Olympiques threaten move, cry foul at costs of new building

Stop me if you've heard this before.

A hockey team wants their city to kick in funding for a new arena for the team to play.

The latest example: the Gatineau Olympiques.

Olympiques governor Norman MacMillan said Thursday that the city's new arena project is a "matter of life and death" for his team, and they will be forced to move if the city doesn't support the team by funding a portion of a new arena project.

But don't worry, it's only $25-million dollars or so.

MacMillan urges the team can't pay for a private arena for themselves in the region. The money just isn't there.

And hey, if you don't ask, you don't get.

The call for a team to force its city’s hand to pay for a new building, or renovations to an old one, is not a new idea.

Heck, three NFL teams are doing that right now. The St. Louis Rams, San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders are all threatening to move to the Los Angeles area if they don’t get new or improved stadiums.

In monkey-see, monkey-do fashion, the behaviour has trickled down to the junior hockey level, where the Canadian Hockey League has had a difficult debate with defining itself in the last few years.

Are they a business model, providing entertainment for the small towns and cities of the nation at all costs, or are they the steward of towns everywhere, a source of pride for the local populace, with a civic duty to provide sport for their region?

Score one more for business. The city of Gatineau needs to pay for the Olympiques to stay in the city, as MacMillan explained to LeDroit Thursday.

The Olympiques governor, who is also the president of the ‘Save the Olympiques’ committee, is saying that the project will cost no more than $50-million dollars, and the city will have to cough up half of that cost. The other half would come from a provincial grant for a previous multi-functional center project that went belly-up.

MacMillan is also calling dingo on the possible rent fees, which Gatineau mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin has offered at $1.2-million per year.

He maintains that the team is working with potential partners but can’t come up with the up-front cost of privately financing a new arena for the Olympiques, so they have several projects they want to present to the city to look into funding.

They include multi-rink facilities with a 4,000-5,000 seat arena for the team, among other proposals. The city will put up several of those rinks in the care of a non-profit organization.

The plans must be presented in a week to the city of Gatineau for approval.

“It’s clear that the future of the team depends on this,” MacMillan told LeDroit. “If the city doesn’t [go with us], the Olympiques will have to move, it’s that clear.”

The team wants to be partners, and they say the $1.2 million in rent fees is too much for a partner to pay.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that any junior team should have to pay for their upgrades themselves, even though some teams can surely afford it. It’s obviously a case-by-case situation.

$25 million dollars is a lot of money to cough up for the average junior team that is lucky to break even, and that’s assuming the other half from the Quebec government is still on the way.

The Robert-Guertin Arena is a legendary junior barn, hosting the Memorial Cup in 1997, but a coat of paint won’t fix the old-age issues of the building. It also lacks the new bells-and-whistles and revenue streams of new arenas that other junior teams are profiting from.

At the same time, it’s not the Olympiques or MacMillan’s job to spend the city’s money, and that plays in on the civic pride part of the CHL’s identity crisis. MacMillan is playing the media to try and get leverage, as every team does in this situation, because it works.

Fans of the team are also, mostly, residents of the city they play in, and they don’t want to lose their team. This can get the fans, who are also taxpayers, on the backs of the municipality to use dollars to go to a new toy for their team, road maintenance, public works and public safety be damned. At least that’s the hope of MacMillan and the Olympiques.

The team is in the process of finding a group that can manage and build the new upcoming arena project. They have negotiated with two partners and will choose one before their proposal with the city next week.

The Gatineau franchise, previously under the name of the city of Hull before Gatineau was formed in 2003, has played in the Robert-Guertin Arena since their inception in 1973. It holds 4,000 people, 3,196 seats, and was built in 1957. They averaged 2,399 fans through the gates last season.