“That thing’s operational!”–Lando Calrissian
We’re up like the Death Star, baby. Hello, my name is Andy Grabia, and I’ll be your host for the evening. Welcome to Why Downtown?, a pro-Edmonton, pro-downtown website that opposes the downtown arena project, as currently proposed, for one or more of the following reasons.
- The owner of the Edmonton Oilers, Daryl Katz, is one of the richest men in the world, and can afford to pay for an arena himself;
- Academic research consistently shows that there is little to no economic benefit to taxpayers when cities subsidize sporting facilities;
- The downtown arena project will not “revitalize” downtown Edmonton, as it does not truly solve the “problem” of the downtown core, which is a problem of low population density;
- The current Rexall Place is a storied, historic, and fully functional and operational hockey arena. It is a built heritage that should be protected, so that it can be enjoyed by Edmontonians and hockey fans from around the world for many years to come.
Over the next little while (God, I hope it’s just the next little while), this site is going to examine the downtown arena project from a variety of angles–economics, politics, sports, media coverage, urban planning–in the hopes of better informing Edmontonians on the issue.
For now, I will be the sole contributor to the site. It is something I care passionately about, and have written about for almost four years. But the plan, and the hope, is to bring in other contributors who also care very much about this issue. Some will write under their own name, and some will write under a nom de guerre. But they’ll all be smart people, and they’ll all know a lot about this issue. Most of them will be opposed to the arena project in one way or another, but they won’t necessarily share my point of view on every single matter. To be clear, this will not be an equal-opportunity site in terms of posted content. I can’t see the space being offered up to the Katz Group, as they already have their own space, as well as mainstream media outlets willing to let them share their side of the story. But I do encourage people to leave comments and engage in the debate, whichever side they may be on. All I ask is that everyone keep it civil. That might be too much to ask from a blog, but I’m going to ask it anyway.
I will be delivering more content as soon as possible, but it will take time. The public meeting between the Katz Group and Edmonton City Council was this afternoon, and there is lots to dissect. I’m also off to Calgary Folk Fest tomorrow, so that will prevent me from getting to everything as quickly as I want to. But my hope is to get some new content up by end of this weekend at the latest. In the meantime, take a look around the site, as well as the arena primer from my old site, The Battle of Alberta. You can also start following the page on Twitter, at twitter.com/whydowntown.