Q&A with Ian Troop: Pan Am Stadium Decision; Games Funding

(ATR) Toronto 2015 will any day now announce a location for its main stadium, long the chief cause of concern for these Pan American Games.

The decision comes on the heels of a Feb. 1 deadline by which the municipalities of Brampton and Mississauga submitted plans for 5,000-seat soccer-specific venues to act as contingency plans for a 25,000-capacity complex shared by the city of Hamilton and its Canadian Football League franchise.

The $160 million Pan Am Stadium proposed by Hamilton would host soccer during the Games and the Tiger-Cats football team after.

Frequent delays and a funding shortfall forced Toronto 2015 CEO Ian Troop to look elsewhere for bidders. Now his leadership team must choose between a larger – but much costlier – football legacy and a smaller soccer legacy that would leave the Ti-Cats out in the cold.

Until the location is made public, Troop is under a gag order with regard to the stadium, but he still took time late last month to speak with Around the Rings about Games funding, Olympic qualifiers and, yes, maybe a little about the stadium.

Around the Rings: Why the need for a "blackout" with regard to the ongoing evaluation of stadium plans?

Ian Troop: Well, there’s a lot of discussions going on with the various parties that are involved in trying to cobble together the funding, so we think that those discussions are best done in private and not in the media. There’s such interest in this thing that allowing people to focus in the quiet of pulling these things together makes total sense to us.

ATR: The Feb. 1 deadline – that’s for plans to be submitted to you or for you to make a decision?

IT: Plans to be submitted.

ATR: And then you expect to say something by the second week of February?

IT: That’s right.

ATR: How final is the Feb. 1 deadline?

IT: Very.

ATR: You told me last time we spoke a stadium would take roughly four years to build. Does that same timeline apply to a smaller, soccer-specific venue?

IT: Yes. Not quite with the degree of urgency, but our Feb. 1 date was created because we think that’s the date when if we were going to go to a smaller stadium, it’s about that time that we need to start the process: the selection of a partner, the ability to go through design and functional programs, RFQ (request for quotation) to RFP (request for proposal), making sure the land’s buildable, all those sort of things.In fact, it’s a process where for us to be ready, we need to start now to be able to have that stadium done for test events in 2014.

ATR: Did the recent cost increase of the Games come out of the blue, or is that something that could have been foreseen?

IT: This is really a matter of how the city of Toronto is handling things from their perspective. On one hand, the ’08 dollar versus the ’14 dollar – yes, we hope that they knew and we knew that it was there, and the remediation cost I think was an underfunding against [the fact that] we knew that was a garbage dump, so we knew remediation would need to be there, but as we’ve gotten and they have gotten experts and consultants to evaluate it further, I think they were able to put a better number in place.

So it wasn’t out of the blue. Some of it was known in advance. Some of it was knowledge that as it came up, it became visible, and they needed to account for it. The other thing to understand in Toronto, on top of this, is an election and a new mayor, so the political landscape changing probably was a complication from a timing or from a communications standpoint.

ATR: Are there going to be more additional funding increases like that, would you anticipate?

IT: Nothing that we can see at this point. The remediation cost is born by the city, and it’s their responsibility to both estimate it properly and account forit properly.

And it’s important to note on the Toronto side of things that the new mayor may not have been fully pleased with the process – although he was a councilor in the prior city government, so he was party to it – but that executive committee voted unanimously to support the aquatics center in Scarborough because of the advantages they see in serving an underserved part of Toronto in Scarborough. The collaboration with the U of T splits costs, and essentially they’re getting a world-class facility at 25 cents on the dollar.

ATR: When you say "for 25 cents on the dollar," you mean that they’re really only providing a fourth of the funding?

IT: Yeah!

Because remember: it’s 56/44. We provide through the Ontario and federal governments 56 percent of the cost. The facility owner is expected to pick up 44 percent of the cost. Now in the case of the aquatics center, it’s split between ownership and U of T, so in essence they’re picking up 22 percent plus remediation cost. So with even all that in, they’re still getting a fantastic deal.

ATR: Have any sports agreed yet to have Toronto 2015 be their qualifier for Rio 2016?

IT: No, not yet. We’regetting closer. We expect to use the Sport Accord in London in early April to be our key vehicle for us to solidify Olympic qualifying support.

ATR: Anything new on the FIBA front?

IT: Well, we’re continuing to make very good process. We’re working closely with Basketball Canada on a proposal to make the Pan American Games the FIBA Pan American qualifier, and I think Basketball Canada feels optimistic at this stage, and we’re moving forward and we’re hopeful.

ATR: What about sponsorship announcements? Do you have anything coming up?

IT: Well, depends on what you mean by "coming up". We’re certainly in the middle of sitting down and talking and reaching out to who we would consider to be really high-potential sponsors for the Games. That work is definitely in high-gear at this point.

ATR: Have you spoken with Guadalajara 2011 recently?

IT: Yeah, we speak on a regular basis. We’ve got a very good relationship with Guadalajara. It started with me flying down right after Vancouver to meet with them back in the spring. We had a number of sessions with them. In Merida, we had one. In Acapulco, we had one.

[Guadalajara 2011 sport director] Ivar [Sisniega] is someone I’ve known for a long time, so we’ve had both formal downloads of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it to learn from them, and we’ve had regular conservations through email and on the phone, so we’re using them as a benchmark for us and learning from them and at this point actually looking to formalize our plans on how we participate in Guadalajara 2011 and our observer programs and all that part of it to make sure we take full use of the event itself to give our people some practical on-the-ground experience with pulling off a terrific Games.

ATR: Anything else on your radar that we should know of?

No, the message we’d like to send to readers is that we are right into planning, so we are into the middle of that early phase of planning for the Games. We are on track with where we need to be. Our venues are moving along very nicely through the process of RFQs and RFPs and that process is so important for us to be able to keep ahead of the curve to be on time and on budget.

We’re being a lot more external now, as we have a brand and we’re launching it with both potential sponsors and with our community to make sure that they understand what the Games are all about and how they can participate.

Written by Matthew Grayson.