Stadium talk dominates CFL expansion discussion
FRANCIS CAMPBELL The Chronicle Herald December 28, 2017
Place to play is top of mind in team, city, league officials
This is part two of a series on the possibility of a CFL franchise in Halifax.
PART ONE: CFL in Halifax: A gamble with lots of field to cover
Professional sports teams need a place to call home.
In the Canadian Football League, that place is a stadium, a place conspicuously absent in the effort to bring an Atlantic regional expansion franchise to Halifax.
“Getting the stadium, that’s the ballgame,” said Mike Savage, mayor of Halifax Regional Municipality. “You can’t have a team, you can’t have an ownership group and you can’t be in the CFL if you haven’t got a stadium. It has to be a multi-purpose stadium that’s realistic and economically viable.”
The stadium stumbling block has scuttled many expansion discussions.
“There is no place to play,” said Jeff Cummins, the American-born former CFL player who has run the Acadia Axemen football program for more than a dozen years. “My concern will be that until it shows up, a stadium, a place to play. You can talk about a team all you want but there is no place to fill 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 seats. There is no place to have that game.”
The necessity of a place to play is not lost on the league or the ownership group, registered under the name Maritime Football Ltd.
If you build it they might come
Anthony LeBlanc, one of three front men for the ownership group, refers to a stadium as the elephant in the room and league Commissioner Randy Ambrosie said a stadium is “first and
foremost” among the expansion requirements that the ownership group must address. The two men agree that the stadium could not be a CFL-only facility.
“We’re conscious that this would not just be about the CFL, this would be about unlocking the full potential of the Maritime region to show their hospitality to people from Canada and from around the world at a world-class facility,” Ambrosie said.
Key questions swirl around a potential stadium. Who would finance it? Where would it be built? What would it cost? Who would own it and what would it look like?
The estimate is that a stadium in the Halifax area would cost well north of $200 million. The Saskatchewan Roughriders moved into the $278-million Mosaic Stadium for the 2017 CFL season. The 33,000-seat facility can be expanded to accommodate 40,000.
A Halifax stadium, according to LeBlanc, would likely be an expandable 24,000- to 26,000-seat facility, falling in line with the size of the stadiums that are home to Eastern Division teams in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton.
Moshe Lander, a professor who specializes in the economics of sports at Concordia University in Montreal, said a publicly funded stadium doesn’t make good sense.
“It is not like there is an unlimited amount of tax dollars out there, so if you are going to put it toward a stadium, then that means there is less money for health care, roads, infrastructure, education or whatever else,” Lander said. “Usually, the benefits that come from a stadium don’t justify that diversion of funds.”
Neither is Lander a proponent of the public-private partnership to build a stadium.
“The city or the province will say, ‘We don’t want to put up any of our money, so you put up yours.’ The owners say, ‘If you don’t put up the money, we just won’t have a team.’
“You will find that these ownership groups are rich to begin with because they made their money elsewhere . . . They don’t need a franchise, it’s not their source of wealth, it’s not their source of income. ‘Give us what we want or we can find another worthwhile way to use our money to benefit us.’”
That sort of squeeze play seems unlikely to move the three levels of government that could be involved with a Halifax stadium.
“From a municipal government point of view, we are saying, if you can come back with a plan that allows us to contribute but to contribute in a way that doesn't drain the resources of the municipality, in other words, do some kind of development around the stadium that brings in tax revenue which could then be used to offset our contribution, then that is the kind of thing that I think there would be an appetite for,” Savage said.
“But it’s just not in our capital budget plan right now. There are a lot of things that we need to put money into that the only way to do it is to just spend the money and do it — a fire station or any other number of projects. If there is a way that everybody wins with a stadium, a private entity with other orders of government, I think that is very attractive.”
Premier Stephen McNeil said earlier this month that it is “exciting to see interest in Halifax and Nova Scotia from a reputable group of businessmen.”
But McNeil said the provincial Liberal government had not received any funding requests.
“If we do, it would be assessed just like other requests and projects that come before government,” he said.
The Lansdowne model
Darren Fisher, a former city councillor and now Liberal MP for Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, said he has been a longtime supporter of having the CFL in Halifax.
Lansdowne Park, located in the heart of Ottawa near the Rideau Canal, encompasses the 24,000-seat TD Place Stadium where the Redblacks play, shopping, restaurants and entertainment venues, a farmers market, courtyards, a playground, heritage buildings and green space.
“I have really fallen in love with the model that is in Ottawa around Lansdowne,” the Liberal MP said. “It’s the model that uses private money and leverages the surrounding areas around the stadium in order to help fund the capital costs.
“I hadn’t really even contemplated the ability to build something with no public dollars,” Fisher said. “I kind of envisioned some public dollars and some private dollars and some leveraging of surrounding lands. I’ve also thought of where you could use the growth in tax dollars around the area just to help support it and that would be the public contribution.”
That is in line with Savage’s vision, too.
“You have the complete experience of hotels, restaurants and shops that would be a natural complement to a stadium,” Savage said. “People come in, say, from out of town, they want to shop at the same time as they want to have their football game and do their tailgating. The old idea of building a stadium outside of town where nobody lives and nobody can get to is not attractive. There has to be almost a village like you see in Ottawa with Lansdowne.”
Lander said a stadium close to downtown would be preferable.
“If you put it right downtown where everybody is, everybody can walk down to Spring Garden or the harbour front,” said Lander, who has become familiar with Halifax while teaching a course at Dalhousie University every May and June.
“You are inviting people down there. It will be part of their day or they will make a day of it. It is much more likely to create a lasting impact than putting it out in the middle of nowhere.”
Lander suggested a property like the Halifax Commons as an ideal site.
There has been speculation about properties at Dartmouth Crossing, back of the Kent Building Supplies store in Bayers Lake Business Park and even the Shannon Park military site, although both Savage and Lander dismissed Shannon Park as an inappropriate location.
“We’re talking to a number of landowners right now,” LeBlanc said. “It’s intriguing. We have some opportunities in and around Bedford.”
LeBlanc said earlier this month that the ownership group is working with all levels of government, the league and private investors.
“That final piece that we need to figure out so that we can truly understand the economic impact is doing a final site selection. That’s something we hope to get done in the next four to six weeks . . . We’ve been very open in saying that the model we are looking to replicate is the model here in Ottawa and it is more than just a stadium. It’s a work, live, play environment with significant retail and residential. We’d like to do the same thing because that is what really drives a lot of the revenue from a provincial, city and federal perspective that makes it reasonable for them to participate in that way.”