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Originally Posted by Nathan
I did read something today though about the mayor of Halifax wanting to push for some sort of stadium. Not much was really said except that they think it is an important piece of sporting infrastructure.
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Unfortunately a lot of past stadium planning in Halifax was poorly managed and lacked direction. The last 2 sports event bidding processes were absolute train wrecks. The Commonwealth Games bid for example would have included a stadium and there were even funding commitments of around $700M, but for some reason the bid committee started to plan $2B games and then (I think the province) freaked out, pulled the plug, and everything started back from the beginning. No Halifax/NS politicians would touch sporting events with a ten foot pole and we started to hear about Moncton. More recently city council was interested in bidding on the women's FIFA tournament even though they had no clue where they would even put a stadium and had little hope of building one on time for the games. Note that this started largely because people wanted a CFL stadium and ended with a half-baked plan for a soccer facility.
This is all basically the story of a poorly-run city shooting itself in the foot over and over.
We will see if things change over the next few months. I think a modest CFL-sized stadium is a perfectly reasonable and achievable goal, but it has to be championed by somebody with influence (like the mayor) and it has to proceed in a sane way. They need to pick a site and carefully plan an appropriate design that maximizes the use of the facility. Once that's done they can go after sporting events, maybe see if there is interest in a CFL franchise, etc.