The Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia says it is wrong to suggest a visitor levy on hotel rooms and car rentals to help fund a proposed Halifax stadium.
“The indiscriminate suggestion that we should increase tax on all visitors using accommodation and car rentals to fund a private sector venture is completely inappropriate,” association president Darlene Grant Fiander said in a release.
Grant Fiander said tourism is “incredibly important” to the Nova Scotia economy and requires strategic investments to ensure economic goals are reached.
Grant Fiander said discussion on visitor levies are contentious at the best of times.
"Currently, there are three regions of Nova Scotia that collect a visitor levy on the accommodation sector and these funds are to be used for regional marketing, not infrastructure," she said.
Meanwhile, the future of the proposed community stadium and Canadian Football League team in Halifax remained in limbo through Tuesday’s meeting of regional council.
Coun. Sam Austin (Dartmouth Centre) had been expected to bring a motion forward to council that could scuttle the Schooner Sports and Entertainment (SSE) proposal for good.
But Austin held his motion in abeyance until the Oct. 22 meeting in respect of Coun. Russell Walker’s absence because of a personal emergency.
Austin said late last week that his motion would ask council to rescind its October 2018 motion directing staff to bring back a detailed analysis of SSE’s proposal, a plan that was delivered to Jacques Dube, the chief administrative officer of the municipality, on Sept. 17.
“We’ve now seen the broad outlines of what that proposal is and for me, personally, it’s so far outside the ballpark of what I would consider something I can support,” Austin said Friday.
“To me, it doesn’t make sense for staff to spend six months working on something that I am not going to be able to vote for,” Austin said. “For council as a whole, I think it is useful, now that we know what is being asked from us, to have a check-in and say do we want to keep digging into this or do we want to just pull the plug.”
The proposal would have SSE borrow money to build the stadium — with the municipality, provincial and/or federal governments providing a guarantee — and have SSE pay back the lender $5 million to $6 million a year over a 30-year period. The company’s proposal included five options for municipal funding, including a plan that would have HRM commit $2 million annually to the lender and SSE repaying $1 million to the municipality each year on ticket fees.
The stadium, land purchase at Shannon Park and other professional fees would run in the range of $130 million, said Anthony LeBlanc, one of three SSE founders. The stadium would have 12,000 permanent seats, 10,575 semi-permanent bleacher and temporary seats and standing room for 2,000. The group’s projected timeline is for a construction start date of February 2020 and a completed stadium by October 2022.
Austin said a detailed staff analysis, which Dube estimated will take six months to finish, is not produced without cost.
“You’re talking about taking staff that could be working on other things and assigning them a fair bit of time to work on this stadium proposal,” Austin said. “It’s not free to just let this play out and get a detailed review done.”
Two-thirds of councillors would have to support Austin's motion to rescind for it to pass.
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