Let's get Lansdowne right this time
The next phase of the renewal will be costly indeed. How will the city pay?
After more than half a century of half-baked development and inadequate fixes at Lansdowne Park, it's time for the City of Ottawa to get this site right.
Not only do the northside stands suck, so do the Civic Centre, the Aberdeen Pavilion and the Horticulture Building. That's the gist of a city staff report councillors will consider and vote on today. It's a conclusion that could be reached with just a single visit to Lansdowne.
The north-side stands, built in 1967, are past their prime, if they ever had one. Washrooms, concessions, seating and the concourse are all inadequate. Recent engineering reports say the building isn't going to fall down, but that's about the best that can be said for it. The Civic Centre arena is tucked under the stands and has all the ambience of the area under your house's staircase. The Aberdeen Pavilion is a magnificent building, but it has been allowed to decay. The roof leaks and it lacks air conditioning. The Horticulture Building is somewhat better but also lacks air conditioning. All of that makes it difficult to attract people and events to the site.
City staff want Lansdowne's private sector partner, the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, to come up with a plan to fix the mess. That's all councillors were asked to approve this week, but they will be opening the door to a megaproject. Just evaluating OSEG's ultimate proposal and seeking public views on it is to cost $875,000. The city spent about $211 million on the version of Lansdowne that we have today, with $134 million of that attributed to the new south-side stands.
The next phase of the Lansdowne renewal will almost certainly be larger and it poses significant logistical challenges. The first is where the new Civic Centre would fit on the site. The bigger problem is how to replace the arena and the football stands without disrupting Redblacks and Ottawa 67's games for an extended period.
Mayor Jim Watson says that “in hindsight,” the city should have replaced the north-side stands when it redid the other half of the stadium. Foresight would have suggested the same thing. That decision was made in 2012, when Watson was mayor.
It's fair to say that the half-reno the city went for was the most the council of the day would accept. Even then, it took an astounding feat of accounting wizardry by city manager Kent Kirkpatrick to convince councillors that they would fix up the derelict Lansdowne without incurring any significant net new spending.
The deal with OSEG was certainly a huge improvement over the city's long record of neglect. Lansdowne was a little-used sea of asphalt and the south-side stands were so badly maintained that they eventually had to be torn down.
Councillors' decision to go with a football stadium that was good only on one side was an echo of their predecessors' much earlier decision to build a stadium with one big covered stand and another open to the elements. The 1960s-era decision to tuck an arena under the stadium stuck Ottawa with a facility that would be substandard in a city half our size.
Lansdowne has been a reasonable success, with 20 million people visiting the site over seven years. City staff are right when they say it won't get better without improving the buildings and adding more reasons to come to Lansdowne.
The question about Lansdowne isn't whether it needs to be improved, but how the city will pay for it. Staff offer some wishful thinking about new housing above the north-side stands that would produce revenue from selling development rights and add more residents to boost Lansdowne's economy. Those seem like micro-points, but there will be nothing micro about the eventual cost.
The city says the next phase of the redevelopment must be “affordable,” whatever that means. This time, let's make sure we get full value for our money by doing the job right.