Raise the Hammer

Ryan,

Something significant shifted behind the scenes between May and July, and I'm determined to figure out what it was.

There is no conspiracy to be found there.

Your quote above is taken out of context of an article that took what Scott Mitchell said out of context. Scott was trying to be very supportive of the Mayor and the City in their city-building projects.

You will note what he did -not- say in that story or the quote you use. Specifically he did not say the West Harbour would work for getting 30,000 people into and out of a stadium there on a regular basis.

Once we recognized that the City was determined to build the stadium in the West Harbour without any plan to address the access, transit, and parking problems with a stadium in that location, we were forced to go public with our concerns over the city's plans.

The Ticats are not favour of suburban locations for stadiums over downtown locations. We are in favour of locations that work for hosting large events over locations that do not work.

Had the City been able to come up with solutions to the access problems with the West Harbour location, such as a deal with CN to use their rail yards for parking and access to the 403, then that location might have worked for a large event business.

But the City were not able to offer solutions to the problems we pointed out to them. When the City went in the opposite direction by assuring the local residents associations that they would not be expanding local streets to accommodate stadium bus and vehicle traffic or build new parking facilities, we were required to point out that a stadium would fail in that location under those conditions.

On the other hand we remain, as per Scott's quote above, very supportive of doing some innovative development in the West Harbour. This development needs to be compatible with the assets that that location features. So the "Setting Sail" plan, to build condos shops and offices there where you have much smaller volumes of traffic that would be spread-out over the course of the day, would make sense.

Cheers, Bob.