Recently the City of Edmonton announced how PCL was contracted to do "stuff" for the proposed downtown arena, and with the Provincial election under way the blog posts are appearing all over.
Recently, Mack Male posted some interesting items under a title of More power and money to cities in Alberta? I don’t believe you! In his blog, he quotes the various parties positions on Provincial help for cities, and then suggests that what those parties said doesn't hold some form of "truth factor" with respect to the arena.
With all due respect to Mack... the parties stances on not supporting taxpayers funds going into a billionaires pocket, is 100% smack on.
Now... if Katz was actually putting the majority of the funds into this project from his own pocket, and wanted some assistance to make up the rest, then there would be a valid cause for discussion. However as time has gone on, the citizens of Edmonton have come to the conclusion that we have been hood winked by the process, what we were told Katz was going to be putting in has been whittled down to a few bucks here and there on an annual basis rather than up front, and the City will have to borrow the money for him to "pay back" instead. And then there is the issue of the City going into an "advertisement" agreement which for the most part almost totally negates any pennies Katz will be putting in.
In the mean time, the City is forging ahead with plans to attempt to use the magical abstraction of taking money from one hand and putting it into another hand and calling it "new" money. Or, as some say... its the "CRL" side. The mystical and magical projection of future taxes INCLUDING the educational portion of taxes, being used to pay for this.
And of course, no one in this supposed CRL zone will ever have the need for City services, like the rest of us pay taxes for. No need to cost out things like fire or police responses. There will be no fires or crime that will consume tax dollars, so we can divert all those new and 'adjusted' taxes into the arena. And we most certainty have all of the money in the world up our yin-yang for the rest of the citizens of the Province to add more money from the robbed educational component. Remember, if the City steals a million dollars of education tax per year (or whatever it works out to) the Province will just raise the rate that all taxpayers pay, to cover the loss.
Let us also not be blindsided by the City saying this will "only" be $450 million dollars. They promise there will be no cost over runs... (yeah, right... just like they promised there would be no dollars spent until all of the funding is in place... and I am guessing that at least $100 million has already been spent).
Since when has a politician ever told the truth? Clearly the City of Edmonton has not. And the provincial parties can see the writing on the wall. After all, they are politicians too and can smell the bullshit here because they are all too familiar with the smell.
So for those who take a political stance and say "no" to the arena funding... kudos. There is no valid reason in the world for taxpayers to be literally funding 100% of this arena project, and not get one penny of revenue from it. Remember folks, Katz can walk away from this at ANY time, by simply selling the team.
Like sports owners never sell teams, right?
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