Sheeran effect aids case for stadium

When a centre-city bar owner predicts a dire winter and says a covered stadium is a necessity to make the central city hum, you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes. What bar owner wouldn’t want ratepayers to cough up half a billion dollars to turn on the spigots of beer – and cash – that a test match venue on the edge of the centre would bring?

But that wish come with strings, and this piece of string is the best part of a quarter of a billion dollars.

That is the funding gap between what the council has budgeted for a stadium, which the long term plan calls for being built during budget years 2022/3 and 2024/5 at a cost of $253 million, and the $496m, 30,000 seat, covered roof, retractable turf option preferred by the Government’s latest pre-feasibility study.

With annual rate rises at a well-above inflation rate of 5.72 per cent and 5.5 per cent over the next two years, ratepayers are weary of escalating rates and wary of gold-plated dreams.

But the truth is that there can be no backing out of a multi-use arena, as the stadium is now called. It is the linchpin of the strategy to have a rebuilt, re-energised central city. Investors have built elaborate destinations with multi-million dollar fit-outs and centre city apartments and the Government has done its part with huge contributions to anchor projects.

But without throngs of people, the whole strategy falls apart.

If you are understandably loathe to fund the big drawcard of an arena, imagine how much worse it would be to have funded an entire centre city which would be dead on arrival without the arena.

Looking at budgets is invariably depressing – economics is not called the dismal science for nothing. But there is also joy in the prospect of our rebuilt centre city. It can already been seen in pockets and you have only to look south to see Dunedin painting the town Ed for its expected 100,000 concert-goers this weekend to see the vitality and economic activity that can be sparked by major events.

About a third of those Ed Sheeran fans will be coming from Christchurch, which means that if the concerts were to be held here, as they surely would had we a venue of sufficient size, then the remaining twothirds would be visitors to our city.

If you find yourself in what is likely to be a deserted centre city this week, closed up for Good Friday and Easter Sunday and with 33,000 concert-goers gone, imagine what it would be like to have all them, with a mate on each arm, spilling out of bars and restaurants before the shows.

Your joy may not match that of a centre-city bar owner, but sometimes there is joy for its own sake in being in a city that feels alive. You may just be able to remember that feeling.

A fast-tracked business case for the stadium is expected about mid-April. There will be legitimate debates over how ambitious it may be, how much the Crown may contribute and what the city can afford.

But the one thing we can’t afford is not to build a multi-use stadium.