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This is a great deal, unless you are against happiness, wealth, and health

This plan, announced in early spring, was itself a marked departure from what was envisioned a few months earlier, when the ownership group unveiled the Schooners name at the Grey Cup and said they wanted a 24,000-seat stadium with the costs split about evenly between themselves, the municipality, and the province. The scaled-down version was a response to local concerns about the costs and risks involved with building the whole thing at one go, SSE said. Details to come.

Those details came in the form of a proposal submitted to Halifax Regional Municipality last month, most of which was released on Thursday. And the surprise twist is that the bulk of the funding would come not from the city, but from the province, in the form of an increased hotel tax and a new car-rental tax.

The financing proposal assumes that an institution would loan SSE up to $110-million to acquire the federally-owned land and cover construction of the permanent 12,000-seat structure. This would then be repaid over 30 years at $5-6-million per year. The hotel tax, doubled from two per cent to four per cent, and the unspecified car-rental tax, would bring in $3-4-million per year, and the city and the Schooners would cover the rest of the annual loan repayments.

The proposal also provides a range of options for Halifax to provide its share, much in the same way one might buy an appliance set at an outlet store: from a lump-sum, one-time payment to a no-money-down approach that could end up costing much more. One of the options suggests a ticket surcharge that, if all goes well, would cover Halifax’s annual payments. Sounds great. FREE STADIUM.