Combining two sporting venues could bring savings, expert says

Moves to consider combining facilities at central Christchurch’s two planned sporting venues have found favour.

On Tuesday, Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods announced a review of the city’s metro sports facility plans, including whether to put all, or some, facilities on the same site as the planned multi-use arena.

Steven van der Pol – a director of Arrow International, which managed construction of Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr stadium – said combining aspects of both Christchurch projects could bring savings.

‘‘They would be two very different structures and it would be hard. But because the metro sports project has stopped, this is the time to take a breath and consider the options.’’

Van der Pol said rearranging some facilities could prevent duplications.

‘‘It’s not unusual to cluster some of these things together and there would be synergies on things like parking and transport.’’

He pointed to central Melbourne where stadiums for cricket, tennis, rugby and Australian rules all shared a riverside site.

Van de Pol said facilities for high-performance training and tertiary sports or fitness study could be built into the arena stands. That would help financially by adding major organisations that paid rent.

‘‘Maybe these conversations haven’t been had within the city. It may be just a different way of thinking. But it needs to happen quickly – we don’t want to spend six or eight months trying to figure it out.’’

The two sites are similar in size.

The metro sports facility would house pools, hydroslides, courts, a gym, fitness studios and a high performance centre on a 7-hectare site bordered by St Asaph and Antigua streets and Moorhouse Ave. Costs have ballooned to an estimated to $300 million.

The arena would host sports matches and concerts with seating for up to 30,000 spectators on a 6ha site between Madras, Barbadoes, Tuam and Hereford streets at a cost of up to $500m.

Mayor Lianne Dalziel said the next few months would be a chance to look at ‘‘what we really need’’ and talk to sporting groups to see whether decisions made five years ago were still relevant.

‘‘What was the case then, may not be now,’’ she said.

The delay to the Metro Sports Facility is yet another body blow to the rebuild of Christchurch, and this one will be felt widely. The Metro Sports Facility, originally slated to be opened early in 2016, has now been pushed back to the first quarter of 2021. That’s a decade after the earthquake that wrecked its predecessor, the QEII facility built for the 1974 Commonwealth Games.

That is 10 years of sports organisations having to improvise, delay, pare back, and make-do, and the toll from that has fallen on a wide range of sports codes and their players.

In 10 years, the kind of young swimmer who used to grind out 50 metre laps at QEII proceeds from promising junior talent to Olympic prospect.

So news of the Leighs Cockram Joint Venture being dumped over a cost blow-out of $75 million taking the a total budget to $321 million is gutting but not that surprising.

The St Asaph St site for the facility required more land remediation than was expected, and as we have seen with the justice precinct, delays and construction inflation can imperil even the largest of construction companies.

Reportedly, the joint venture’s and the Crown’s failure to see eye-to-eye on how that risk should be shared led to the decision to delay the metro sports facility.

It is good that the public’s money is being protected in these negotiations but the inevitable result is that sometimes contractors will blink first.

But in crisis there is opportunity, and in this case, it is a welcome chance to reconsider both the metro sports facility and the multi-use arena, intended to replace Lancaster Park.

Two options will be presented to the minister in April or May next year – to build the metro sports facility on the site currently prepared for it, or to consider a joint stadium-sports project.

The two sites are just 1300 metres apart and there is likely to be some overlap in the sorts of events (and their audiences) between a facility that is to cater to recreational and high-performance athletes and an arena that will host both top-level sport and other events.

Or going further, could the city supersize the arena so that it became a centre of participation as well as watching? That would help the arena to hum around the clock around the year, delivering the goal of energising the streets surrounding it.

It looks unlikely that Christchurch City Council can afford the arena project, which now sits at a budget of about half a billion dollars.

Surely there are efficiencies in sharing facilities such as car parking and possibly behind the scenes functions like heating and cooling.

The risk would be to create a Hydra-headed muddle out of what should be the South Island’s premier events facility and its premier sports facility.

With $800m of public money at stake, public input into making the right decision is essential. But this must not delay progress.

After seven years without appropriate facilities for the city’s athletes nor a major indoor pool for recreation, it is time to act with urgency and determination.