Riverdale Rink Rat
Senior Member
Seriously? You need to spend a BILLION dollars to get people fit? I tell you what - I'll do it for $100 million. You'll save 90%!
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- Thread starter FutureMayor
- Start date
Seriously? You need to spend a BILLION dollars to get people fit? I tell you what - I'll do it for $100 million. You'll save 90%!
wopchop
Building Toronto
I'm not defending the price, but the existence of the event itself.
And yeah, I'd argue that you do need to hold competition to inspire people to play sport. Even for sports with professional top-tier leagues sports, young people are most definitely inspired by the professional athletes.
We built a ton of new venues, and even building those outside of the scope of the games would have been tremendously expensive. There is apparently $672m going towards construction or renovation of venues, and this figure wouldn't really be much expensive if you wanted to "just build" them, as other suggest we should have done.
See below. If this wasn't Pan-Am, do you think any of the below would be cheaper?
Aquatic Centre - $205m
Markham Pan Am Centre - $78m
Tim Hortons Field - $145m
Mattamy National Cycling Centre - $47m
Athletics Stadium - $45m
None of these venues would have really been any cheaper to "just build".
At the end of the day, anyone with children knows that a lot of sporting infrastructure in this region was a joke, so at least we'll benefit from that. I could be wrong, and everything turns out to be white elephants, but I suspect that the prosperity and growth of this region will help prevent that from happening.
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Riverdale Rink Rat
Senior Member
First, my daughters had tons of opportunity to play sports growing up in Toronto, so I don't 'know' that sporting infrastructure for children is a 'joke' at all. Second, you changed your argument dramatically from 'inspiring people to be fit' to saying the infrastructure is worth it. That's very different.
As I've said before, I'm not going to argue venues now - they're built. It's time to enjoy the games. But to say that a diving tank or velodrome won't be a white elephant due to 'prosperity' is ridiculous. Both are very costly niche sports. The number of people that get excited about either due to this elite-level infrastructure will be in the hundreds, at best, over the lifetime of the tank and track.
Markham? New stadium for the Tiger Cats? Meh. Probably a bit better than would otherwise have been built, so that's good. The rest of the venues are going to work out pretty well as they've converted space and will disappear after the Games, and to my eye the Athletes' Village looks like a big win for Toronto as the condo market has held up.
But back to your original comment - I could take the money for the Mattamy and put into ParticipAction ads and it would inspire more people to get fit.
Tewder
Senior Member
Nonsense. This is the only velodrome of its kind in Canada, and only one of two in North America. If you're going to be 'niche' you've got to be the best in that niche and it seems this one is. It will attract athletes from across North America who will come here to train.
That said, this velodrome isn't just for cycling. It was built as a multi-function community recreation centre too, and the long term vision is that it will eventually be part of a wider 'education village' that will include a university. This is smart planning.
We don't really need to speculate though it's been open for four months now and already they are claiming success:
http://www.mattamynationalcyclingcentre.ca/en/index.asp
Attachments
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Anyone else notice that with the exception of the Aquatic Centre and York Uni's sports field, none of these builds are in Toronto? With a geographical spread out past the GTA to Hamilton, perhaps we should change this to the Golden Horseshoe games.
MisterF
Senior Member
I'm sure this has been mentioned, but do we know how much revenue the Games are expected to bring in?
animatronic
Senior Member
The original budget at bid time was $1.4b, of which $100m was sponsorships, $2.5m media rights (i.e. less than the equivalent period of nhl rights) and less than $40m in ticket sales. The remaining $1.2b and change is tax dollars.
TOareaFan
Superstar
Hard to tell if you are kidding or not? When Premier McGuinty first indicated support of these games he was very careful to describe them as exactly that....the Golden Horseshoe Games.....to get provincial support the bid was not going to be Toronto centric it was going to bring benefits to all communities in the region. He was specific...these are not Toronto's games they are the the games for the entire region.
The fact that a chunk of the new venue spending is outside Toronto is probably indicative of a couple of things....1) there was less sporting infrastructure in the other municipalities and 2) those municipalities were more willing to contribute/raise the local portion of the funds needed to contribute to the provincial and federal funds.
Regardless of where the new facility spend is, compared to what was originally announced, I find these games to be far more Toronto centric than originally discussed.....
...certainly as a resident of Brampton I am left wondering why the most popular event (by speed of sellout) basketball is being held in a 2500 seat arena with no box/corporate seating to speak of when our 5k arena with 20 boxes sits empty during the games....I am left wondering why money is being spent building a temprorary facility for volleyball when that same arena in Brampton sits empty during the games.
I actually have no issue with the new venues and the legacy they leave...but when people talk about the regional nature of these games and I look at use of existing facilities this is where money is being wasted.....more revenue from basketball could be generated in the Powerade than in the reno'd MLG and, certainly, money did not need to be spent on a temporary volleyball facility when a better resource was available.
These were always suppoosed to be regional games....they just turned out to be less so than planned.
wopchop
Building Toronto
Firstly, the problem is not finding sports leagues to play in. There are tons of those, and that just indicates how popular sports of all types are in the Greater Toronto Area. The problem is that a lot of the infrastructure across the region was old, and needed renovation. A lot of the infrastructure required for elite sports (ie. Olympic ones) did not even exist. There wasn't any major impetus to upgrade any facilities until Pan Am came along, and it didn't look like that was going to change either.
Secondly, maybe I'm phrasing my argument badly. But it boils down to this, I think the event is good because it inspires people to play sport at all levels. To get 5,000 Pan-Am athletes, you need to whittle that down from tens of thousands of contenders. I think the infrastructure cost and investment was probably worth it. We certainly wouldn't build any of what we built for any less than we did. The security costs seem tremendous, but I'm not an expert on that, so it's hard to comment. At the end of the day, though, the infrastructure investment would never have happened without the event itself ... so we might have to look at that cost as simply the cost of infrastructure renewal.
Here's a small example, because it is local for me. The Etobicoke Swim Club, which is located at the Olympium, has a team of 250 competitive swimmers. But they also host programs for thousands of non-competitive swimmers. Most "elite facilities" (such as the Velodrome) operate or will operate in a similar way. The elite competitive training is only a part of the program. They've also hosted a number of provincial and national competitions, which attract tourists to the city. I believe the upgrade was worth about $20m, and I find it highly unlikely that something like that would have happened without Pan Am.
And despite the new construction being built for the games, pretty much all of the new builds also have facilities that are scaled for local fitness programs, as they all contain multi-function rooms, fitness rooms, gymnasiums, etc. The Aquatic Centre, for instance, might have 2 Olympic sized pools and a diving tower, but it also has four gymnasiums, a climbing wall, a running track, racquet courts, and a fitness centre. The Markham Pan-Am Centre after the games will provide tons of gymnasium space, multi-function rooms, a pool, and a huge fitness-centre for the people of Markham in a new area that currently doesn't have much of anything. The Athletes Village after the Games will become condos (which are likely to sell well), but we also got a new YMCA out of the deal.
EDIT:
As for TIm Hortons Field, the Provincial contribution was actually rather small (about $22m) with the remainder split between the City of Hamilton ($54m) and the Federal Government ($69m). The Ti-Cats signed a 20-year lease for $1.2m a year. I suppose Hamilton sees economic value in supporting the team, so I'm not going to argue it, when local Toronto teams (and others all across NA) have also received public funding.
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Admiral Beez
Superstar
I was more referring to that specific list, but to your point, if these are not Toronto's games, someone should tell the marketers, since that's all we hear and see in the promos http://www.toronto2015.org/ though Hamilton is trying to get some attention with their own site http://preview.hamilton.ca/attractions/2015-pan-am-games/
Tewder
Senior Member
Tourism and spin-off revenue is generated during the games; visitors who pay to stay in area hotels, dine in restaurants, shop, see a play while in town, tack on a trip to Niagara Falls while in the region etc. Locals who attend events will also be spending. All of this increases tax revenues during the period of the games... and who can say what growth in long term tourism will result from the international publicity? TIFF, Pride, Caribana etc are all similar such investments in that the initial costs to host them are outweighed by the benefits they generate.
TOareaFan
Superstar
shortly after announcing the bid and certainly after winning them the GGH games started morphing into TO2015
howl
Active Member
Large international games ALWAYS take the name of the major city. If they didn't people from outside the area would be confused. Would you call the 2010 Winter Olympics the "Lower Mainland Games"?
animatronic
Senior Member
Locals would have spent the money in the community anyways so there's no lift. There will be visitors during the games but that only counts above the regular numbers for the time of year (and those visitors will be staying away because they don't want to be there during the games). There is also the opportunity cost of lost business travel and conventions because of the timing. Repeated studies have shown that there is no halo effect for tourism for cities before and after major sporting events.
Pride and TIFF are extremely profitable for the city because they do bring lots of out of town visitors and the capital outlay is relatively miniscule. They are also recurring events so can build a following over time and reuse any infrastructure spending.
nrb
Active Member
There's some evidence that the games are driving tourists away because a lot of people don't want to visit toronto when it's projected to be a traffic disaster.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/hotel-occupancy-falling-short-for-pan-am-games-1.3090096
770 million in operating costs is a lot to to recoup through a couple weeks of tourism.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/hotel-occupancy-falling-short-for-pan-am-games-1.3090096
770 million in operating costs is a lot to to recoup through a couple weeks of tourism.