Posts by giovanni tiso
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I'm not saying they don't exist but they don't provide benefits to the residents (only 13% of whom went to Carisbrook last year) that match what they're being required to pay.
That's a very different proposition from "Dunedin ratepayers are subsidising the world cup to the tune of $200 million". Which is just silly.
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but those rates will be the same RWC or not, the businesses still have to pay that - no extra gain there...
Again: you need to have businesses afloat in order to have commercial rates at all. I'd suggest a stadium generates more money in the local economy than a cemetery. (And I'm all for the value of services that don't generate money.)
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Giovanni: if a bar, or a hotel or a restaurant depends on 5 nights a year to make a profit it's already on shaky ground and isn't going to last.
Are you kidding me? Lots of businesses do depend on key dates on the calendar which are enough to make them profitable. Will you be suggesting to abolish Christmas next?
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There are decent reasons to build stadiums, but increasing your rating base is not one.
I'm not saying it will pay for itself, but it's one of those things that a local economy can benefit from. Wellington certainly does with its stadium, which makes the public investment in it that much more rational.
(And again, I'm not saying the new Dunedin stadium will be a good investment, or that the Cake Tin returned as much money to our city as it was touted - just that it's silly to completely leave the induced benefits out, as if they didn't exist.)
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Giovanni: the new stadium will be smaller than Carisbrook which seats 30k, the new stadium will have 17k permanent seats and be about 10% smaller than Carisbrook on days when they add temporary bleachers, we will be attracting FEWER visitors to All Black games than we used to - we only get ~5000 to Highlanders games, people really don't come from overseas to see them
I think the actual answer - as in the transition between Athletic Park in Wellington and the Cake Tin - is that it's going to bring up to 17k more people than it would have, since Carisbrook in its current state couldn't realistically hope to see the All Blacks for much longer. Small, modern and with attached facilities is where stadiums have gone the world over. And the facilities then get plenty of mixed uses - the Otago University school of medicine, of all things, has a long term lease for part of the Cake Tin.
As I pointed out above the bars pay the same rates no matter how many customers they have
Yes, but they need to have an income. If you're no longer able to bring in visitors from out of town, many of them will close down and your rates will go up.
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in essence the rate payers are subsidising the RWC by more than $200m without a referendum or anything.
You're not demolishing the stadium after the RWC, are you? The point is that it will still attract domestic and overseas visitors to all blacks games and highlanders games and they will bring money into the city. The money made by bars and such goes into paying their commercial rates which keeps residential rates down.
I'm still not saying you're necessarily going to get a fair return on the money invested or anything like that - just that saying 'we're building a stadium for the world cup' is a little simplistic, even if it wouldn't have been built hadn't it been for the world cup.
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This is a particularly big issue here in Dunedin where we we've basically been forced to build a replacement for Carisbrook with hundreds of millions of dollars of ratepayer's money
I detected a certain amount of bitterness in the way the data was presented, yes.
if people use public toilets and cemeteries more than rugby stadiums we should spend more on them
One of the differences surely is that cemeteries and toilets don't bring in vistors from the rest of the country or overseas? I mean unless you can somehow get Jim Morrison's corpse transferred to the city.
I'm not saying that it necessarily makes sense or that the numbers aren't ludicrously skewed towards sport. But in Wellington we had the same polemic and in the end I think the Caketin ended up being an asset and not just a place where a private rugby franchise makes its own profit.
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It's a stadium without existing associated sponsor brands, including in the name of the stadium itself. So Westpac Stadium in Wellington will drop Westpac for the duration of the World Cup, for instance, and all fixed corporate box signs will have to go. So that RWC international or whatever it's called can negotiate its own sponsorship deals. (That's how I remember it anyhow, I hope I'm correct.)
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Fair enough - saying it's now almost the least-used public amenity is more meaningful.
Its meaningfulness is still bugger all if you ask me. None of those amenities are open only ninety minute a week during the rugby season. Also, you don't pay to visit the cemetery or the library. (Yet.)
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(Timidly) I really like the central column style. I find it much more readable than blocks of text that go all the way across.