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By Simon (registered) - website | Posted December 23, 2010 at 10:55:03
Hey Lawrence, happy to be having this back and forth with you.
It is my understanding the 20 million your referencing is to keep it going as is. No new luxury boxes, no extra frills from the structure we currently have. From a business perspective keeping things as is doesn't make sense if your losing money on it.
I'm all for nostalgia, and trust me, I do love watching games at Ivor Wynne but keeping things the same will, well, keep things the same. I really really don't know where we could get an extra 15,000 seats from, and even still, the point of the new stadium was never to make it bigger than ivor wynne, but more modern and a more fun gameday experience.
With all due respect to the "broader community output" I disagree wholeheartedly. As they say, "a camel is a horse made by committee". I think a problem with Hamilton as a whole is there's a little too much weight given to the "keep things the same" camp. you even mentioned the "pardon my lunch bucket" mentality of the city. I think we can all agree that blue collar jobs are dissapearing from the city. Instead we're seeing the innovation park and other white collar opportunities starting to make their way in. Personally I'm thrilled by this. I hope the "pardon my lunch bucket" mentality soon starts transforming into a "let's do this ourself in an innovative way" mentality. We saw this sort of transformation take place in waterloo, where essentially a city driven by regional agriculture became the tech hub of Canada. Change is a good thing, and I feel this city has a habit of being paralyzed in the face of it by checks and balances to make sure the old ways aren't offended.
Bringing it back to the stadium issue. With a new stadium and new facilities Bob Young also promised to go after an NASL team. In fact this stadium issue has become a major issue in the Canadian soccer community, for example:
http://www.canadiansoccernews.com/conten...
Not only would an NASL team provide secondary entertainment, but also and academy system to help talented youngsters from the community develop a career in soccer. Vancouver was the first one to do it, Toronto and Montreal recently did it, and Bob Young has vowed to do it should he get a new facility.
you can check more on them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitecaps_F... http://www.torontofc.ca/academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Im...
To anyone who thinks a velodrome would provide more opportunity for community use, I would argue the complete opposite—that facilities catered to youth soccer would do a lot more. To anyone who thinks you would be able to show up to the velodrome any old day of the week with your huffy and peddle around, I think your sadly mistaken.
I understand I'm probably going to upset a lot of people with this post. I apologize if I do, I just hope you understand that there are opposing opinions to a lot of the popular ones on this board and consideration has been put into them.
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