CALGARY—The committee tasked with reigniting stalled arena negotiations with the owners of the Calgary Flames may reconsider adding citizen advisers to the roster after dismissing the idea weeks ago.

Emails show city councillors debated in April whether to include one or two “citizens at large” and the president of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce to the then-termed event centre exploration committee.

“This must be a council-led process, open to one or two citizens at large (shows inclusion),” Councillor Shane Keating, one of the principal architects of the committee, said in a partially redacted April 23 email.

However, Keating’s colleagues raised concerns that enlisting citizens could bog down the process and negatively impact their timeline to strike the committee as soon as possible.

“Advertise, what are the qualifications, who interviews etc. etc. This effects (sic) timelines etc.,” Councillor Ward Sutherland replied in an email. “I would suggest dropping the citizen at large and add a councillor?”

Councillors briefly discussed whether to appoint Sandip Lalli, who was named the president of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce in March. But Lalli was disqualified as “she’s new in her position and might not be able or allowed to take this on,” Councillor Diane Colley-Urquhart noted in the chain of emails.

Several councillors have been itching to restart discussions with Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corp. (CESC) after the owners walked away from the negotiating table last fall.

CSEC owns the NHL’s Calgary Flames, the CFL’s Stampeders, the Western Hockey League’s Hitmen and the Roughnecks of the National Lacrosse League.

In 2015, the owners unveiled an ambitious proposal to replace the aging Scotiabank Saddledome and McMahon Stadium with CalgaryNEXT, a massive complex that included an arena, football stadium and field house on the banks of the Bow River in the west end of downtown Calgary.

A second site in Victoria Park near the Calgary Stampede grounds was proposed after city administration presented a report stating CalgaryNEXT would cost $1.8 billion — double the Flames’ estimate.

Councillors Keating, Sutherland and Jeff Davison, city manager Jeff Fielding, and Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) president Michael Brown were appointed Monday to the renamed event centre assessment committee.

“I don’t want to go into anything with a prescribed notion of what may or may not transpire,” Davison, who spearheaded the push to establish the committee, told reporters this week. “We needed a cool-off period. That’s happened. It’s time to get started again.”

CMLC chair Lyle Edwards and Steve Allan, chair of Calgary Economic Development, were named advisers to the committee.

In an interview, Keating said councillors initially thought “it would have been nice” to include a couple of citizens on the committee, but “it would have tied the hands of the committee so much at the start.”

“We have the opportunity in looking at it where maybe we’ll get some citizens who are economists and things like that to come on,” Keating said Thursday. “But we can do that as the committee forms, and it wouldn’t take as long.”

Colley-Urquhart, who appears to have done much of the heavy lifting drafting and editing Davison’s notice of motion, suggested the committee could hire a headhunting firm should it decide to add citizen advisers.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“As the committee does some preliminary work and fleshes stuff out, we’re going to see where the weak spots are and where you need the expertise to fill those spots,” Colley-Urquhart said in an interview.

“I think the public would expect that there would be an independent process where you would either headhunt to bring people in to fill those positions … rather than picking your buddies to go on there.”

Read more about: