New park plan down the road
Rogers Centre might be bulldozed in major rebuild — all paid for privately, owners say
Reports of a plan to tear down the Rogers Centre have Blue Jays fans dreaming of a more intimate, scenic, well-stocked ballpark in its place.
But the owners of the 31-yearold stadium say an overhaul of any kind will have to wait.
“Prior to the pandemic, we were exploring options for the stadium, but through this year our primary focus has been keeping our customers connected and keeping our employees safe, so there is no update on the Rogers Centre to share at this time,” Rogers spokesperson Andrew Garas said Friday.
The statement came after the Globe and Mail reported Rogers and real estate giant Brookfield Asset Management Inc. were looking to knock down the stadium as part of a larger development project.
Citing unnamed sources, the Globe reported that two companies would build a new stadium half the size on the southern part of the current site and use the remaining land for residential towers, office buildings, stores and public space. Building a new stadium on the lakefront if the initial plan falls through is also an option, the report said. Brookfield declined to comment on the matter.
Rogers owns the stadium but not the land it sits on, which is leased from the Canada Lands Company through 2088 and zoned for stadium use only, Sportsnet reported in 2018.
The city of Toronto said a formal planning application has not been submitted to redevelop the Rogers Centre, while a spokesperson for Mayor John Tory said neither he nor his office staff are involved in any discussions on the subject. Tory told city council and staff last year that he would not take part in any talks about the stadium’s future because he remains on the Rogers family trust after a previous role as a chief executive with the company.
Lobbying records show the most recent registered activity regarding the Rogers Centre came in the form of a meeting with Coun. Joe Cressy, who represents Ward 10 SpadinaFort York where the stadium is located, in July 2019 and an October 2019 meeting with Cressy’s staff.
Cressy told the Star last August that he accepted an invitation in July to meet with officials from the Blue Jays, Rogers and Brookfield to chat “in broad terms” about their plans for the domed ballpark.
At the time, Cressy said having a redeveloped stadium on the existing lands would be an important anchor for downtown and the city as a whole, and that any refurbishment must be done with private money. The group Cressy met with didn’t have a proposal to share at the time, he said.
Cressy has not heard anything further since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If there is any ambition for a broader land revitalization, we need to work to together to ensure it adheres to good planning principles and a good public process,” he said in a statement Friday.
If and when Rogers, Brookfield and the Jays are ready to restart the discussions, Cressy said, he will ensure there is a “clear understanding that public dollars are not to be used to pay for a revitalized stadium.”
Rogers said Friday that any redevelopment project would be funded privately.
Downtown Coun. Mike Layton said he does not know details of the reported plan, but agreed that no more public money should go into the site or a new stadium.
“We’ve paid enough,” Layton (Ward 11 University-Rosedale) said Friday.
Then-Metro Council and the Ontario government were originally on the hook for a combined $60 million of the initial $225-million price tag, but ended up paying a total of $350 million after the stadium’s cost ballooned to almost $600 million.
“We paid a lot of money to build that (SkyDome) and then it was sold for $25 million. I don’t know the proposal, so I wouldn’t endeavour to give a hard ‘No’ now on whatever they want to do with the site,” Layton said, “but I hope we don’t see any more tax dollars going for a stadium that should be going for transit, affordable housing and parks for residents — not just a handful of major leaguers.”
Layton, who has led council’s response to climate change, also questioned any plan to demolish the current stadium, saying a tenet of carbon reduction is reusing existing infrastructure rather destroying, dumping and building anew.
Longtime sports industry executive Richard Peddie, president of the Rogers Centre between 1989 and 1994, said the idea of building a new stadium on the existing parcel of land simply isn’t practical.
“There’s no way you could do it on the same site, because it would mean the team needing to play somewhere else for three or four years. You’d need to keep this open while you built somewhere else,” said Peddie. “There’s got to be natural grass. It should be an open air stadium which you can cover up, rather than a domed stadium where you can roll the roof back. It should be smaller. And wearing my progressive hat, there shouldn’t be money from any level of government going towards this.”
The Rogers Centre landed at No. 27 out of 30 in Ballpark Digest’s ranking of MLB stadiums in July. Changes to the stadium no longer falls under Jays president Mark Shapiro’s purview, with Rogers now leading the file, but he told the Star in February, before the pandemic hit, that there may be more upgrades to announce in 2021.
“A lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of focus from people — both within our ownership and even a couple of people within our building — continue to be spent exploring the next steps for a much bigger plan,” he said. “It is incredibly complex, and I think that’ll be clear once it’s announced, and so that’s why it’s taken so long.”