeing as they have the most to lose with regard to the stadium project and the least ability to control their immediate destinies.

To conspiracy theorists, this silence is like catnip. A small but significant minority of Winnipeggers believes the stadium project marks some sort of secretive attempt to swindle taxpayers out of cash, property or other assets.

I can’t really blame the loonies, given the twists and turns in a stadium saga that began in 2004, when the Bombers first floated the notion of building a new home outside the Perimeter.

Since then, we had the original Asper pitch for Polo Park. We had the competition between Creswin and Leo Ledohowski’s St. Boniface site. We had the selection of Creswin by the football club, the rejection of the Polo Park site by Ottawa, the short-lived flirtation with Point Douglas and then not one but two “stadium deals” at the University of Manitoba. And soon, a probable third.

If there’s a conspiracy at work here, the conspirators are idiots. Nobody fails so publicly and so spectacularly by design.

But there are no simple solutions. Ottawa is unlikely to provide a cent, despite the recent controversy about a Quebec City hockey arena. A provincially funded stadium is a tough sell when the provincial budget is increasingly consumed by health-care demands.

The city doesn’t want to fork over any money. Creswin’s resources are limited. And there is no white knight waiting to ride in — Canad Inns, it must be noted, has been slow to begin its projects at the Health Sciences Centre and Metropolitan Theatre and saw the city yank funding away from its stalled Polo Park water park.

Unless you’re a construction company, there is no money to be made building a stadium. It’s just something that has to be built to prevent the Winnipeg Football Club from losing money shovelling restoration funds into Canad Inns Stadium — a task that will eventually wind up on the backs of taxpayers, if nothing is done.

Which is why I’m not prepared to call the University of Manitoba stadium plan dead. It’s also why the Selinger government appears hell-bent to find some resolution to this headache long before the start of the 2011 provincial election.

I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen, but several options remain on the table. The province could go ahead and build a stadium on its own, using the new taxes from the sale of the Polo Park land as some means of recovering its costs in the long run. Asper may have a horseshoe stored somewhere convenient.

Or the football club could issue public shares in the team and see the Bombers truly become community-owned. Katz has been praising this idea since 2006, when he got into an oversight dispute with former club president Lyle Bauer.

But issuing shares isn’t an easy task: The legal and financial implications would take endless hours to sort out, which means no hard money could be raised for many months or even years.

But if that’s what Katz wants, he has to come out and say it. The same goes for anyone else on council.

No incumbent councillor wants the stadium deal to go south before the civic election because that would give angry, otherwise apolitical Bomber fans a reason to show up at the polls on Oct. 27.

The window for action on the stadium is closing for all of the players involved.