Stop the Stadium

By Meg Davidson

Robin Charteris’s Dunedin,  so eloquently described in “Time to polish off the knockers” (ODT 9.9.08) is my Dunedin too. Returning to the city of my birth I have fallen in love; the grey, dilapidated city I grew up with in the 1960s and 70s has been transformed, and I can do no better than to quote Mr Charteris:   through the wisdom of our city fathers it has become “a strong, vibrant, extremely-liveable small city in an incomparable harbour-hugging setting with amenities, attributes and a lifestyle for which countless millions of people elsewhere would give their eye teeth.” 

Restored and reinvigorated, Dunedin’s heritage buildings have never looked so good. It cost ratepayers $13.5million to transform a department store in the Octagon into a sophisticated world-class art gallery and the Chinese Garden to which they contributed $1million is a triumph.  Buoyed by successes like these, the city is buzzing with new projects;  reinstating trams or cable cars – or both – is just one. 

Like Mr Charteris I hope for, and expect, a bright future for Dunedin. There are challenges that must be faced. The Pacific is threatening St Kilda (and I doubt the residents would agree with the chap who, as we surveyed the eroding sand-dunes, commented that nature should be left to take its course). Further sewage treatment facilities will cost tens of million on top of hundreds of millions already spent. New jobs are needed to replace those recently lost; we must retain and increase our population, and people won’t come to a city that isn’t attractive and dynamic.

To allude to these challenges is not to be a doom-merchant. It is simply facing facts.  Dunedin has stared down past threats with courage and imagination, and the city we have now is testament to that.  I’m sure Mr Charteris would agree. 

But it’s when he starts talking about how our present challenges might be met – specifically whether they would be adequately addressed by spending $140million of public money on a $188 million stadium at Awatea Street - that he and I start to differ.  

Mr Charteris is a stadium supporter. He is charitable enough not to number his “sincere and thoughtful” anti-stadium friends among the naysayers he condemns, and in a letter to the editor on 24.9.08 he restates his call “to mix prudence with vision” and to remove the stadium project’s “fish hooks”. He is confident our city and regional councils and the Carisbrook Stadium Trust are ‘addressing the issues and problems [of the stadium] responsibly’. 

I don’t share that faith. Both DCC chief executive Jim Harland and  finance manager Athol Stephens had concerns which were expressed in the chief executive’s 14 March 2008 report. If construction costs go over budget “debt servicing costs could become unsustainable”. A shortfall of private funding would be “very serious” for the DCC and the city’s holding company’s capacity to service the debt “would be substantially jeopardised”.  The conditions that the DCC put on the decision to support the stadium have not been met, yet the DCC has bought the land for the stadium and agreed to underwrite $55 million of private funding.  The DCC-commissioned peer reviews sounded strong warnings about the financial viability of the project and the number of exclusions from the budget. Further information requested by the reviewers was not provided, and the reviews were never completed. 

The ORC did not supply its councillors with the peer reviews  –  the only independent opinion available  -  relying instead on a briefing from the Carisbrook Stadium Trust. 

Mr Charteris cites Dunedin’s existing buildings and facilities.  If the naysayers had had their way, he says, these “amazing amenities” would not have been built. But the comparisons he draws with the Awatea Street stadium are not valid and his 24.9.08 explanation muddies the waters still further. 

The town hall WAS built by the ratepayers, but not with borrowed money. When in 1923 Dunedin’s ratepayers were asked to sanction a £90,000 loan for the town hall they dug their toes in. There was anxiety about Dunedin’s ability to survive and instead, the council poured money into the international exhibition, timed to boost the city’s population in the 1926 census. It worked. The city’s trading departments thrived; the town hall was paid for with cash. By contrast, the Awatea Street stadium would require a $91.4 million DCC loan which over a 20 year term would approximately double to $180 million. 

Innovative thinking went into future-proofing Dunedin in the 1920s, but this was not achieved by raising a crippling loan. The 1923 ratepayers were right to say nay to that.

Yes, Robin, it is “crap” that “Dunedin today is a city of depressives and whingers hunkering down under doom-laden skies” (ODT 24.9.08).  Where are these glass-half-empty whingers? The anti-stadium people I know, like the 1923 ratepayers, are not hand-wringing pessimists but optimists with a more imaginative vision of Dunedin.

An ambitious plan is not guaranteed success just by dint of being ambitious.  Let’s consider some great Dunedin visions of yesteryear: the 1950s plan to reclaim the whole upper harbour for an airport and industrial development; the 1960s plan to cover the Octagon with concrete pedestrian flyovers; the 1980s smelter at Aramoana. 

The CST’s scale model of the stadium is soon to go on public display. Backtrack to September 1970, when a scale model was used to promote plans to demolish Dunedin’s municipal chambers in favour of a new civic complex. Eventually the present library and civic centre were built, but public opposition saved the municipal chambers.  

No doubt the “naysayers” of the day got a hammering over their opposition to these projects.  Thank goodness they prevailed.   

Who are the real doom-mongers: those of us who caution against the wilder schemes the so-called visionaries dream up,  or the visionaries themselves: those who insist that Dunedin needs saving – needs a smelter/airport/stadium or it will die? 

Mr Charteris, like you I am proud of Dunedin. I want this city to visualise its vibrant future, and I too say: Dunedin, get on with it. We don’t need this stadium to make it happen.