Today in The Spec a story ran about Hamilton Entertainment and Convention Facilities Inc. (HECFI) needing $7.25 million in taxpayer money to cover its losses after a disastrous year. I also listen to the Bill Kelly Show on 900 CHML this morning and heard CEO Duncan Gillespie say that the losses at HECFI are due to a combination of factors, like the lagging economy and a difficult year for concert venues. Which are all true… in part. What also worried me was some of the listener who called into the show thinking that the answers to this shortfall were very simple such as “sell it” or “fire them all” and some even suggesting that we don’t need such facilities.
This is my take on the situation. Hamilton is in the unique and difficult position of:
- Being an old and recovering industrial town
- Situated in the shadow of the country’s largest and most influential city and
- A victim of it’s own chronic self-doubt
Although I agree that privatization in most cases makes businesses run lender, meaner and more profitable the problems with HECFI are much more complicated.
If Hamilton was the “big” city we would already have a state-of-art Convention Facility, NHL team with hotels and amenities to match and people living and working downtown.
It’s not HECFI’s fault or missteps that have placed Hamilton in the position we find ourselves in today. Although, I’m sure HECFI could have done some or many things better and more efficiently over the years… we all can say that! Today’s problems are systemic and more the result of historic poor planning, resting on past successes and the lack of vision decades ago. We had some great people with big plans, ideas and hopes years ago but unfortunately not enough strong leadership and money to help steer them threw the past 30-40 years.
Today Hamilton is in competition with 100′s of other midsize cities for concerts, sporting events and conventions and we don’t have the facilities, amenities or money to properly compete. The answer isn’t privatization for the simple reason.. who in their right mind would buy such a decaying group of facilities? Sadly, if we didn’t have HECFI for the past 10 years or so we would probably have had nothing in the way of concerts, sporting events or convention facilities to be talking about today!
So what do we do? To start, we need strong leadership from all sectors to help form partnerships, collaborative thinking, creative refocusing and bundling of available inventory not only on a hyper-local level but as a region! (from my understanding this is starting to happen). Understand that concentrating social services in the city core is counterproductive to helping those in need and in attracting investment or people.
We also need all levels of local and regional government on the same page as local special interest groups and businesses. It has worked in other cites and yes it is hard and many times painful. But, without a shared vision we will find ourselves in an even worst position a decade from now. Lets start a more prognostic dialog and stop complaining, finger pointing and beating ourselves up!
