Sports Bratina: 30,000 Seat Stadium or Nothing By RTH Staff

Published January 04, 2011

this blog entry has been updated

According to a CHML report, Mayor Bob Bratina is saying if Hamilton cannot put together a full 30,000 seat Pan Am stadium that can accommodate the Hamilton Tiger-Cats after the Games are over, it makes no sense to build a smaller stadium in its place.

Hamilton Mayor tells CHML's Bill Kelly he doesn't want to be the mayor who diminishes Hamilton - taking it from a 30-thousand seat stadium to a 6-thousand seater. He says either we're going to be in the game and play off the tradition that the Tiger Cats are a part of, or not. Anything in between, he says, doesn't make any sense to him.

As of this writing, Mayor Bratina and the councillors have not yet responded to an email from RTH sent early this morning asking if they would consider delivering a bid for a scalable 5500-6500 seat West Harbour stadium to Toronto 2015 on February 1.

Toronto 2015 CEO Ian Troop clarified yesterday in a Raise the Hammer interview that the February 1 stadium deadline is final and that the Pan Am host corporation will consider a 5500-6500 seat stadium in the West Harbour that can later be scaled to include a professional tenant.

Specifically, Mr. Troop stated that a stadium with 15,000-25,000 seats requires a permanent legacy tenant to be financially viable but a 6000 seat stadium has modest enough operating costs that a legacy of community use is viable and affordable.

He also explicitly pointed out that money freed up by building a smaller stadium could be used to upgrade the Pan Am Velodrome to be "a tremendous high-performance sports legacy" for Hamilton.

Update: Mayor Bratina just responded to our email, writing, "Council has been aware for some of the information presented here, which is not relevant to our deliberations."

You can read about Raise the Hammer.

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