Rexall Place is no hellhole

Edmonton council should just say no

Let me say this about the ongoing Edmonton arena soap opera, the latest chapter of which began to unfold at city council Wednesday in the Alberta capital ...

No, let me first don the asbestos underwear, double-check to make sure my life insurance is paid up and clear space in my email inbox. There, all done. Now: What if, instead of thinking of new and creative ways to raise and spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to further enrich the already wealthy drugstore billionaire Daryl Katz, Edmonton took a second look at the existing arena — the one with his company name on it — and said: “You know, this place is still pretty good. Not the best, not what a new one would be, not as good as Toronto’s or Montreal’s or Vancouver’s, not in a great location ... but good enough.” It’s radical thinking, I know. Everyone is all wound up about the prospect of a shiny, brandspanking new arena/retail complex that would breathe new life into a moribund downtown and if that’s truly what moving out of Rexall Place would do, it’s understandable why council might buy it.

Not to be a total contrarian here — I haven’t covered many games in Edmonton since the Oilers’ 2006 run to the Stanley Cup final — but is the former Northlands Coliseum such a hellhole?

Is it totally beneath a mid-sized Canadian market?

It’s been renovated and retro-fitted, jazzed up with fancy electronic signage and concourse-level luxury boxes, a spectacular home-team dressing room complex and rinklevel lounges that allow the big spenders to pat the players on the shoulders or yell insults at them as they enter and exit their boudoir.

It has aged gracefully, without anything like the wear-and-tear and general air of decay that has afflicted its Long Island doppelganger — or even the much younger Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

What, exactly, tops the list of things wrong with it?

The artificial ice plant is “tired,” so what used to be the best ice surface in the National Hockey League is now only average? Well, replace the ice plant. Dig up the concrete.

Rexall Place doesn’t have enough luxury boxes to produce the kind of revenue NHL owners have come to expect from their sports palaces built with someone else’s money? Gee, given what we have learned in the last decade (more specifically, the last week) about NHL owners, cry us a river.

There is a highly analytical story on this topic by Patrick Hruby on a site called Sports on Earth that explains the fallout of our North American culture of sports welfare (www.sportsonearth.com/article/ 40595178/) better than a couple hundred words in a column ever could. Read it and weep, Edmontonians, because one way or another, you’re the meat in the sandwich.

However the government contribution is worded, or camouflaged, it doesn’t come from the Arena Fairy. It’s tax money. It comes out of the pockets of hockey fans and people who give not one whit about the NHL, alike. Jettison an old arena, build a new one on credit. It’s a disposable world. Someone will pay. Someone always does.