It’s generally not a good idea to base your perceptions of a major development plan on which of two elected officials has the best sound bite, but in the case of the proposed new Calgary Flames arena, it’s really hard not to when these are both contained in the same article:

“What I’ve been saying to proponents of the arena is, ‘Don’t sell me magic beans,’” [Calgary Mayor Naheed] Nenshi said in a year-end interview with Postmedia. “Just be really honest: This is the amount of public financing that it’s going to take to build this and this is why we think it’s a good investment in the city.”

And:

Some at the city, including the mayor, have questioned what sort of private development is likely to be spurred in an environment where office towers are already sitting empty and there exists an oversupply of condos and apartments.

“I dispute that a little bit, [that] putting an office tower there isn’t a good thing when we have vacancy,” says [city councillor Jeff] Davison. “It’s absolutely a good thing, because it’s a totally different model than what we have now. And what we’ve learned is that in this downturn, the model we have right now doesn’t work.”

Don’t sell me magic beans vs. we should build an arena in order to spark the creation of office towers in the middle of an office tower glut because not building arenas hasn’t worked great so why not try something different? is a first-round rhetorical knockout even before we get into the actual numbers involved. Which are, if you’re scoring at home: A new arena could now cost $600 million plus the price of land, which is a higher price tag than in the last plan that the Calgary city manager projected the city would lose $1.2 billion on (though that one would have included a CFL stadium as well).

The Calgary council is set to vote on January 28 on which projects to dedicate public funds to, and both Davison and Nenshi have votes. Expect a whole lot of public lobbying in the next four weeks, in other words, which means lots more opportunities for fun sound bite wars.

The Calgary city council is set to vote today on reopening talks with the Flames owners about a new hockey arena as part of an “entertainment district” — presumably this won’t include discussions just yet on how much the city would have to pay for one, since that only gets people upset — and just in time, the city-owned Calgary Municipal Land Corporation has issued some fresh renderings: Okay, that looks like an arena of some kind, certainly. It’s an unusual touch for renderings to show passersby bundled up against a driving snowstorm, but I guess that’s how we know that it’s Canada, if the Canadian flag didn’t tip us off.

Anything of the interior?

GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Okay, so the plan is apparently for Calgary to build an arena not just for hockey, but also for portals into adjacent dimensions, from which will extrude a warped version of space-time that will inexorably start to cover the walls and ceiling of the new venue, en route to engulfing all of Calgary, and eventually, our entire universe. Fortunately a lucky few fans will be able to use their glowing wrist bracelets to teleport to safety just in time, but for the rest of us, there will be no escape. Also, those upper-deck seats look like they have terrible sightlines.

When the Calgary city council announced a new Flames arena negotiating committee without Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who was the guy on the old committee who clearly knew the most about negotiating arena deals, it was a worrisome sign. But hey, maybe the new committee was going to be smart, too, and they just wanted Nenshi out of the way because the Flames owners hated him and this way they could bargain without him being a lightning rod for criticism?

Turns out, not so much:

Reporters were told that on May 31, Coun. Jeff Davison sent a letter to Flames’ CEO Ken King, asking for a new round of talks.

King responded with a letter which started with: “While we would never decline your formal request for a meeting, we do have some concerns based on past practice.”

King requested a preliminary discussion so the Flames can see what’s changed in the city’s position, and then the team could decide if it’s worth returning to the table…

King’s letter also came with a caveat.

“If we are to proceed, a simple and preemptive imperative is media silence. Public and/or media involvement must only be rendered in the event of an agreement,” wrote King.

So the Flames owners’ official position is: Tell us your offer, and we won’t tell you our offer, and then maybe we’ll consider discussing things with you. But nobody is to talk to the media about anything, because we will only negotiate — by which we mean listen to you negotiating against yourself — behind closed doors, with any open democratic debate to take place after the deal is already done.

That is … what’s Canadian for “batshit”? Surely Davison could see that, right?

Turns out, not so much:

He said the letter is a good sign.

“We haven’t heard officially from the Flames in months and getting moving on a conversation quickly was important,” said Davison.

Also, the CBC reports that Davison says he “understands the condition” of not revealing anything to the media.

If you want to bend over backwards to give Davison the benefit of the doubt: Maybe he’s just trying to nod and smile to get King and the Flames execs back to the table, and at that point he’ll start playing hardball. (And he did release the letter to the media, which shows he’s not going to negotiate totally in secret, though he also noted that the letter was going to be subject to freedom of information requests anyway.)

But still, why is he so eager to get the Flames execs back to the table, when it’s the team, not the city, that is desperate for a new arena? Nenshi’s approach — show me why we should build you an arena, and we’ll happily listen — may not have led to progress toward construction, but that’s largely because building an arena that the Flames would profit from would be a terrible deal for the city, while building an arena that wouldn’t cost the city much would be a terrible deal for the Flames. So yeah, there’s an impasse, but that’s only because $1 billion–plus arenas in medium-sized cities that already have perfectly okay if lacking new-car-smell arenas are terrible investments, something that no amount of smiling and nodding and negotiating is going to change. It’s still early, but “Please let us negotiate with you for this thing that you are demanding from us” seems like a very, very, very bad sign.

As rumored last month, the Calgary city council has gone ahead and formed a committee to reopen talks with the Flames owners on a new arena, a committee that will edge Mayor Naheed Nenshi out of a central role in negotiations. Nenshi, though, either thinks the rest of the council will hold a hard line or is just making a brave face of it, because he had this to say:

“I think hitting the reset button is a good idea, but the reset button has to be hit on both sides,” Nenshi said.

“Given that we were not the party that walked away I think it’s important everyone come back to the table and maybe with new faces around the table as well.”…

“It will be hard for the committee to convince me to put a lot more public money on the table,” Nenshi said Monday. “I think it will be hard for the committee to convince council to do that.

“I think it will be hard for the committee to convince Calgarians to do that.”

The concern here, ultimately, isn’t who does the negotiating on behalf of Calgary residents, it’s whether they give away the store. Nenshi still wields influence on the council, and obviously still has the bully pulpit to embarrass all concerned with facts, so it’s not like the Flames owners have carte blanche now. Still, this is something to keep an eye on, to be sure that it’s genuinely the Calgary council telling the team, “We’re willing to talk so long as you’re not asking us to give away the store,” and not “Okay, we pushed out the guy who understood economics, when do you want us to jump and how high?”

This article from the Toronto Star is really weird and convoluted and lede-burying, but if I get the gist of it, it’s that some members of the Calgary city council are trying to find a way to freeze Mayor Naheed Nenshi out of future negotiations with the Flames over a new arena, because he’s been too good at not giving away the store. The evidence on hand:

At least 10 councillors are directly involved in or aware of recent meetings in which elected officials have discussed drafting a notice of motion calling on council to strike a new committee — one that may exclude past brokers from both parties.

“Initially, it should be new blood that’s on it to give it a different perspective than we’re getting now,” said Coun. Ray Jones.

“The longer we leave it, the more it just kind of goes away,” he explained. “Everybody right now is gung ho to get going on it, and I think we should take advantage of that.”

And:

In addition to Jones, councillors Ward Sutherland, George Chahal, Sean Chu, Shane Keating, Peter Demong, Diane Colley-Urquhart, Joe Magliocca, Evan Woolley and Jeff Davison are directly involved in or aware of discussions to restart talks and form a new committee.

“We’ve got to get a few oars in the water here and moving in the same direction before we really can make any headway with it,” said Davison, who is leading the charge.

“Overall, you’re just seeing a different makeup on council,” he said. “There’s a lot of us that are new, and sometimes some of the ideas that failed in the past get rejuvenated.”

And:

Lori Williams, associate professor of policy studies at Mount Royal University, said councillors might be wary of voter backlash given many Calgarians supported Nenshi’s position.

“I suppose it does make sense to try to get new people to the negotiating table so that any animosities that may be lingering from the breakdown of negotiations in the past would not be part of this,” Williams said.

Okay, sure, “new blood” and “new ideas,” but otherwise this is just weird: The last round of negotiations “broke down” not because of any problems on the council side, but because Nenshi pointed out that the Flames owners’ plan could cost the city more than a billion dollars, and then the Flames walked away from the table and put all their energies into trying to defeat Nenshi in last fall’s mayoral election. When that didn’t work, they mostly sighed a lot about how now what were they gonna do with a mayor in power who didn’t want to give them lots of taxpayer money, and deployed NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to say that the Flames will lose money without a new arena, when that’s patently not true.

While Nenshi has been possibly the most prominent city mayor anywhere in holding the line on sports subsidies, he’s always been limited by Calgary’s weak-mayor system, in which he’s only one vote on the 15-member council. Given that the Star report only talked to a couple of council members, it’s hard to say whether this is an actual major revolt or just some people trying to trash-talk the mayor into getting out of the way and letting them get down to the business of shoveling money at the Flames — one councillor, Shane Keating, is cited as having said of Nenshi, “I’ll never be as intelligent as you are, but I’ve been smarter than you many times,” which is described as a “stinging rebuke.” Maybe it sounds different in the original Canadian?

Here’s an article from the Globe and Mail on the Calgary Saddledome that starts with an extended Charles Dickens reference, because man, oh man, does sportswriting get boring after a while if you don’t mix it up.

Once columnist Roy McGregor gets to the point, it turns out to be that unlike the things Charles Dickens saw on his visit to Canada — and, presumably, Dickens’ works themselves — the Flames‘ arena wasn’t built to last, or at least “wasn’t made to produce revenue in the deep streams demanded these days by professional hockey.” (Whereas Canadian buildings in 1842 were? Hey, it’s not my metaphor.)

This is an assertion we can actually check! Hey, Forbes magazine, how does the Calgary arena compare to the rest of the NHL in revenues? Unfortunately, Forbes doesn’t break down the NHL by venue revenues, but the Flames rank 21st out of 30 overall in the league in total revenues, which is neither great nor awful. They’re about $22 million in annual revenue behind the Edmonton Oilers, the team that’s most often held up as an example of a nearby franchise that got a new arena and is now thriving — spending $1.2 billion on a new arena to get back $22 million a year in new revenue would be spectacularly stupid, which is no doubt why the Flames’ owners want the city of Calgary to spend much of the money instead. And if that strikes you as spectacularly stupid in turn, McGregor has an answer for that: revitalization!

In this era of what he calls “sportainment,” André Richelieu says that, increasingly, arenas are being built as entertainment hubs, the “jewel box,” so to speak of massive developments that go far beyond any sporting event.

Richelieu, who has taught sports marketing at Laval University and is currently a professor at École des sciences de la gestion in Montreal, says “The rationale behind these real estate projects is to trigger traffic all year round in order for the new stadium complex to become a point of convergence for the community and, in some instances, revitalize a neighbourhood.”

Yeah, no, not so much. With numbers like this, maybe it’s understandable that you’d reach for the Dickens quotes instead.

The Calgary Flames arena squabble has remained fairly quiet since the Flames owners failed in their attempts to displace Mayor Naheed Nenshi in last fall’s elections, except for NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who won’t shut up about it. Since October, Bettman has declared that the Flames’ “sustainability” was being jeopardized by stupid economists who don’t believe arenas revitalize cities just because numbers show they don’t, said the Flames can’t be “viable for the long term” without a publicly subsidized arena, called the lack of forthcoming public funds “very frustrating,” and said that Calgary will never get the Olympics without a new arena, even if the IOC says the exact opposite. As on Friday, he was back on the sustainability tip:

“It’s clear that this building is the oldest building in the league. It’s clear that the team needs a new building. Calgary’s a great market, there are great fans here, but a building is as important a factor as anything else. The team’s competitive situation, financial stability is obviously being impacted with each season that they stay here.”

Bettman said that Calgary used to be a top 10 team that made money for the league, but now over the past few years, the NHL has been the one writing cheques.

“The cheques are getting bigger and that means the situation, financially, continues to deteriorate and that will affect, I suppose, the competitiveness of the organization.”

What does the evidence say? Let’s check out Forbes’ team revenue numbers, which are estimates but have been right on the money when actual revenue data is leaked. Here are the most recent charts from the Forbes Flames page (time moves right to left, so the most recent year, 2017, is at left):

So revenue has in fact been going up pretty steadily, though operating income (profits) has taken a dip as the team ownership started spending more money on players. The Flames have dipped from 13th to 19th among most valuable NHL franchises since 2010, but that’s more owing to other teams boosting their value in the interim than to anything going wrong for the Flames — “they’re still making money, just other teams are making even more now” isn’t usually what normal humans mean by “unsustainable.”

Bettman also said Friday that the Saddledome is costing Calgary concerts that it could otherwise get, because like the Olympics, that is totally the concern of an NHL commissioner:

“I was told that there were 27 acts, some of them multiple days, that have played in Edmonton since the building opened that haven’t played here,” Bettman said. “That goes to the quality of life of the city and that’s an indication as to the differences in the buildings.”

I have other news fish to fry this morning, so I’ll leave this to readers to fact-check. Be sure to check for acts that played Calgary but not Edmonton, too!