Stadium $140m debt to loom large in debate

The CST's founding documents are available online from the Trusts office and explain where its members think they live, probably better than the CST's web pages do - Mr Barnett for example says he lives in Christchurch, Ms Smith has of course left town and I believe also works in Christchurch. The Companies Office register of directors gives Bill Baylis's and Eion Edgar's current addresses as both being in Queenstown.

As far as I can tell only 2 of the 7 CST board members actually reside in Dunedin.

The CST, however, according to their founding documents, seems to have been created not in Dunedin but in Kaiapoi - go look for yourself, all the information is public

MikeStk, I stand corrected. The CST was formed and given a mandate to explore options re Carisbrook. In the end we got the Stadium. Remember the University of Otago had a hand in influencing the location; they made it clear they wouldn't utilise a revamped 'Brook'. In other words they weren't going to fork out dollars or pay rates. As for Mr Farry's directorship, he was just one of a number.

Your contention CST directors all live far away, sorry wrong. Four are listed as resident in Dunedin, 1 in Invergargill and 1 in Queenstown. As for the CST being a quango; it should be called a qualgo.

Malcolm Farry is the spokesperson for the Trust; he is not a one man band. You are entitled to feel aggrieved about the financial burden placed on ratepayers (and renters); just keep the character assassination out of it so we can keep debate factual and balanced.

MikeStk: You can add $33 to your figures . That's the approximate amount levied on your Otago Regional Rates account per annum to cover 'their' contribution to the stadium. So the total rates increase for the average ratepayer is not $66 as so often claimed. It is $100. 

It seems that those who don't remember history are doomed to reinvent it. Mr Farry was not appointed to bring the stadium idea to fruition - he was appointed to figure out what should be done about Carisbrook, which had become a drain on the city; the city had loaned the ORFU several million dollars to help fix it up and they were unable to pay it back. Mr Farry, who had been on the ORFU board, hardly an unbiased actor, decided that we should build a brand new covered stadium, it wasn't going to cost the city a cent because it would all be 'privately funded. He and his committee were the ones who invented the stadium, not the council - they just went along and enabled him.

The rest is history of course, it's been an unmitigated financial disaster, the 'private fundraising' turns out to have been a myth, to simply be the ratepayers being forced by the city to provide those private funds out of their own private pockets, without even a vote on the issue. Mr Farry's quango CST, a private trust with many of its members living outside Dunedin, has been run in secret without any public supervision. Who knows where the money went? The ORFU provides better online accounting than the CST does and their finances are barely sustainable. At this point there is no 'commercial sensitivity', the books should now be opened for everyone to see - it's past time for an accounting.

Certainly we shouldn't be showering Mr Farry with public honours for this piece of work - instead we should be making an example of his organisation's behaviour to show future generations how not to behave.

Thanks to increased house insurance premiums (up to 50-60%), increases to rates (4-5%) and general inflation (3%) I think your landlord is entirely warranted in increasing your rent by what probably doesn't even equate to 5% (although this can't be done during your contract, only when you renew).

Louise - the same argument can be easily applied to changing the price of rugby tickets to cover the actual costs of them using the stadium - let's simply up the ticket prices to cover all the money that the ratepayers are current donating to pay for their fun.

Of course it doesn't quite work that way - there were only 5000-8000 regular rugby-goers last year but there are 50,000 ratepayers - that $26 (don't forget the $66 as well, and the just announced $1.8m a year rates give away, another $36 a year per ratepayer) - that $26+$66+$36 = $128/year average rates cost over 50,000 ratepayers is the same as an $800 donation to each for those 8000 rugby fans' fun - they should be paying their share rather than all getting discounted tickets at your and my expense.

This selfish gimme-gimme-gimme attitude of sports people just has to stop - it's time they took a lead and started raising money for the stadium themselves rather than pretending to by diverting stadium income and the best seats in the house for themselves.

I find it odd that so many Dunedin ratepayers seem to be hesitating and whining over an extra $26 a year. My landlord has unwarrantedly increased my rent by $5 a week - that's $260 a year. I propose, therefore, that my landlord uses this extra cash to sponsor ten Dunedin ratepayers. So, allow my fellow students and me to bear your fiscal burden; it's our pleasure. 

Missy: paying more of the stadium debt now will save us hundreds of millions in interest in the future - Athol's plan to pay off the stadium over twice the period means paying roughly twice the interest - an extra $100 million - that will come from our pockets. If we could pay it off today in one lump sum we would be paying it off at 1/3 the cost of Athol's plan; otherwise we will be paying it off at the promised mythical $66/year rate - but we were promised when the stadium was built that this would only be for 20 years - we were duped.

I think we should pay it off as fast as we possibly can, we will save close to $200m of ratepayers' personal wealth if we do. I do think that we should make sure that those who benefit from the stadium pay the lion's share: Mr Farry and the ORFU should raise the $50m in private fundraising they promised us. So far we haven't seen a sausage sizzle or a whip-round at a test, there was no-one at the RWC taking donations. If they continue to refuse to raise the promised funds we should simply tax rugby tickets.

We should also raise the rates on bars, restaurants and hotels to try and recover some of those millions of dollars that the stadium is supposedly bringing in to the economy, continue it until the stadium is paid for.

Finally I think we should raise rates by an average of $200 a year for 5 years (rather than the existing $66/year) - this will bring in $50m to pay off principle - that would be a total of $1000 per ratepayer - far less than the $2640 (40x$66) that Athol's 40 year plan involves or the $1840 (20x($66+$26)) that Ian's $26 extra a year for 20 years would entail.

I can fully understand the depth of feeling of most of the other contributers re the "Stadium Issue"; however, I do not accept the at times almost rabid attitude toward the CST chairman, Malcolm Farry. He along with other appointed directors were charged with bringing the stadium idea to fruition. It was not his personal 'hobby horse'. He was asked to carry out a function by DCC. He did this. None of this was done for his personal aggrandisement.

To e.j.kerr -  please look at his contribution to Dunedin and Otago and you will see he is very deserving of his 'gong'.

To others' remember who really started this ball rolling - the elected councillors of the time; most of whom remain! 

Perhaps increasing payments through additional rate increases may reduce the debt in the intial instance. However, many people cannot afford to pay existing rates, let alone increases over and above the yearly pennance forced on us. And let's not forget that this plastic box is going to continue to lose money at an exponentially greater rate than many of the other DCC  finanacial 'sponges', e.g. the Chinese Gardens! Add to that the desperation of the DCC to secure the professional rugby teams as users of the stadium and there goes more money!

I did not vote for this council to continue to throw money into this plastic hole. It is time to stop, show some responsibility to the Dunedin ratepayers and find ways to make the thing at least break even! Those who got us into this mess could do the decent thing and step up to assist in getting us out of it!

I would happily pay an extra $26 per annum to keep the payback period to 20 years; in fact, I would even welcome an initiative to reduce that time interval to ten years if it would get this unmitigated disaster off our backs that much sooner.

The way it is being contemplated now, it has become an inter-generational phenomenon, something which will have our grandchildren still labouring on in a state of 'peonage', when the stadium itself has become just an abandoned rusting derelict, disfiguring our foreshore. [abridged]

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Each and every single one of these aspects is being used as some form of DCC 'magician's trick' to conjure up a possible answer to the debacle that is the stadium.

I struggle to use the word corruption or corrupt but it seems that this might be the best possible way to describe the way that messrs Farry and his certain type of cohorts have acted here.

Now's the time for Malcolm Farry to hand back his New Year honour and apologise to the Dunedin and Otago public.

"“If they listened to us at the start we indicated that the funding from the private sector would come from donations, from purchases of naming rights, and from purchases of seats and memberships,” Mr Farry said. “Some in the community have said that’s not private sector fundraising, that was the sale of product. Well how else were we going to get money? I don’t know what magic trick they thought we had to get this money. I don’t care what you call it, it’s cash, and we needed that cash to build the stadium. You can give it any name you like.”

Cash is debt.  There you have it. 

So Athol's plan to solve the his debt problem is to have it outlive him, and stick it to his great-grandkids. I guess that's one way of making it go away. We'll be paying off this financial disaster for generations now - Athol's plan is to save us on average $26 a year for 20 years ($520) by making us pay $66 a year for an extra 20 years ($1320) - I'm sure it looks good to him - I guess that's an easy choice to make when it's other people's money, and some of those people haven't even been born, and most are unable to vote yet - today's 17-year-old just coming out of school will be 57 when it's all paid off.

All this to pay for something that's been sitting there idle for the past 2 months - it should be being used each and every day, earning its way, if it's going to take so much out of the life blood out of our city.

What we should be doing is taking the bull by the horns, paying off the debt in 5 years rather than 40; that will save the ratepayers a couple of hundred million dollars in interest. We can do it, I've explained it here before: make Mr Farry and the ORFU raise the $50m in private funding they promised, raise the rates on the bars, restaurants and hotels that make money from stadium events until it's paid for, increase rates for a limited period (5 years) to actually pay for the stadium - the alternative is 40 years of grey city mediocrity spent on a dying, economically unviable sport.

And of course actually raise rugby ticket prices to cover the actual costs of running the stadium so it's not a yearly drain on the city's coffers.

So it is now reported that the "private" component of stadium funding is now actually a debt - something that has been pointed out for years.  There is no such thing as any private funding for construction, never has been, never will be.  The only thing that actually exists is some advance operational money and even this has now had its term halved.  We also now know after long enquiry, that under the terms of the contracts for seating that they will be void if the Highlanders franchise decides to go elsewhere.  So, as has been pointed out many times, the city's ratepayers and professional rugby has entered into a mutual suicide pact.  Well, honestly, I couldn't give a hoot if professional rugby died in Dunedin as it appears that the benefits of hosting a franchise at the Stadium are far outweighed by the costs.

And now we learn that the stadium can't afford to pay its rates - another repeat of the scenario that we have whereby DVML can't afford to pay DVL the costs of running the stadium. Solution?  It appears that DVML just tell the DCC what they possibly can afford and that is it.  What do you think would be the result if any other business adopted that attitude?

Is there really still any doubt that a full, detailed and independent forensic audit should be made of the stadium proposals, formation of the "Trust" and the financial activities relating?