Come one, come all
Posted by Carl on December 8, 2009
Yesterday’s Citizen editorial notwithstanding, the document produced by City staff for the Corporate Services and Economic Development Committee isn’t all bad – at least not as far as baseball is concerned. (View the prospective Proposal criteria) It is true: Whoever takes over Lynx Stadium will be faced with prohibitively high operational costs, chiefly the utility bills. The dirty little secret on Coventry Road is that the $108,000 annual lease amount is dwarfed by the costs of actually running the Stadium (the latter, conservatively estimated at more than 3x the $108K).
But, I digress: Arguing the economics right now would be akin to a prisoner, having been granted a stay of execution, complaining about prison conditions. There will be time for that later.
The real “win” here for proponents of baseball is the provision that in order to be considered, a proposal must include a baseball component. Essentially, even Ikea could make a pitch but they’ll have to field a baseball team to get control of the property. The extension of the deadline proposed by the report (submissions are now required by February 2010) is another mixed blessing – getting a team up and running in three months will be a tall order, but it gives the Can-Am additional time to find owners for a team.
In my view, the early winners are Miles Wolff and the Can-Am. The requirement for baseball has ruled out the soccer proposal and the deadline extension has prevented the Ottawa Stadium Group from becoming the defacto winner of the competition- at least, for the time being. (Neate has a peremptory take down of the OSG here.)
Larry Williams said
Great to see the site active again!
Dave said
Hey Carl! Glad to see the site back, just clicking an old link and didn’t expect to see this. Was by the park around Labour Day and happy to see the field in reasonable shape again, be nice to see a team on it…….Trois Rivieres & Ottawa?????
Dave said
The report is interesting. OSG’s numbers include a $1 ticket surcharge per patron, at an average 7,500 patrons per event, which is optimistic. And wow, the transitway will service the stadium by 2018 (about 25 years late) and who would’ve imagined you’d need an Environmental Assessment to build a concrete footbridge beside another one over a 6 lane expressway (another thing that should have been built when the stadium opened)? Hard to imagine the “mothballing” expense being so high, but I can’t say, there’s a lot of plumbing there…..
Dave said
There was a lot of skepticism last year on this OSG group taking on the Can-Am. How is everyone feeling towards the IBL “Fatcats” being run by the same group? There are 3 Can-Am dates on the schedule, might we see a return in 2011, and does this group have the resources to pull it off? All that aside, I hope to see you all at the ballpark this summer, the calibre is really quite good…..
Larry Williams said
I expect most people are taking a “wait and see” approach to the Fat Cats (or maybe a “if you can’t say anything nice. then don’t say anything” approach).
Personally I don’t have much confidence in the Fat Cats organization. Anytime I’ve see/heard them make statement, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The idea of using an IBL team as the main draw to the stadium just doesn’t work. I know it’s probably the best they could have done given the way things worked out with the city, but it’s still not a good situation.
At best this is a “hold the fort” year. No one can reasonably expect an IBL team to pay the rent for the stadium, so the team will have significant losses. If the organization knows what they are doing, they will be securing an independent league team for next year (Can-Am makes the most sense) and working to get a new lease with the city. A few concerts (if they actually happen) aren’t going to make much difference.
I hope to be surprised by the Fat Cats but my worst fear is that the they field a terrible team, fail miserably, and people will claim this is the last chance that proves baseball won’t work here.
Anyway, we need to support this team as best we can. We’ll be at all the games we can fit into our schedule.