Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[jeffster]

It's all a question of scale. I'm not suggesting anything about this project, but many cities spend a significant fraction of their capital budget on projects like this, which are not in line with the actual portion of the public which values the thing.

I don't know about CITS (I thought it was operated separately from the city anyway) but KPL is only a small fraction of the city's budget.

Larger cities spend crazy amounts of money building expensive stadiums and arenas for billionaire-owned pro sports teams. This isn't really comparable, though.

The KPL renovation cost something like $40M. And a new CITS (which will need to happen at some point, too) will cost many times that. Building facilities is not cheap, but hockey is not the only thing that is expensive.

Some cities - but you don't see it everywhere. SkyDome was funded by Ontario, I think Scotiabank Centre was all private, SkyDome (Rogers Centre) renos have been paid by your Rogers accounts (if you have any). The city of Toronto made out like bandits with BMO Field, contributing just close to $10M towards the cost of the build (Canada paid close to $30M, Ontario $10M) - and they got ownership out of it.

Back when SkyDome was owned by the province, anyone could've rented it at cost, if I recall correctly.

If the city ever did decide to build a new arena, they'd have to get the other levels of government to help, as they should, as we have paid for all those nice things in Toronto. Same applies to Tim Horton Field in The Hammer - we paid for that. Renovations are The Aud, that was all paid for by the Rangers, not a penny from tax payers.

Just realized that the city of Kitchener does a poor job at advocating for itself.