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The Atlantic Schooners have trimmed their sails significantly as the devastating COVID-19 gale continues to blow.

Anthony LeBlanc, one of three founding partners of Schooners Sports and Entertainment (SSE) and a spokesman and head cheerleader for the project that would bring a Canadian Football League team and stadium to the Halifax area, accepted a position recently as president of business operations with the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League.

LeBlanc chose not to comment directly but he is backing away from an active role with SSE.

“The founding members are all entrepreneurs, they have primary roles outside of this project in trying to bring a team and a stadium to the Atlantic region, so it is certainly not a blow,” Halifax corporate lawyer David Wallace, lead counsel for SSE, said of LeBlanc’s status changing to a passive partner without day-to-day involvement in SSE activities.

“Another one of the founding partners, Gary Drummond, will now assume the group’s lead spokesperson role and I’ll be on the ground here in Halifax, kind of doing what I’ve been doing for the last two years, pushing the project along and being the main point of contact on the ground here in Atlantic Canada,” Wallace said.

In early December, Halifax regional council narrowly passed a motion to provide a one-time $20-million contribution to a community stadium project provided that a new site other than SSE’s preferred Shannon Park location be found.

HRM’s contribution, payable upon substantial completion of the stadium, was estimated to be payable in fiscal 2022-23 or 2023-24 and would come from the strategic capital fund, which had a balance of $39 million when council made its decision.

LeBlanc said in December that the first order of business was to work with municipal staff to come up with a new and acceptable site for the proposed stadium. The stadium is projected to cost in the range of $100 million to $110 million and feature 12,000 permanent seats and 12,000 temporary seats.

“We have been exploring sites and doing some planning in the background but again, because of the pandemic, our engagement with the city and levels of government have obviously been put somewhat on hold,” Wallace said.

Zeroed in on two sites

“We have probably two sites that we have zeroed in on at the moment and we’re talking to various landowners of those sites. We’ve done some planning in the background with our advisers.”

Wallace said he would not comment on the locations targeted but LeBlanc offered in December that sites at or near Dartmouth Crossing, Bayers Lake, Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Exhibition Park, the Bedford Common and Woodside were being considered.

With HRM committed to a $20-million contribution and the founding partners and stakeholders of SSE adding another $30 million to the project, almost half of the projected price is still unaccounted for. That’s where the second order of business, approaching the province for a monetary contribution, comes in.

“Obviously, our plans to engage in an active manner with the province have been somewhat derailed with their attention greatly elsewhere,” Wallace said. There is not much to report on that end other than we continue to seek provincial support when it is appropriate to do so.

“We’ve been trying to push it along on the back end but certainly we are respectful of what the province and the city need to deal with right now and we will continue to take our cues from them for when it is more appropriate to re-engage at a more active level.”

In December, regional council on the strength of a 10-7 vote committed financially to the project, primarily because the proposal for a stadium with a CFL team as an anchor tenant would leave SSE responsible for the risk of owning and operating it.

HRM commitment opposed

Coun. Sam Austin (Dartmouth Centre), one of the seven dissenting votes, has not changed his mind.

“I didn’t support it then because it is always a question of priorities,” Austin said. “We could spend the money on this or we could be spending the money on some of our other municipal needs and I still look at this in comparison to investing in the library system, investing in transit and investing in all the other needs we have. To me, it just didn’t make the cut because we don’t have a lot of that core stuff funded. There is a lot sitting in our capital budget that is not funded.”

The fact that the municipality is losing a substantial amount of money in deferred property tax payments and suspended services and corresponding service fees during the COVID-19 crisis has reinforced Austin’s position.

“I suspect, given where we are heading with the revenue hit, we are going to have to defer more (projects), so in that context, I don’t know how we can turn around and say we have $20 million for a stadium.”

Austin said the strategic capital reserve could be used for any number of signature capital projects.

“Our budget has to be redone,” Austin said. “A lot of the assumptions in it that were made around revenue are totally out the window now so we have to look carefully at our expenditure. We don’t know yet what other aid from other levels of government might look like … how bad it is, we just can’t say yet.

“In that context, the rationale for saying we are kind of pressed on the capital budget over the next couple of years and is this (stadium) really one of our priorities, for me the answer to that and what I’ve been hearing from many of the residents in my district, is that the answer is no. That logic is even more sound now then it was then.”