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Photo by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press/File

Those details were finally submitted to Halifax council in August, and released to the public in September. It did not go well. SSE proposed spending $30-million of its own money, $30-million of the city’s money, and between $90-$120-million of the province’s money, over 30 years, to build the stadium. It gave the municipality several options to provide its share, and said the province could raise its required millions through an increase to a tax on hotel rooms and a car-rental tax.

The province’s tourism association, not surprisingly, freaked out at the notion of suddenly making it more expensive to be a tourist in Nova Scotia, and municipal politicians questioned the wisdom of exposing Halifax to the risk of a large infrastructure project with uncertain prospects. A motion that sought to stop city staff from investigating the potential benefits of SSE’s proposal was defeated at Halifax council by a single vote. “If you were sitting in the room judging things based on that meeting, it would be hard not to walk away with a conclusion that the odds of this thing coming together were quite low,” says Sam Austin, a Dartmouth councillor.

So, not great. SSE responded to this near-death experience with a revised proposal that was submitted late last week. Much of the new proposal is dedicated to emphasizing how awesome the old proposal was. “This is the best deal for (Halifax) and, in fact, better than any stadium jurisdiction in North America,” it says. That part is underlined. SSE also now promises to be responsible for any cost overruns and says it is open to not owning the facility if that’s what the municipality would prefer. It also has scrapped most of the previous mechanisms for covering the city’s share of the funding in favour of one: a ticket surcharge and tax-increment financing. It says the city would get new tax revenue from commercial developments that would only happen if the stadium is built — an important distinction — and it also imagines a $10 per ticket surcharge that would cover, at least, the early years of the city’s share, when the new tax revenue would not yet be realized.

“I feel like it might have some new life,” Austin, who brought the original motion to have the stadium-study killed, said in an interview.