Raise the Hammer

Man....Bob Young is starting to screw himself....a quote from his interview with TSN: "The whole trick to a modern sports stadium is to get 25,000 people to that location in very short order, half-an-hour...hour worth of time, you get them home again in very short order..."

No...Bob...that isn't the trick. The trick is to pay the folks that built you the stadium...through tax revenue. That doesn't mean people being teleported into the stadium and back home again with zero interaction with any other business.

What Bob is asking for here is EXACTLY what several dozen cities initially thought was the "trick"...and found it to be the "absolute failure".

You get people in and out...yes....but you give people reasons not to go straight home. That is what makes the area surrounding a stadium vibrant and lucrative for businesses. In Bob's idea though there would just be parking lots surrounding the stadium so no business, other than his Tiger-Cats, would see a dime.

He goes on to say that he is on board with fixing up the West Harbour....BUT..."it is 2.5km from the nearest highway entrance."....Bob....that isn't miles, it's kilometres. Even if traffic is moving at a crawl of 20km/h...you would still get to that highway in under 10 minutes. Ever tried getting out of a parking lot of 7,000 cars??? Good luck getting out of there in less than an hour. If there is ever a lane closure/construction on either the Linc or the RHVP you're totally screwed.

His "a few dollars worth of subsidy" is also a bit of a slap in the face to the City. How about a team that is competitive? That might work too Bob.

He somewhat saved himself by saying..."We're going to work very hard for the best solution...", "We're going to work hard on it, we're going to come up with a solution. I have no idea what the solution is going to look like today...but we're going to come up with it."

I take from that....the door is still open (since no other reasonable doors are)...and Bobby will find an agreement with the city he can live with that will make him much better off than he is at Ivor Wynne...and once the city realizes the benefits of a downtown stadium he will probably be able to negotiate a much better "solution" in the years ahead.

It's just a good thing Bob didn't have Mitchell the Mouth speak on his behalf to TSN....I'm sure we would have seen rallying cries and possibly a few salutes, fist pumps and pounding a fist on a desk to raise the troops to overthrow the local government....by any means necessary.

Comment edited by Jeffrey93 on 2010-08-17 02:14:23