EDMONTON — It’s the $100 million question — just how and when will Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach come through with the money needed for Edmonton to build a new downtown hockey arena.
Earlier this week Stelmach and Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel emerged from a closed-door meeting saying there’s nothing preventing the city from using an existing fund called the Municipal Sustainability Initiative.
Stelmach says any municipality may use its share of the program for any infrastructure project it chooses.
The only hitch is that Edmonton was allocated more than $2 billion from the MSI fund in 2007, and all that money has already been earmarked for projects within a 10-year capital plan.
Mandel says the premier has indicated there will be more money added to the MSI, and those are the funds that will able to be used for the arena.
Scott Hennig of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation says he can’t see how that will be possible, given the province’s fiscal situation.
“They shouldn’t be looking to top up municipalities that have already allocated that money,” Hennig said Wednesday. “I mean, they don’t have any money — the province is broke. It is running somewhere between a $2 billion and $3 billion deficit this year.”
Counc. Karen Leibovici said she also has concerns.
“That’s the question, whether it is current money, which is already dedicated and I think we would have a hard time pulling away from our current allocations, or whether this is a new source of money being looked at,” she said.
Mandel said Edmontonians don’t have to worry that money will be taken aware from road and bridge projects to fund the arena.
“Existing infrastructure dollars will stay with an existing project,” he said. “This is new money. This has been designed to help all cities in the province, but Edmonton, in particular, about an arena.”
Stelmach said Tuesday he wants to wrap up the arena issue before he leaves office in just a few weeks.
“There’s a number of matters I’d like to complete before I leave office, this is one of them,” he told reporters.
He said more will be known once the province is done analysing its first-quarter fiscal results, which is usually done in late August.
When the city and the Katz Group were trying to come to agreement on the funding of the arena, Stelmach had said there would be no direct provincial money given to a private enterprise.
But he now says that since the city will be the owner of the arena, that makes it a public and not a private project.
The Katz Group, which owns the Edmonton Oilers, has agreed to chip in $100 million for the new $450-million facility, with the city ponying up $250 million.
That still leaves $100 million to be raised.
Under the deal, the city will own the land and the building while the Katz Group will take care of operations and maintenance.