Posts by Paul Campbell
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Yeah, I want to party with Psy - my guess is that it translates as "Mr Big Shot"
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(then again maybe they're just gouging rather than gauging ....)
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It's not Canterbury's fault insurance premiums are going up - it's the insurance company's fault for not correctly gauging the risk in the first place
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My son lives in a student flat near the stadium, when there's a big event on he's not allowed to drive to his home - I found myself lumping too-hot soup many blocks to a sickbed against a tide of RWC people hoping no one was going to do me for hawking in a restricted zone ("but you've got soup")
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it has almost no public parking - it's between the Uni and the harbour (with all the daily parking pressures that being near the uni brings on)
The real problem is that it's nominal 30,000 seat (max) venue in a city of 120,000 - 1/4 of us have to agree that something's worth paying money to see to get a full house - to actually break even, pay the mortgage, it needs to fill itself a few times a week - it's quite out of scale with the local economy, it's a great venue but it's looking like a long term fiscal drag sucking the opportunity cost out of our city
Chch's 35,000 seat stadium in a city of 300,000 so it's more like 1/9 of you have to attend often enough - still pretty hard to do IMHO - in the SF Bay Area where I used to live there were two football and two baseball venues servicing roughly 7m people (and they were always griping about profitability) - by that estimate NZ should have just one stadium and be done with it
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Tim: another thing we've learned in Dunedin is that an indoor stadium designed for rugby doesn't make a good concert venue - the same acoustics that amplify crowd sounds to make a lively rugby venue (2 stands facing each other reflecting the sound back and forward) make good music acoustics almost impossible
My point about making the stadium pay for itself is very important - sure your insurance company may bring down the yearly mortgage payment - but Dunedin's stadium can't even come close to breaking even if you pretend the mortgage is being paid for by a magic fairy. Rugby ticket prices are just too low - besides your stadium's biggest market competition is the Sky Rugby channel and they have your tenants by the balls
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Lilith __,
I suspect that any Dunedin resident could explain exactly what's wrong with buying a huge new stadium. Not to rain on any parades here, but has anyone done the costings of how the proposed Chch stadium would break even?
Oh yeah where do I start .... "$200m" maybe - our smaller one (17k permanent seats) was promised to cost $188m, ended up something like $250 (who builds a stadium and doesn't include the cost of kitchens, turnstyles, a scoreboard, .....) once you include 20 years of financing it's going to cost much more like half a billion dollars.
Worse even if you ignore the cost of building it and financing it it's losing money, millions a year, if you can't figure out how to get the rugby fans to pay high enough ticket prices that bring in enough money to cover your real costs, you'll end up with little old ladies on fixed incomes subsidising rugby tickets through their rates as they do in Dunedin.
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Tess: Muldoon was always drunk
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If you live in Dunedin all your MPs are in the YES camp but one 'UNKNOWN' - drop him a note at Michael.Woodhouse@parliament.govt.nz
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thanks - sadly in Dunedin we have unused gas mains all through our neighbourhood .... but in its infinite wisdom the city sold them to Telecom for $1 to forestall Telstra actually competing with them - don't you just love a city run by the good ol' boys looking after their own