Comment 57954

By Zephyr (registered) | Posted January 25, 2011 at 11:40:58

My (latest) letter to council:

Apparently our mayor has now boiled the PanAm project goals down to “save the Ti-Cats” (apparently at any cost) and “no tax increases”. I suspect it is not his prerogative to change the PanAm strategy from a legacy of amateur sport with the Ti-Cats as only a “nice to have”, and I am certain that he cannot in honesty characterize this as “what the people of Hamilton want.”

Because I am a resident of Hamilton and I wanted more. I expected true leadership that would take a scarce resource, Future Fund and taxpayer dollars, and invest them in a way that would maximize our return on investment. We all know that stadiums do not traditionally offer return on investment, so we needed to be strategic and find a location that would allow us to kick-start private investment. We found that location in the WH. Waterfronts are destinations and forward-thinking cities are turning their waterfronts into urban playgrounds. That’s how to create livable cities where companies are willing to locate because their people actually want to live there.

I work in project management and consulting. In any well-run company there is a list of potential projects brought forward, and they look at both cost/benefit of said project and opportunity cost of choosing one project over another. The IWS rebuild comes at any incredibly high opportunity cost – the loss of any opportunity to remediate contaminated brownfields, loss of private development dollars in a high-demand area, and loss of a permanent velodrome facitility.

We are a city that has long been brimming with unfilled potential, and decisions and leadership like we witnessed last night is why that potential is never fulfilled. I urge councilors to say no to the IWS rebuild, even if the funding gap is somehow closed. It offers nothing but a very expensive status quo.

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