Raise the Hammer

I think what Adrian is driving at, is that it wasn't selected in every way.

It seems to me that although much of it seems to be about secrecty and back door deals, a part of me wonders how much is also about oversight and assumptions. Are you telling me a whole committee is corrupt and deliberately kept these Veledrome details secret? Or, was everyone under the assumption that aside from moneis required, the committee was free to run as it was until a moment in time (aka yesterday), where voting on the location the committee had come close to an agreement on, and dollar amounts needed to be discussed.

Not that we should just except their pinky fingers extended to the corner of their mouth in a statement of 'whoops', but I think Adrian in so many ways, has it right with his discussions about Town Halls and the need to step back from our political finger pointing, and realize the system in general is broken and we are equally as responsible for this mess. Especially, people like me who went most of their life hardly involved in municiple politics.

Let me ask you this: Before each of those dozen votes for West Harbor as the Cities chosen location for the new stadium, did we invite Bob Young down for coffee to discuss our game plan to make sure he was still on board with everything? And don't give me the private investor line. Bob may be equally to blame here or Scott Mitchell or Pigskin Pete for that matter for blinding us with Civic Pride when we should have been mad at the big bad Tiger-Cats owner who, bottom line, did save the team and pour a great deal of money and time into getting us to a point where we were even debating a stadium for our second or third or fourth chance Tiger-Cats.

Sure, it doesn't mean we should have to bow to his feet for the duration of his ownership simply because he saved the day at the last second of the last hour, but it does mean we owe him a little respect and to step back and realize that if we must cast blame, it needs to be equally spread around the boardroom table.

I look at the stadium in particular and the desire for IO, to have council and others involved in this Pan Am process to stay tight-lipped and I get mad at them for taking our $55M, and other funds that are coming from the Province and Feds and not one cent is coming from IO specifically. We are creating jobs for them and they are building us a community owned stadium. The fact that we have no say in design or how local jobs are going to be created to build it or anything to do with the building of something that at the end of the day, is going to be ours.

So spread that hatred you hold around or better yet, or get on board the Town Hall train and let's start making a difference by getting off our computers, and meeting in person to discuss these problems. Some of us have already started doing it. We gain nothing from blame. Only from action.

So no, it wasn't voted on a dozen times because there isn't one atom in my soul that believes Bob Young would string our council along for 12 votes before saying 'WHOA!' We have no desire to play down there. Sure, a lot of this speculation could be avoided if we knew more of the truth surrounding this whole fiasco, but maybe we will never know so le'ts move on and work towards not letting this happen again.

The fact that RTH has obtained some meeting minutes from the Veldrome Committee and more and more people are demanding transparency, I would think that we are already headed in the right direction towards making it harder for this closed door secrecy to exist. We need to continue to push this as Ryan, Matt, Joey, et al have already been doing for quite some time, and then brainstorm as a collective as to how we can fix some of the problems in our city from municipal politics, to toxic waste sites in residential neighborhoods.

Comment edited by lawrence on 2011-08-30 09:19:42