A question was asked:
Right so if you look at this one for Hamilton, where they’ve got, oh hey, here we’ve got $100 million there, and we’ve got 80 there.
If there was a big lump in here that was $200 million for a stadium then you add them up, you’ve got – oh we don’t have that much money. And we’ve got all these other things.
Because if you have a conversation about affording a stadium in isolation to all. This Hamilton one is good because it has got everything.
And you look and you go, Hamilton doesn’t have $200 million for a stadium because they also have some other stuff going on.
And so then, what do we give up if we build the stadium, what goes? Do we stop mowing the parks for 10 years? Or whatever it is.
A further question was asked:
Dunedin has increased charges, but they’ve increased them to the level that it changed the entire council. They’ve got a complete, council got chucked out.
All the senior executives got chucked out. The community said, we don’t want it anymore but by then the stadium was built.
They don’t want to pay any more, right. Okay we just built the stadium, we’ve got the massive amount of debt, and we’ve got all these other stuff we’ve got to do, what do we do?
A further question was asked:
Very hard. Because everybody likes to, the thing is, when you build a bridge, or a sewer pipe or a road, there’s not a little name plaque that says such and such Mayor or such and such politician built this bit of road.
Whereas, when you build a stadium, there’s this big plaque on the side of that says, Mr. Big, the Mayor built the stadium, you know.
From my point of view, those sorts of discussions are intensely political.
So as a professional advisor, I do my best to provide credible information to inform decision-makers, this sort of stuff.
At the end of the day, the political decisions, the political decisions of politicians sometimes make interesting decisions.
They were elected to make decisions, and sometimes these decisions might not seem to make sense. You can’t actually stop them from doing it, and that is the democratic process.
You can educate them, you can say this is the consequence of your decision.
These are the risks of this decision, but they still might go and build the Rugby Stadium.
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