Calgary Flames President and CEO Ken King confirms new arena plans in the works
Posted Mar 5, 2015 11:07 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s been talked about for years and it sounds like the Calgary Flames are one step closer to making it a new reality.
Calgary Flames President and CEO Ken King confirmed to our sister station Kiss 95.9 Thursday morning that there are plans in the works for a new building and they will be making them public soon.
“Before any of your listeners have conniptions, when you see our project, people are just going to love it and we’re not going to sneak in here and steal money from the city,” he told Mookie and Billie-Joe. “I just think it’s going to be awesome, this is a fact of life, we don’t have a very acoustically attractive building, we can’t hang the roofing loads they need and good news is we have a plan that’s going to fix that.”
King admits the Saddledome has been a problem in the past, in attracting big-name talent to the venue.
“Some have had to skinny down their load rigging in order to get here because it’s a good market, this is one of the best concert markets in the world, but they don’t want to subordinate their shows and in the end when they want to put on a great show, they need all of their equipment and they just come to the conclusion that they can’t do it here,” he said.
According to King, many of them really love the city, they just feel they can’t perform here.
“It’s not the reason as to why we need to do a new building and our plan is much, much more than an events centre, it’s much bigger than that but it’s one of the pieces of the puzzle for sure,” said King.
He could confirm to Kiss 95.9 that the new facility will be located downtown and they want to show their plans to the mayor first before making them public.
King says McMahon Stadium is a building that was built in the 1960s and is far too outdated for the concerts in terms of size, compared to something like Commonwealth in Edmonton.
“I think people will love what they see and like the funding mechanism, so they’ll like the whole package, I really believe that!”
