Saskatoon wants to keep up with Edmonton in the concert and business conferences business.
There are a number of politicians in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada who want a new arena in town. The problem for those politicians and Saskatoon business leaders is pretty simple. How do you go about finding loonies to fund the cost of a building in a city of about 275,000 people and a metro area of about 340,000 people? The building, which would seat around 16,000 people, would anchor an arena-village with businesses, residential space and hotels as part of the project. Saskatoon politicians and business leaders claim they need a new arena because concerts and business conferences are bypassing the city in favor of places like Edmonton which eight years ago opened an arena and Calgary which will be opening a new building in about three years. Saskatoon politicians want to keep up with nearby cities in the arena business. It is highly unlikely that the National Hockey League would consider putting a team in another small market Canadian city. Saskatoon does not even crack the 10 top in the most populated Canadian cities and the province of Saskatchewan has slightly more than 1.2 million people.
City leaders claim they don’t want to raise local property taxes but they do have to find revenues somewhere and could include hiking taxes on local hotel and motel rooms. Once upon a time, Saskatoon did have a National Hockey League franchise for a very brief moment. In 1983, the Ralston Purina Company sold the St. Louis Blues franchise to Saskatchewan investors. The NHL blocked the move which set off a flurry of lawsuits. The NHL concluded Saskatoon was too small a city, with at that time just a population of 160,000 people , to be an economically feasible NHL market. In 2012, there were stories that Saskatoon investors were ready to make another pitch to the NHL for a franchise. Nothing happened.
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Proposed Saskatoon arena.
