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“It’s a huge project with a tremendous risk,” Melnyk said in a recording from one of the fan sessions. “I’m a risk-taker, but this one is really rolling the dice, and if we’re wrong, we’re really bad wrong.”

Specifically, Melnyk said he worried about whether there’ll be a market for the condo units the RendezVous LeBreton plan includes. The land is surrounded by other developments and Ottawa’s only so big a market.

“I’m now hesitating back and saying, ‘You can’t do all this development there and have LeBreton’,” he said.

Melnyk’s a loose talker. He mused about walking away from the LeBreton deal late last year, right when he was on the verge of signing an agreement in principle to move the plan forward. He’s mused about moving the team. He’s left the Senators’ hockey fans bitter over how he treated team captain Daniel Alfredsson and their business fans bitter over how he treated team president Cyril Leeder.

But gee-I-don’t-know-about-dissing your own proposal after it’s been through two rounds of acceptances is special. The NCC group that evaluated the RendezVous LeBreton plan against the one from a group led by Gatineau developer Devcore even worried publicly that the condo component might be too aggressive. No, no, the RendezVous LeBreton people said, we’re confident this’ll work. They seemed to know what they were doing. They sure insisted they did.

Melnyk’s now got a market study of some sort, he said, and it’s worrying him. Asked Thursday, the Senators declined to share it. “(T)hey are evaluating the results at the board level,” senior spokesman Brian Morris said.