Stadium logic

Here's James Dann and Barnaby Bennett on the mess around the Christchurch stadium.

Sporting events would create around 20 big occasions with any of the options. The covered stadium options enable many smaller events: music, conferences, other community events. These are forecast to produce small 'profits', as opposed to the uncovered option that would generate small 'losses'. A massive caveat is that when the 25-year life cycle of ALL of the options is considered, (big venues need substantial reviews every 25 years or so), all of them lose about $7-8m a year.

Hence the report favours the bigger spend, arguing it would create more activity, and lose about the same amount of money over the long term. It is worth stressing this again; even with the most optimistic predictions for stadium use in the report, the best-case scenario still forecasts it costing us $7-8m year; on top of the $474m construction cost.

They also hit all the points that should be hit around the difference between creating new events and shifting events from one place to another.