Province huddles with Bombers, Triple B to score new stadium-funding deal By: Larry Kusch Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 27, 2018

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This article was published 26/09/2018 (2185 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister says he’s looking for a new stadium-funding deal with the Blue Bombers that will be less confusing and more transparent to the public.

“Our goal is to replace (the current) arrangement,” he said Thursday.

“This is a big deal for Manitoba. The Bombers are important, the stadium is important. It’s important enough that the public should be able to understand what’s going on with their money because it’s their money that built the stadium,” the premier said.

In a brief interview while attending the official opening of True North Square Plaza, Pallister said discussions are already underway with the Blue Bombers and Triple B Stadium Inc., the consortium that owns the stadium. He said he hopes a new deal can be reached “in the not-too-distant future.”

Pallister said one of his goals is to ensure that a new stadium financing deal is “sustainable” for the Blue Bombers. He repeated an assertion he made earlier in the week that under the current arrangement, the football team would fail to make their payments “no matter how hard they tried.”

On Wednesday, Pallister and Finance Minister Scott Fielding announced that they had written off an $82 million stadium loan, bringing total provincial stadium write-offs this year to $201 million. The provincial government previously wrote off a loan for $118.7 million that was supposed to be paid with tax revenue generated by developments at the old stadium site – a location that remains largely undeveloped.

While the $82 million has been presented as a Bomber debt, it technically is the responsibility of Triple B. Triple B’s sole revenue for the loan is through its management agreement with the Blue Bombers.

Principal and interest payments on the $82 million loan are $4.4 million annually, the government said. It said it chose to write off the debt due to high interest costs and the club’s obligations for ongoing stadium maintenance.

The football club is not obliged to cover off the Triple B’s annual $4.4 million payment, if club revenues fall short. Under a complicated management agreement, the team is only obliged to turn over revenues from entertainment taxes and facility fees plus “excess cash,” based on a complicated formula that assures it retains sufficient working capital to operate.

In an interview Thursday, Bomber president and CEO Wade Miller said Wednesday’s announcement by the province that it was making a loss provision for the $82 million Phase 2 loan does not in any way affect the club’s financial obligations.

“We will make our required minimum payments every year. I can guarantee that,” he said.

Miller said he could not estimate what that total payment will be for 2018. That will depend on revenues from home game attendance and other factors. He said he will not know what the team’s revenues will be — and required payments to Triple B — until after it closes the books on the 2018 fiscal year.

Todd MacKay, Prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Thursday called for a “comprehensive investigation” into a stadium deal that has saddled taxpayers with potentially $200 million in costs due to loans being written off.

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Told of the premier’s plans to restructure the stadium agreement, MacKay insisted on an open process.

“Right now, I don’t think the public has any idea where we’re at other than we’re out hundreds of millions of dollars. So we need some kind of assessment of what happened. How did we get to this point,” he said.

While it’s a good thing that the government is sitting down with Triple B and the Bombers to try to work out a new deal for the future, it should be done in an open manner, MacKay said.

“If this is a backroom deal to fix a previous backroom deal, we’re going to end up going down the same path again,” he said.

MacKay said every effort must also be made to repay taxpayers for the losses.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

Larry Kusch
Legislature reporter

Larry Kusch didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life until he attended a high school newspaper editor’s workshop in Regina in the summer of 1969 and listened to a university student speak glowingly about the journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa.

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