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Paula Simons: Debate over future of Northlands Coliseum has lost its way
Blow the whistle. Call a time out. Just stop, before we go any further with the city’s latest grand plans to “repurpose” Northlands Coliseum.

Last spring, Northlands made a proposal to save Edmonton’s venerable arena by converting it into a six-sheet hockey complex, suitable for hosting tournaments and other sports-related events, complete with fitness centre and running track. Northlands estimated the cost of the retrofit would be $85 million.

A few months later, city hall issued an analysis criticizing the plan in scathing terms. Retrofitting, it said, would cost at least $102 million. The city was also skeptical — to put it politely — that there was enough tournament demand for such a facility. Yes, the city was planning to close aging rinks in south-central and west-central Edmonton, said the report. But the report was doubtful that building a skating six-plex at Northlands was really the best way to replace rinks in Old Strathcona, Queen Alexandra and Crestwood.

Yet having apparently forgotten all its previous objections to the plan, the city is now proposing to double-down — with a triple-axel twist.
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http://edmontonjournal.com/business...uture-of-northlands-coliseum-has-lost-its-way
 
Who's barking at the moon... it seems that City Councillors and City Administration are both ill-equipped to make a decision on the Coliseum building. I am not surprised.
 
What we had proposed to the City was more community oriented -- that plus elements that were "junior" to Rogers Place and therefore in support of its business plan. Getting the scheme in front of the right people is one thing; getting them to understand it is another. The political faction at City Hall seems so averse to making mistakes that they end up making gigantic ones. And the administration is simply not trained to look at proposals from the right perspective.
 
Live: Council votes to postpone Hockey Canada's Coliseum plan
Council postponed a vote on Hockey Canada’s Coliseum renovation plan Tuesday, arguing it needs more information on the full Northlands campus redevelopment plan, the not-for-profit’s future and the fate of Edmonton’s single sheet arenas first.

“Assuming (the Hockey Canada plan) is tied to this site and this building is premature,” said Mayor Don Iveson, after council was told the plan could cost 50 per cent more than Northlands’ original estimate.

That means Northlands $85-million idea could grow to $150 million and it might be cheaper to simply demolish the beloved structure and start again.
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http://edmontonjournal.com/news/loc...es-a-gut-check-on-coliseum-hockey-canada-plan
 
Demolition would be such a mistake; not because of nostalgia, but because it perpetuates the sense of "temporary city" we currently have going.

Forgotten in this debate, too, is how we can maximize the potential of the LRT station there. Hockey players aren't likely to be using it much.
 
David Staples has zero imagination. We need to stop thinking about our city's buildings as temporary and disposable.

David Staples: Northlands Coliseum must be demolished for neighbourhood to be reborn
It’s increasingly clear where we’re headed with Northlands Coliseum: to the demolition of the old hockey palace and the building of a fourplex of community arenas on the same site.

For that area to be reborn, the old arena must die.

The Coliseum is located on one of Edmonton’s most inhospitable pieces of land. It’s surrounded by major traffic arteries: Wayne Gretzky Drive, 118 Avenue and the north leg of the LRT. This makes it a relatively easy place to get to, but not such an attractive place to be. It’s hard to imagine it will be any more popular for condominium and housing development — which is one of the options that has been mused about — than has been the extremely slow-moving Station Pointe development at Belvedere LRT station just up the tracks.

Sporting history was made at the Coliseum. It was our own theatre of hockey dreams, but due to the inaccessibility of the arena’s design, its isolated location and the inwardness of the Northlands organization, the arena added little to the neighbourhood.

The old arena is a perfect example of 1970s’ suburban planning gone wrong. It’s a mess of forbidding concrete walls, closed off from surrounding streets, engulfed by highways and parking lots — great for cars, terrible for people.
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http://edmontonjournal.com/news/pol...-be-demolished-for-neighbourhood-to-be-reborn
 
I wholeheartedly agree @Daveography with your statement on DS -- two sayings come to mind: "all hat and no cattle" and "a little learning is a dangerous thing". The Coliseum is a substantial structure with many valuable interior assets. It may be less than an aesthetic masterpiece on the exterior but that can be easily remedied with new adjoining development. There is substantial history here and that is also a reason for saving the structure.
 
:mad::(

Let it go or keep it? Coliseum’s history comes into focus as future remains up in the air
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But does the coliseum itself have enough historic importance to be worth saving? That's the question city council will have to address as they discuss the next steps for the structure.

Plans hit a stumbling block Tuesday, when city councillors learned that renovating the structure for Hockey Canada’s proposed centre of excellence could cost tens of millions more than bulldozing and replacing it. Council decided to put that proposal on hold and tasked city staff with looking at more options.

Following that decision, Mayor Don Iveson said the coliseum might not be worth saving.
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http://www.metronews.ca/news/edmont...nds-coliseum-debate-history-replace-keep.html
 
As much as I'd like to keep the existing structure, I'd want to see more numbers if I'm a city administrator, and currently, there are imprecise numbers. That makes executive level staff in any form of government quite uneasy and unwilling to support projects/proposals. Often, it leads to the language of, 'might not be worth doing' or 'we need more information' or 'we'll come back to this' or what Don said above. It's nice of them to say, we have this vision, etc etc, but you need hard numbers at the end of the day.
 
It's worse than that @westcoastjos -- through a call for proposals the City (politicians) signed on to a concept that would place 4 rinks on two levels inside the existing structure (at one point they were looking at 6 rinks, but then someone with average intelligence said that if we do that there will be no room for spectators or other amenities). The 4-rink concept was endorsed by Hockey Canada, an organization that would not contribute financially to the proposal. Nearly a year ago, I wrote a letter to Mayor Iveson and to City Councillors warning them that the cost of the proposed fix would exceed $200M -- letter ignored. Northlands (another organization that either needs a complete overhaul or a phase-out (I think the latter would be more prudent for the City)) in their 6-rink proposal to the City, suggested that the build-out would be on the order of $85M. City administration (with whom I was interfacing at the time) said WRONG -- this proposal is going to cost somewhere north of $125M at a minimum and the engineer working on the costing estimate suggested that my number was probably closer than his when all was said and done.

There are many potential users for the Coliseum building that doesn't require gutting the structure to fit rinks inside (something akin to trying to put an elephant inside a canary cage). The political fix -- the unshakeable mindset -- 'we need to have a rink facility built inside the Coliseum'. This, too, in my opinion is entirely wrong-headed.

The Coliseum building is worth saving for two prominent reasons: 1. it is a substantial structure with workable interior components that, with a much more modest expenditure can be repurposed to accommodate both community and City-wide events (we had, in our proposal, suggested a 360-day per year use that enabled for flexible alternates of interior space combined with some entirely new elements not existing elsewhere in the City); 2. there is history here -- 5 Stanley cups in 6 years; the home ice for unarguably the greatest hockey player of all time (maybe that should read hockey players, plural).

I would rather see replacement of some of the political minds and salvage the Coliseum than something that is the other way around.
 
By more numbers, I simply meant, concrete numbers rather than conjecture. If I had seen numbers of $200m, $125m, and $85m, it is difficult to make any type of informed decision based on that. I deal with senior executive types all the time daily and they always want things that are concrete rather than maybes and they will call you out on 'guess-estimate' numbers.

I hope that by exploring more options, they look at the existing options and price them more accurately, while looking at other options as well. I imagine they've known for quite some time the difference in pricing - papers got to hyperbole to attract readers though.
 
February 8, 2010.

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