06 Aug Waye Mason defends the costly plan to save TUBCED

Last week, I decried HRM council’s decision to reject a staff-recommended plan to replace The Ugliest Building Cobb Ever Designed with a new four-pad rink, and instead vote to spend two-and-a-half times as much money for 25 percent less rink. Waye Mason, the excellent councillor who moved the motion to save TUBCED, aka The Halifax Forum, responds.

First the math: $45 million gets you four rinks at DND lands. DND gets one and Halifax gets three, so Halifax pays 75%, which is $33.75 million. The lower figure you cite assumes the Forum lands sell for $18 million and all that money goes against the construction cost, bringing the cost to $15.75 million. So renovating the Forum is $21 million more expensive, but both proposals are talking about three pads.

The staff report (on pp. 10-11) put the difference at $23.2 million, but I won’t quibble about the dollars. I do quibble about the number of rinks. Even if the fourth rink to be included in the staff proposal was exclusively for the use of DND personnel and their offspring, which I doubt, I have to ask: What are they, chopped tofu? Last I checked, they reside in HRM. The military has had a continuous presence in Halifax since the city was founded.

The DND proposal was for a BMO style 4 pad with one 1200 seat arena. The Forum proposal is for an event facility that also has three pads. Serving hockey kids is not the only use of ice surfaces and arena spaces. Free skates and figure skating and competition skates and university all fit into that facility. What won the day for the Forum proposal was all the other events, meetings, bingo, all of it, I think it is basic good public administration to design facilities to be used as much as possible by diverse users throughout the year. Just so it is clear, bingo pays $336,000 into the bottom line of the Forum, which helps keep the fees at the Forum low.

The last point responds to my wisecrack that, in most of the province, residents put on bingo nights to maintain public services like fire halls that cash-strapped counties can’t afford, whereas cash-flush HRM subsidizes a public building so residents can play bingo. I’ll concede that council’s plan to preserve an eyesore sounds more versatile than a pure rink complex, but couldn’t nearby schools fulfill most of these other functions? Citadel High has a lovely auditorium, and lots of smaller rooms. $23.2 million, or even $21 million, plus the loss of one rink, are steep prices to pay for the sake of converting a homely old warehouse, however beloved by some.

Then there are hidden costs – an example is the universities say they need 1700 seats minimum for tournament games and they would want to replicate the changing rooms they already have at the Forum, so you’d have to add that additional cost to the DND proposal. Make sure one of the pads is figure skating size. Add some meeting rooms. Add parking, as the Forum has now more parking than the DND proposed, especially as the Forum is on major bus routes, Connolly Street certainly is not.

Universities are highly subsidized. If they need an extra 500 seats, maybe they should pony up. Surely change rooms would be part of either structure.

Finally, Mason makes a plea about the role the Forum has played in the community:

For me, as someone who has done events at all three big rooms in the Forum, I know it is a really important venue that goes beyond hockey, which I don’t play and watch sometimes during playoffs if at all….

I don’t know how else to describe my thought process that got me to that decision, other to say that I think it is important to not just focus on the bottom line, rather, the community good and best value over all for money have to come into play. I think if we tore down the Forum we would be looking at building another 4-6K seat arena/venue within 10 years.

If we vote against the stadium (which I will) and if the train report says wait 15 years (which it probably will) then I don’t think we need to raise taxes to pay for any of the major capital projects. Even though it is unlikely that we will get provincial support for any of these things, unlike every other municipality in Nova Scotia.

Meow.