OTTAWA — You can bet on almost anything these days.
I wagered a million dollars that the sun would come up and am rolling in dough today.
(Sun-rising metaphors are fitting in Ottawa, where it has been dark to NHL playoff hockey since 2017).
Now, if you were in charge of placing odds on the future location of Ottawa’s NHL arena, how would you lay them out? Would it be 5/2 in favour of LeBreton Flats and 8/1 on a downtown site? Or something else.
Certainly LeBreton Flats — a tract of land west of Parliament Hill presided over by the National Capital Commission, a crown corporation — has the inside track as an established candidate for a new Senators arena. But, as often happens in an election, later candidates to the scene can win the day.
Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, for one, is a proponent for looking into sites even more central than LeBreton, in downtown Ottawa.
Earlier this week, Senators CEO and president Cyril Leeder was speaking to a building summit organized by the Ottawa Board of Trade. Unintentionally, he garnered some headlines for the arena project by stating a simple fact – that LeBreton is currently the one location officially on the docket.
“The only site we’re really focused on right now has been LeBreton Flats,” Leeder said. “Obviously there are other sites in the city. We’ve looked at a number of those. Probably too early to say definitively where the arena’s going to go, but at this point the only site we are really serious with is LeBreton Flats.”
True enough, representatives of the NHL club, including Leeder and Erin Crowe, executive VP and CFO, have been meeting with the NCC every couple of weeks to discuss LeBreton.
The meat on the table — the Senators, under previous management, signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreement with the NCC to negotiate a lease for building an arena on LeBreton Flats. That arena site would be part of a larger project in the area, building homes and retail space on a vacant area near the War Museum.
With new majority team owner Michael Andlauer coming on the scene last September, that MOU was extended by a year, meaning that time is running out to get something done before the MOU expires.
As Leeder noted this week, there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done before anything is settled on the arena front, citing “shortcomings” in the memorandum of understanding, as far as the hockey club perceives it.
Diplomatically, both Leeder and the NCC are on the record as saying these sorts of issues that remain outstanding are part of a normal business negotiation. But now the onus is on the NCC to come up with a plan that works. To those of us anticipating summer, September seems a long way off. But considering we have been talking about a new arena and the LeBreton site in particular for about a decade, four months is not much time.
Tick. Tock.
“Whatever we do with the NCC has to lead to a viable project,” Leeder said. “Something we can finance, something we can build that will work for us in the long term. It’s got to work for us and our fans.”
Following a recent NCC meeting, CEO Tobi Nussbaum reiterated that he hopes to have an agreement in place with the Senators by the fall.
“There’s no question that there will be a point at which we’ll have to have a lease or not,” Nussbaum told reporters last week. “I can’t say with 100 per cent certainty when that is. Is it September? I certainly hope so. That’s our hope that we can get all the work done by then.”
If the arena concept for LeBreton falls through, Nussbaum notes that the NCC has a ‘Plan B’ for the site.
“Our first hope was to have a major attraction, a major event centre there, but should that not happen, there is a Plan B for those parcels within LeBreton Flats,” he said. “There’s a great need for housing and mixed use development in the city so, if, at some point, the two sides are not able to come to an agreement or the Senators make a decision that they’re not going to build there, then yes, absolutely, we’ll have to move to our second option.”
As much as Leeder sparked discussion on LeBreton with his talk with the Board of Trade, he confirmed in a text that nothing has really changed. LeBreton is the only site currently up for discussion. Other sites could become candidates but have not to this point.
Recently the federal government announced plans to reduce its office space by 50 per cent over the 10 ten years.
That prompted Ottawa mayor Sutcliffe to suggest it could represent an opportunity for a new arena more central than LeBreton.
“Maybe we can have a new park downtown, maybe we can have other attractions downtown and maybe we can have a conversation about a downtown arena,” Sutcliffe told Ottawa sports radio station TSN 1200 last week.
“If the Senators are interested in exploring a downtown option, I think it would be great for the downtown core,” said the mayor.
None of this is new to Leeder.
Eight years ago, when Eugene Melnyk owned the team, Leeder represented the Senators in a winning proposal to build a new arena on LeBreton land. That project, known as RendezVous Lebreton, provided about 50 acres of land to the RendezVous group, which included the Senators and Trinity Developments – Trinity had a major housing and retail proposal included in the deal.
After the Trinity-Senators partnership dissolved in a spate of lawsuits, the RendezVous proposal died and the NCC moved on to a more piecemeal approach of developing LeBreton. That 50-acre parcel is no longer available and instead, the team is being offered six to seven acres of land on which to build.
As much as the location is tied into rapid transit stations in the area, the Senators want room for cars to park and even more vitally, a lively space around the rink for restaurants and bars, typical of other centrally located NHL arenas.
While Nussbaum has repeatedly said the NCC is “flexible” on the size of the parcel, is there enough flexibility to satisfy the Senators and their needs?
What are the odds of getting this deal done by September?
And the odds of the Senators going elsewhere with their new rink?
Bets on the table, everyone.
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