It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the new $208 million football stadium that Manitoba is building for the municipally owned Winnipeg Blue Bombers football team. How’s that going, guys?
Triple B Stadium Inc., the consortium that owns IGF and funded the construction of the 33,500-seat facility at the University of Manitoba, has filed a lawsuit against construction company Stuart Olson and architect Ray Wan.
The lawsuit argues the home of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers is riddled with problems that will take millions of dollars to fix.
Oh, dear.
The minister said part of the reason the province chose not to put money into the old Canad Inns Stadium near Polo Park was because putting the required $50 million into it would have been “pouring that money down the toilet.”…
“Do I think that this is still a great stadium? Yeh, I do. But we want it here for 50 or 60 or 70 years. And the problems that have been identified and what Triple B is looking at is that the construction, we may not get that 50 years out of it and it’ll just start to crumble a lot earlier and so these problems need to be taken care of.”
Oh, dear oh dear.
Basically, the new stadium will be safe, but the charges are that the builders mucked up the waterproofing, which will cause the building to sustain more damage over time. One hopes that the suit will be settled in a way that will allow for repairs to be made that will keep this building around for 50 years or more — wow, people talking about a stadium lasting 50 years, that takes me back — but in the meantime, I guess at least Manitobans can be glad that they can play football in it at all.
The stadium looks really nice from the photos that I have seen of it. I hope they get it all sorted out. The older I get, the more I appreciate the CFL. Better than Arena League, it least it is real football. I don’t know if a CFL team could win the SEC, but they would smash the MAC and the sorry Big 12, etc.
The CFL is a lot better than US fans give it credit. It is not your fault, most people don’t understand something they rarely ever see. Check it out, it is well worth your time. BTW, the biggest problem with this stadium was the fact that since the city of Winnipeg provided most of the funding, they insisted on a local architect (who had never designed a stadium before) and local contractors (who had never built a stadium before). They were out of their league on this project and it showed. Had the designers been Populous or HKS and the contractors someone like PCL, these problems most likely would never had happened (they are doing the new stadium in Regina). Such a shame because it really could have been a great stadium.
This will save the franchise operators from having to make any effort to prove the place is “obsolete” in 10 to 20 years. Planned obsolescence (sub-par products for top dollar) worked for auto and appliance manufacturers, why not the sports industry too?
The sports sheep will follow their herders (owners) who know the power of their addictive product “…bahh, bahh, bahh we want new!…”
Could a new scheme in stadium blackmail be on it’s way?
I had everything in my new stadium gold-plated, at taxpayer expense. That way this sort of thing won’t happen.