Bettman and owner Michael Andlauer will sit down with Sutcliffe to discuss what role the municipal government can play in the club’s project to build a new arena at LeBreton Flats.
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Gary Bettman will stop downtown before heading to the Canadian Tire Centre on Tuesday night.
The National Hockey League commissioner will be in town Tuesday to speak at a luncheon with the Senators’ owner, Michael Andlauer, at the National Arts Centre, which is put on by the Ottawa Board of Trade.
Bettman will also be in attendance when the club takes on Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers.
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After they speak with some of the city’s business leaders, Bettman and Andlauer will sit down with Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe to discuss what role the municipal government can play in the club’s project to build a new arena at LeBreton Flats.
The Senators and the National Capital Commission announced an agreement in principle on Sept. 20 between the two sides for the club to purchase 10 acres of land at LeBreton.
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The club and NCC officials are focused on getting the paperwork finished to complete the sale sometime in the New Year. But the Senators are also trying to determine how they’ll pay for the new events centre, which will cost more than $1.1 billion to complete.
The decision by Bettman to meet with Sutcliffe isn’t just a courtesy call.
The Senators help drive the economy in this city and make a huge financial impact. Look no further than the growth of Kanata since the Senators moved there in 1996 if you want to find evidence.
The people in NHL’s head office in New York and at the Senators’ headquarters at the Canadian Tire Centre believe a move to LeBreton Flats will help make the city more of a destination.
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Look no further than the impact the six Taylor Swift concerts at the Rogers Centre in Toronto have made in that city. All the hotels are booked, and people are flocking downtown because they want to be part of it.
Forty-one game nights a year with people heading to LeBreton Flats after wrapping up their workday will bring people into the downtown area and will provide much-needed dollars for business owners
The NHL and Andlauer strongly believe that if this project is going to be successful then all three levels of government — federal, provincial and local — will have to play a role to help make the dream a reality.
There’s no question that everybody wants this to happen, but now the league, the Senators and the NCC officials need to dig down on how to get to the point where shovels can be put in the ground.
The plan all along has been to engage with city officials, but Sutcliffe has made it clear in the past that he’s not a fan of having public money fund this project because he knows he’ll face opposition from taxpayers.
Still, there are ways that City Hall can play a role.
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Senators president Cyril Leeder has said that Andlauer and the Senators have no desire to have the taxpayers fund a new arena. They understand there’s no appetite for that to happen, but they do believe there is room for negotiation with Sutcliffe about possible scenarios.
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Andlauer and Leeder have cited the structure used to negotiate Public Private Partnerships (P3s) for the Bell Sensplex and the Richcraft Sensplex. He said those have been successful.
That’s also a scenario the city negotiated with the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group for Lansdowne Park.
“We’ve had some success with the Sensplex. That’s a way where the city participated but it didn’t cost the taxpayer any money. That’s a good model and they’ve helped,” Leeder told Postmedia in September. “If you ask the city if they’re happy with the Sensplex, it didn’t cost them any capital or any operating costs and there’s probably been hundreds of millions of dollars spent on both those buildings by now.
“That’s a good result. It would be a different model for a major entertainment centre, but I think that’s the kind of example that we need to look at. We need to figure out how do we do this and not cost the taxpayers to get something done as quickly as we can.”
You can also be certain the league and the Senators will be quick to point out the role that the city has played in Lansdowne 2.0 with OSEG.
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In April, this city council gave the green light to spending $419.5 million to upgrade Lansdowne Park. The project includes a new 5,500-seat arena for the Ontario Hockey League’s Ottawa 67’s and a new North Side stand at TD Place Stadium for the Canadian Football League’s RedBlacks.
The project was met with a lot of opposition but the city opted to go ahead with it anyway by a 19-6 vote and Sutcliffe was among the backers. The city is locked into a partnership with OSEG and the only choice was to go ahead with the project.
The NHL and the Senators won’t be asking the city of Ottawa to pay the freight for a new arena, but they do want Sutcliffe and the city council to play a role in something that it will benefit from greatly.
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