Flames lay out guidelines for arena talks, including City attitude and ‘media silence’
Posted Jun 19, 2018 7:11 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Before negotiations on a new home for the Calgary Flames can begin with the City of Calgary, the Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corporation wants to lay out some ground rules.
On May 31st, the now-chair of the city’s new Event Centre Assessment Committee wrote to CSEC President and CEO Ken King, informing him of the committee’s mandate.
“A goal of this committee is to reset discussions betwee the City of Calgary and the CSEC,” Ward 6 Cllr. Jeff Davison said. “Today, on behalf of ECAC, I officially ask your organization to commit a new round of conversation to assess the topic of Calgary’s new Event Centre together.”
On June 4th, King responded in a letter saying while CSEC would never decline a request for a meeting, the organization still had some concerns based on past practice.
“As a result, we would like to have a preliminary discussion to determine what may have changed in the City’s view to warrant our re-engaging,” King said. “Moreover, if we are to proceed, a simple and pre-emptive imperative is media silence.”
“Public and/or media involvement must only be rendered in the event of an agreement.”
The letters mark the first public signs of re-engagement between the two sides since talks collapsed last fall before the last municipal election.
Before the letters were made public, Davison told reporters that it was still very early in the process and the focus was first to lay out a vision.
“I’m not interested in the past deal and I don’t believe any past deal is relevant to what we’re going to put forward,” he said. “I think we’ll have a lot of the talking points that will eventually come out, depending on what those sticking points were, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
“This is not just a hockey problem we’re trying to solve, what does an entire district look like and how do we make that work?”
King announced on September 12th negotiations with the City were ending, after he called “spectacularly unproductive’ talks.
That was followed by both sides revealing their respective offers for a new facility at Stampede Park.
The city offered a three-way split between CSEC, a ticket surcharge and the city’s portion, which would eventually have to be repaid through some sort of direct investment.
The CSEC offer was half from its organization and the other half from a communit revitalization levy.
