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Now council and CSEC are back with a new arena plan, and there won’t be enough time for serious questions to be asked and answered before the thing is approved. The best way to avoid opposition to a big capital-spending project is to not allow any time for opposition to mount.

And there would be reason enough for taxpayers to oppose it. It doesn’t appear to be as disastrous as the arenas built entirely on the public dime, or as ruinous as those that are constructed in the hope that a major-league team will eventually decide to come play in it. But, still: The city plans to spend $275-million to build the facility, plus another $15.4-million on demolition and land costs, and in exchange it will collect a two percent ticket tax and receive a sliver of the naming-rights money over the next decade, while handing over valuable land around the arena for future development. The city would also own the building, which sounds good but is meaningless: CSEC would operate it for 35 years and collect the profits during that time, at the end of which the arena will be almost certainly declared outdated and worthless. (See, for example, the Saddledome.)

Relative to some of the other arena swindles and stadium boondoggles that have been perpetrated on other cities (hello, Quebec City), this arrangement is more palatable, but that’s also a sad admission of how ingrained the arena-racket has become. The buildings themselves cost a fortune, and sports teams don’t necessarily make huge yearly profits, so even wealthy owners can claim that they need the public to subsidize construction costs. Enough teams in enough markets have pulled this off for long enough that everyone is kind of numb to it. A deal like this one, which is essentially less of a bad thing, ends up looking comparatively decent. And no one from the team side ever mentions the fact that the real money in owning a franchise isn’t in operating profit, it’s in the franchise values that, in good markets, increase exponentially over even a modest amount of time.