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Regional council could pull the plug Tuesday on the dream of a community stadium and a Canadian Football League team for Halifax.

Coun. Sam Austin (Dartmouth Centre) will move at Tuesday’s meeting that council rescind its October 2018 motion directing staff to bring back a detailed analysis of Schooner Sports and Entertainment’s (SSE) football proposal.

“We’ve now seen the broad outlines of what that proposal is and for me, personally, it’s so far outside the ballpark of what I would consider something I can support,” Austin said.

Jacques Dube, the chief administrative officer of the municipality, said it would take him and a staff team six months to analyze the proposal it received from SSE on Sept. 17.

“To me, it doesn’t make sense for staff to spend six months working on something that I am not going to be able to vote for,” Austin said. “For council as a whole, I think it is useful, now that we know what is being asked from us, to have a check-in and say do we want to keep digging into this or do we want to just pull the plug.”

The proposal would have SSE borrow money to build the stadium, with the municipality, provincial and/or federal governments providing a guarantee, and pay back the lender $5 million to $6 million a year over a 30-year period. The company’s proposal included five options for municipal funding, including a plan that would have HRM commit $2 million annually to the lender and SSE repaying $1 million to the municipality each year on ticket fees.

The stadium, land purchase at Shannon Park and other professional fees would run in the range of $130 million, said Anthony LeBlanc, one of three SSE founders. The stadium would have 12,000 permanent seats, 10,575 semi-permanent bleacher and temporary seats and standing room for 2,000. The group’s projected timeline is for a construction start date of February 2020 and a completed stadium by October 2022.

“When I look at our capital priorities, we have lots of transportation projects in the works, plans to recap our libraries, things like washrooms in our parks,” Austin said. “There is more than enough day-to-day stuff, stuff that really makes a difference in people’s daily lives.”

Austin said the last budget deliberations had a lot of capital items moved to the unbudgeted B list for the next couple of years.

“It’s pretty hard in that context to take money and direct it into a stadium, if you don’t see it as a priority.

“We’re being asked for up to $2 million annually. We may or may not get some of that back, it all depends on how the CFL team does. If the CFL team were to fail, suddenly we are on the hook for all of that each year. We are being asked to take on risk, to potentially divert money from other places.”

Austin said he is not sure how many of his council colleagues share his views but the motion to rescind would have to pass by a two-thirds vote to put an abrupt end to stadium consideration.

“I would characterize the response at council to the proposal as fairly lukewarm,” Austin said. “I don’t know whether or not you want to get rid of it at this stage or if you want to see that staff business analysis. You’d have to talk to my colleagues about that or wait until Tuesday.”