PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE WITH LEBRETON FLATS PROJECT
The National Capital Commission can’t let public impatience to redevelop LeBreton Flats stampede it into making a bad deal.
The commission’s chief executive Mark Kristmanson says pivotal decisions are coming up later this fall, as we close in on an agreement with the RendezVous LeBreton group on selling the prized federal land just off Parliament Hill for development, including a hockey arena. The NCC and the group led by the Ottawa Senators have been negotiating for more than two years.
A new poll from the Ottawa Board of Trade found that two-thirds of people who have an opinion think the project’s behind schedule. It isn’t. It’s just a massively complicated project involving billions of dollars of real-estate development over maybe 20 years, uniquely precious land, multiple governments, and a fragile sports and entertainment company whose future is staked on making as much money off the deal as possible. For bonus points, Ottawa’s biggest civic construction effort since the Rideau Canal, the new light-rail line, runs through it and the new central library is next door.
The Abacus poll (conducted with an online panel of 600 respondents who are paid for their participation) asks some leading questions. Like what should be done “if Eugene Melnyk continues to be a hurdle in moving the project forward.”
That assumes some facts not in evidence.
True, nobody thinks the Senators’ owner is an easy guy to bargain anything with. Ask Daniel Alfredsson. Ask Erik Karlsson. The Ottawa Senators’ biggest and most beloved stars, both gone from the organization with bad feelings.
On the business side, Melnyk ditched team president Cyril Leeder (one of the Senators’ original builders, a big fish in Ottawa’s small corporate pond), and brought in former Maple Leafs executive Tom Anselmi to replace him. OK, fine, Anselmi has experience building a new arena for the Leafs in downtown Toronto, and maybe he was better suited than Leeder to handle this franchise-redefining project. Anselmi lasted a year. Now the team has no president.
Melnyk shoots his mouth off about moving the team to another city and then seems confused about why anybody would think he’d move the team. He frets publicly that RendezVous LeBreton won’t be able to sell all of the condominiums it’s relying on to finance the project. He’s only in town sporadically.
Whatever particular challenges Melnyk presents, though, negotiations over LeBreton Flats should be nitpicky, painstaking, meticulous. They should take a long time. Kristmanson says the project is hitting NCC milestones.
But having pushed the idea that something ’s gone wrong, the poll found Ottawans eager to get somebody to do something. Who? Anybody. What? Hard to say. Business leaders should come together to make it happen. Community leaders should stand up and voice their concerns. Sixty per cent of us, apparently, would support “NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and the NHL getting involved to ensure the project moves ahead on time.”
Hold it right there.
We know what it looks like when the league steps in: Bettman shows up to bully local politicians into proving their city is worthy of the NHL’s presence by handing over hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to a private sports company.
In Edmonton, the price was $219 million, about a third of the cost of a new arena for the Oilers. It’s the centrepiece of an unfinished LeBretonesque redevelopment project, too, and owner Daryl Katz has returned to the well for more money for public spaces around the rink.
In Calgary, the Flames also pitched a new rink as part of a downtown redevelopment; a preliminary analysis by the Calgary government pegged the cost at $1.8 billion, with the public having to cover two-thirds of it. Bettman flew in a year ago to stand grimly with the Flames’ executives and urge voters to turf Mayor Naheed Nenshi because he wasn’t supporting it. Nenshi proposed that Bettman get stuffed. It would be awful if the Flames left, he said, but Calgary would still be there without them. Voters re-elected the mayor with a new majority a month later.
Two different outcomes but the same ploy from the NHL. The league doesn’t step in with money; it steps in to demand more of ours.
Taxpayers even spent $370 million for an arena in Quebec City on spec, hoping maybe that would attract the league back, which it hasn’t yet. It’s embarrassing. Have some pride.
The NCC’s ponderous treatment of LeBreton Flats after expropriating and razing the neighbourhood in the mid-1960s has left most of it barren for decades. But that ridiculous history isn’t a good reason to throw caution aside now.
Pushing to make a deal, any deal, just because it’s a deal, will get us garbage.