Raise the Hammer

Can I pose this question, and please excuse me if I have asked this before.

Can we ever get to a place where poverty is not as desperate, where our infastructure is not so in need, and the focus on new jobs isn't so blatantly apparent? If so, is that 5 years, 10 years and at what risk does postponing this process pose with regards to losing the Cats?

Would the Cats support a decsion by the public against building a stadium, versus just 16 people on council voting against it? If the people said no, would they be more understanding and willing to stick this out? Could we revisit perhaps the Commonwealth games in 5 or 10 years, or is Hamilton at such a low point of financial desparity, that there is no foreseable time in which we feel we will be able to feel good about spending this kind of money on a sports stadium?

Everyone knows in part, I am on Sam's side, although committing to only $20M for Ivor Wynne I would think would seal the Cats fate. Some extra funds would need to be committed to go the restore root. You have to replace the bench seats. Some now, and create a 5 year plan to have all bench seats replaced with folding seats. Brian Timmis needs to come down to showcase the stadium, and create surface parking. Same goes with Scott Park. At least tear it down (which should be it's own budget removed from stadium funding), and start with more surface parking there, and look long term, into possibly making that space a parking garage.

We need to drastically improve the services to Ivor Wynne such as water pressure and electrical as well. This is OUR facility, and we need to help the tennants make it work. Bob Young has put some money into this thing, OUR thing, so I think it's time we put some money into it as well if we are going to give up on the Pan Am process. We have all heard over the course of the summer, that Ivor Wynne is used some 200 times by various groups, so let's take care of it so that it remains a place fans love to be, and a place players like to play.

These few things either buys us more time until we feel our city can afford a new stadium, or it starts a process where we decide Ivor Wynne is our long term facility, and we do something with it. We all work with it, to ensure it is an asset to our city. Not something we sweep under the rug and tell the Cats all the best making it work in a stadium we don't have any desire to create a business plan for.

Ivor Wynne would need a management committee made up of citizens, who use creative brainstorming to make this place work like it has never worked before. Things like this map I started, grants for business startups along King or Barton in the stadium distruct to turn this part of our city around. I get that downtowns are the lifeline of a city, but why not move east for a little while and work at creating something special in a different part of the city. If crime rates are so high around here, let's fix that. You have to get downtown somehow, and Barton is a major cross city route. It has some nice spots, and the city already tried to beautify the areas between Wentworth and Victoria with parking medians and centre medians with flowers and such. That could be built upon, and even duplicated around the stadium. The Stadium Mall has even undergone a nice clean-up, including the new Fresch Co grocery stores wich have replaced Price Choppers. They have transformed into nice little grocers.

The proximately of Ivor Wynne to major Gage Park festivals or the Ottawa Street shopping district, and even the Centre and all the parking available for things like Park and Ride. I repeat myself many times in this message but the bottom line is, a $20M plan isn't enough. We need a little more funding than that, and some citizen man-power who have the passion, drive, to do whatever it takes to finally make Ivor Wynne Stadium work.

5 years. Extend her life by 5 years bare minium, and let's see what we might be able to do.

And hey, build a Tiger-Town store along the Cannon side of IWS like places like Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA. I guarantee you it will make more money at IW than downtown. Once again, try some temporary structure like a relocatable building from NRB in Grimsby, and see how sales do over a 1 or 2 year period, before building a permanent structure. I worked for NRB back in the day, and we did a project in Vaugahn, at a high school that looked like a museum that had reached it's capacity, and encorporated portables into the the school, piecing around 6 or 7 portables together, and you could hardly tell they were not part of the original structure when we were done. It would probably be a fairly inexpensive thing to try out.

I wish schoools around here would do something like this, instead of plopping portables all over the school grounds. It looks so cheap. Even better, stop building new schools without properly looking into long term needs. Look at the fairly new Lawfield School; already housing portables on it's grounds. Sad.

But that is a whole new can of worms.

Comment edited by lawrence on 2010-11-03 09:16:29