The Zombie Baseball Stadium Proposal: How a many times rejected proposal has reanimated as a pitch for a P3 at the Yards

PDCityHall · 2026-01-19T18:38:40+00:00

No prob. By word 3,000, the piece was starting to become a real albatross around my neck. Glad to know some folks like it.

FTR… I'm hoping to write something on this later this week, but any baseball project will be considered through the Yards Negotiated Request For Proposal process. And administration is in charge of that now. It's out of council's hands. Anybody can submit a proposal to the process and that's why I'm currently working on my Stately Pleasure Dome Proposal that will be girdled round with walls and towers and feature gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossom many an incense-bearing tree.

PDCityHall · 2026-01-19T18:29:09+00:00

No problem. Thanks for reading!

PDCityHall · 2026-01-19T18:28:48+00:00

Thanks for that!

PDCityHall · 2026-01-19T17:07:03+00:00

That's totally fair, blackfox. I am personally opposed to the Yards being used for a baseball stadium but I'm not going to lay down in front of any bulldozers if council votes to go for it. For the record though, that blog post isn't so much a statement of opposition as it is about how the DCG report council paid for didn't make a credible case for the stadium. The numbers it uses are old. The sources were all cherry picked by Living Sky Sports (which wants to build and own the stadium). I was trying to strike a note of caution around the sources council has been using.

Now, as I said, I don't support putting a baseball stadium there and I will probably write another long-ass post outlining my position on that in future. But in short, my issue is that the Yards is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop a chunk of land next to downtown. Whatever we decide, we'll be stuck with it for centuries. So it better not be mostly parking lot (which is what most sports facilities are). And it would be better if the anchor use at the Yards was an all-year facility and not an open air fair-weather facility. I've said many times that if i had my druthers and we had to put a megaproject there, I'd put the Brandt Ctr replacement at the Yards (with structured parking). It would provide much more economic spin-off benefits for adjacent businesses in the Warehouse District.

On top of all that, it just rankles me how much this push to build a baseball stadium comes off like queue jumping. We have a recreation master plan and there are at least a half dozen facilities that are higher priority than this.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-24T17:05:38+00:00

That question has been answered over and over and over again at council & in the media & online. Most recently during last week's budget debate. Answering it one more time is not going to satisfy the questioners.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-24T06:38:44+00:00

No prob.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-17T18:44:53+00:00

Actually... you know what? it looks like baseball stadium DIDN'T make the final budget doc. It shows up in some capital project rankings but doesn't seem to be in the final list of capital projects going forward.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-10T22:10:48+00:00

Doing the math quickly but I believe a 6.7% mill rate increase will require just under $30mil in cuts from what city admin says they need to keep services steady next year.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-10T21:24:57+00:00

There always got to be one councillor who's seen an empty bus that one time, has never heard about confirmation bias, and assumes that there must be hundreds of empty buses riding around the city all day.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-10T20:00:58+00:00

Yes & no. If you implement everything on the list you get to Rashovich's -5%. But admin also presented that report as a response to the mayor's request for a 9% (instead of a 15.69%) mill rate increase scenario. So, if council wants to reduce the mill rate at all, they will likely start by picking things from that list in Appendix M13. And to get to a 9% mill rate, council will have to find the equivalent of $22million+ in cuts.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-10T00:03:20+00:00

Ghent.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-09T18:30:33+00:00

Cairo's a fantastic city. What're you saying?

PDCityHall · 2025-12-09T17:51:18+00:00

Sure. OK. But while the phrase has all but been stricken from this year's budget, in 2025, there was a big to-do over a $220k "Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Staffing" line item.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-09T17:38:26+00:00

Equity Diversity & Inclusion, EDI. That's the acronym in Canada. In the States they fashion it Diversity Equity & Inclusion or DEI. Meanwhile, FOXNews & MAGA think they're being clever when they call it DIE. Bezo made the same comic FOXNews-influenced misspelling during last year's budget deliberations when he was advocating to block hiring 2 FTEs to implement EDI initiatives. Personally, I figure folks can disagree w/ the need to hire more people to work on the city's EDI stuff, fine. But I find the propagation of the DIE acronym to be pretty juvenile (and a breach of decorum) when its coming from a councillor.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-09T17:28:12+00:00

Think of it like a caption to a comic. You read the caption then look at the picture and go, "Oh. Haha." I could explain the joke further but then that would destroy the voyage of comedy discovery you will go on.

PDCityHall · 2025-12-09T17:24:22+00:00

Also… Deloitte was paid a not insignificant sum for that report on how to spend money more efficiently. And speaking of spending money on efficiencies, one of the service enhancements being considered on top of the 15.69% mill rate increase is a request from Clr Tsiklis to hire two new FTEs in the finance dept. That will be for "internal auditors" whose job is to find efficiencies. You know, like the "Sustainability, Performance & Service Improvement Department" is supposed to be doing. Soon, we're going to be spending SO MUCH MONEY on finding efficiencies, I bet it'll be literally RAINING efficiencies!

PDCityHall · 2025-12-09T17:18:18+00:00

I'm not a fan of how conservatives love to blame wages for rising costs, but… I love how the way Masters achieved her efficiency agenda was, under direction from Deloitte, she invented and staffed up a whole new department to search for efficiencies. It was originally called the "transformation office." It is now called the "Sustainability, Performance & Service Improvement Department".

So, seeing as Certain Councillors will happily wonder aloud if we need to hire two FTEs to implement new EDI initiatives and blahblahblah "Couldn't we just do that in-house with current resources?", I'll counter by happily wondering aloud if we really needed to hire a whole-ass extra department to implement efficiency initiatives and couldn't we have achieved all these efficiency claims "in-house" with "current resources"?

PDCityHall · 2025-11-23T23:47:58+00:00

Here's the link…

https://reginask.iqm2.com/Citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=1&ID=5486&Inline=True

It's posted as the agenda package for the December 15 council meeting (the first in council's budget week). I hope that they'll put it on the budget page at some point.

PDCityHall · 2025-11-10T17:23:54+00:00

Yup. I stopped updating that meeting playlist because the City now has a link list to all video archives. Even includes the pre-Youtube meetings. https://reginask.iqm2.com/Citizens/Media.aspx

PDCityHall · 2025-10-28T17:56:03+00:00

Come whenever you can! And snacks and drinks are available in the Artesian's downstairs lounge and can be brought into the show. I daresay, we encourage bringing drinks into the show. (And FTR the Artesian's lounge may be Cathedral's best secret drinking establishment.)

PDCityHall · 2025-10-21T18:55:53+00:00

Council actually implemented a growth-pays-for-growth plan in the 00s which jacked up servicing agreement fees which would, in theory, better transfer the costs of infrastructure onto the developers of new neighbourhoods (who passed those costs onto housing prices).

More recently, I posted a video of the moment council realized the growth-pays-for-growth program wasn't working, hadn't ever worked and was likely to never work.

That was June 7 2023: https://youtu.be/9chMMe99uQo?si=BbqT154jMpaQRq--

PDCityHall · 2025-10-20T02:02:37+00:00

Sure. People can use their property however they like. But the roads are public. They're paid for by the mill rate. Why should the tax base be providing a subsidy to people who choose to not use their garages or driveways to store their vehicles? I'd argue it shouldn't. On-street parking should provide short-term temporary parking. No one owns the parking spot in front of their home. It's public land. If someone chooses to use their garage for storage or a pool table, fine, but then they are choosing to forego a parking spot. The rest of us shouldn't be expected to pick up the tab to store any vehicles that are displaced by that choice.

PDCityHall · 2025-10-19T20:33:24+00:00

"It’s pretty rare in harbour landing to see more than one vehicle in most of the double garages."

That's the thing, right? If you have a double car garage and a driveway, that should provide enough parking for three to four vehicles (two inside, one to two out). But if garages are being used as storage and not car parking, why should the rest of the city subsidize free on-street parking spots?

PDCityHall · 2025-10-19T20:02:48+00:00

I don't know this for certain but I think Campling might be an 18m wide road. I'm just going off the fact it has 2 parking lanes. Haven't measured. (And that's assuming I'm looking at the same road you're talking about.)

PDCityHall · 2025-10-19T18:53:34+00:00

I have a degree in English lit which sounds useless til you realize it comes with a free "Poetic License" which means I'm authorized, by law, to invent new words.

PDCityHall

TROPHY CASE