They lied, we believed them; in the end we got a good deal on a nice stadium By: Paul Wiecek Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 27, 2018

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/07/2018 (2380 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s play a game.

Let’s pretend we live in a world in which the retail industry is not only dying (which it is), but already dead (which it is not). It’s a pretend world where no new bricks-and-mortar stores of any kind will ever again be built.

Additionally, let’s pretend that the current vacant Target store adjacent to Polo Park, as well as all the vacant land between Target and Polo Park, upon which once sat Winnipeg Stadium, has suddenly been discovered to be leaching radioactivity at levels that render the site unsuitable for development for the next million years.

Let’s pretend, in other words, that no level of government ever again collects even a single dime of taxes of any kind on land that was supposed to help pay off the Manitoba government’s share of the construction costs for Investors Group Field.

Got a picture of that world?

Good, because it is a world that would still be the envy of taxpayers in every other major city in Canada, not to mention most in the U.S. and just about every other jurisdiction in the world that has constructed a major new sports facility in the last quarter-century.

For all the hand-wringing that has gone on this week in reaction to the revelation that the province might have to write off its portion of the costs to construct Investors Group Field, the simple fact remains that even if the province never recovers a cent of those costs — which, come on, that’s ridiculous — taxpayers in this province still have gotten one hell of a deal on IGF compared to, well… just about everywhere else.

Look, we can agree Investors Group Field was built at a bad location that will forever cause traffic headaches before and after big events.

We can agree there were design flaws that an eight-year-old should have spotted long before a shovel went into the ground.

And we can agree that the place was built poorly, with cracking concrete, leaky ceilings and standing water on a scale that would have you hiring a lawyer if this was a shed project in your backyard, much less a public-works project the size of IGF.

But for everything that was wrong with IGF, there was also one thing right — in a city that loves a bargain, we actually got an exceptionally good one on our new stadium.

And none of that changed this week with the revelation that yes, like everywhere else in the world, it turns out it’s probably going to take some taxpayer dollars to have built a new stadium.

Now, let’s assume that the province never recovers a cent of the initial $85-million construction loan — that has ballooned to $118.7 million with interest charges — the government has now written off because the old stadium site at Polo Park continues to sit empty and untaxed for a lot of reasons, many of which begin with the word “Amazon.”

So let’s call that $118.7 million the taxpayers’ contribution and compare that to the contributions taxpayers made to the recent construction of and renovations to stadiums in four other Canadian Football League cities.

Hamilton? The entire $145.7-million cost of Tim Hortons Field was paid by taxpayers. All of it. Every cent.

Ottawa? The city spent $130 million to renovate old Frank Clair Stadium, now TD Place Stadium.

Regina? The city and province are on the hook for $153 million of the $278-million cost to build Mosaic Stadium.

B.C.? Every dime of a $514-million construction loan for a massive renovation of B.C. Place was put up by the province and the facility is now owned and operated by a provincial Crown corporation, which, well, we all know how that’s going to turn out.

So which of those deals would you rather have? Don’t like those comparisons? Let’s talk hockey.

Rogers Place, the new home of the Edmonton Oilers, was built with $200 million of public money, while every cent of the $400 million it took to build Videotron Centre in Quebec — where it’s becoming clear no NHL team will ever play — came from taxpayers.

Yes, you might be saying, but we’re all a bunch of spendthrift socialists here in Canada. Surely those fiscally prudent Americans aren’t throwing away public money on sports palaces!

You slay me. One recent study found, on average, taxpayers have covered more than 70 per cent of the costs of building NFL stadiums over the years. Las Vegans alone had to come up with $750 million to build a stadium for the Raiders franchise that is headed there from Oakland.

And so it goes. While everybody rails at the idea, the simple fact is every city needs a place to gather — the Romans had coliseums, every medieval city had a town square and today we have stadiums — and it’s no more outrageous to think some public money should go towards constructing a stadium than it is to think government should contribute to any public project that benefits us all.

Of course, it’s also not outrageous to expect the principal tenant of such a facility should also pay a big portion of the costs, which — lost in this week’s headlines — is exactly what the Blue Bombers have been doing. It needs to be said that the Bombers are on the hook for $85 million of the IGF construction costs and none of that changed this week.

The club is responsible for a $3.5-million annual mortgage payment; it hasn’t missed one yet and there’s no reason to think it will miss one in the future.

For all the problems with IGF, it is worth repeating that the Bombers, at least, have held up their end.

And so too, for that matter, have the Winnipeg Jets. It’s also worth taking a trip down memory lane here to point out that taxpayers contributed just $40.5 million to the original construction of MTS Centre.

Put that together with the $118 million in public money that is now in IGF, and for a shade under $160 million, we as taxpayers have a downtown NHL arena that is home to a damn fine hockey team and a shiny CFL stadium that is home to a very entertaining football team.

By any measure in the real world, that is an incredible deal. But in Winnipeg, it is cause for revolution, judging by the reaction to this week’s news.

The real problem with this deal isn’t that there was public money spent on a new stadium. The problem is then-premier Greg Selinger’s provincial government pretended that a modern new stadium was going to be built without any public money.

The NDP sold this deal as though all the tax money they were going to collect on the redevelopment of the old stadium site was a done deal instead of what it actually was — speculative.

But we threw those bums out long ago and unless you want to now drag Selinger out of retirement, put him in the stocks and then pelt him with tomatoes, we’re probably just going to have to accept that we got sold a bill of goods by a bunch of craven politicians — is there any other kind? — and got a pretty nice public works project out of it for our trouble.

I get that everyone loves to hate Investors Group Field. First impressions are lasting ones and the first impression the stadium made was a disaster, but the stadium that opened in 2013 is not the stadium that exists today. The leaky ceilings have been repaired, the faulty concrete removed and replaced and the ceilings no longer leak; God knows they’ve been stress-tested by a relentless string of thunderstorms the past few seasons that have seemed to delay every second Bombers game.

Even the traffic situation, while still lethargic in the hour before and after events, has improved dramatically with last year’s addition of a new rapid transit station.

For all its myriad problems — and an ongoing lawsuit between the people who built it and the people who paid them to build it, which I’m betting recovers at least some public money — IGF today is actually a pretty darn good place to see a game or a concert.

If all you know about the place is what you’ve heard, I’d encourage you to go down and judge for yourself. And if your only experience with IGF came in that disastrous first year, give the place a second chance; you will be pleasantly surprised, I think.

Nice things cost money. Anyone who ever told us otherwise was lying. And we were fools for believing them.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek

Paul Wiecek
Reporter (retired)

Paul Wiecek was born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End and delivered the Free Press -- 53 papers, Machray Avenue, between Main and Salter Streets -- long before he was first hired as a Free Press reporter in 1989.

   Read full biography