As your newly elected Councillor, I would like to keep you informed about issues as much as possible. The Pan Am Stadium was a huge issue during this past municipal election. All through my campaign I consistently said “unless the private sector and the anchor tenant were coming with big bucks to the table, we cannot afford this project”. The staff has made it clear that there have been no interest from the private sector to invest in this project.
The government was putting in $70,000,000.00 (not the $100mil the media reports) The city was putting in $55,000,000.00 from our savings account (future funds) and $5,000,000.00 from the sale of Ivor Wynne Stadium.
The funding was still short by $34,700,000.00, which did not include land-related costs (such as studies) or traffic infrastructure costs for any site that was chosen.
So in essence, Hamilton Citizens are on the hook to pay $94,700,000.00 and we haven’t even sorted out where the stadium was going to go yet!
The Ti-cats did offer 0-$10mil over a 10 year period to enhance the funding but they wanted control of the parking, concessions and naming rights to the stadium.
Simply put, we cannot afford it.
We were also told by staff that if Council wanted to study Confederation Park, we were warned there would be major problems with the Confederation site such as geo-technical, environmental, the residential development near by, (Ivor Wynn would not have been built in its present location if the stadium were to be built with today’s guidelines). The strict set back rules for the lake and the strict set back rules for the QEW were a major concern for staff as they felt there may not have been enough land for the stadium. The City Manager stated the costs could run into double digits in millions of dollars for traffic infrastructure alone! So the choice was “do we spend even more money on a study that would have proven what we already suspected? – this site would not be appropriate. Even Mayor Bratina stated that we know this site probably won’t go.
Why waste more money? Again. Considering the deadline, there wasn’t enough time to look for another site.
Hope this helps you to understand why there was a clear majority to stop pursuing this project. Should you require any further information, please contact me directly at 905-546-4513 or email me at Brenda.Johnson@hamilton.ca
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