City Hall says “Build it and they might come.”

Peterborough is preparing to spend somewhere in the neighbourhood of $170 million on a new downtown Multi-Use Sport and Event Centre, and the sales pitch arrives wrapped in all the usual municipal vocabulary: revitalization, tourism, economic impact, vibrancy, momentum.

The city’s share is expected to be roughly $57 million, with the remaining money supposedly arriving from senior governments, sponsorships, partnerships, fundraising, naming rights, and assorted pots of hopeful optimism not yet sitting in a bank account.

That’s the first thing worth remembering.

The city does not currently have $170 million.

It has a plan to try and assemble it.

And if the city borrows its full share — which is the realistic assumption unless money starts falling from the ceiling at Queen’s Park — taxpayers are looking at something in the range of $3.5 million to $4.3 million annually for roughly 25 years, depending on borrowing rates.

That means the city’s $57-million contribution could ultimately cost taxpayers somewhere between $90 million and $106 million once interest is included.

Suddenly the phrase “city contribution” starts sounding a little gentler than it should.

Because this is not a cheque.

It’s a generation of payments.

And all of it hinges on a simple promise:

People will come.

Concerts. Tournaments. Regional events. Packed restaurants. Full hotels. Downtown energy. The building gets sold less like an arena and more like an economic weather system.

Fine.

But let’s stop pretending nobody can do math.

The current Peterborough Memorial Centre already exists. It already hosts the Peterborough Petes and Lakers, concerts, trade shows, and community events. And yes, according to city reports, the building operates at a loss — hundreds of thousands annually — while also carrying major repair requirements estimated at about $22.4 million over the next 15 years.

Those are real numbers. But even those numbers create uncomfortable comparisons.

Let’s say the current building loses half a million dollars annually, it would take well over a century of operating losses to equal the likely long-term repayment cost of the city’s portion of the new arena project.

And if the Memorial Centre requires roughly $22 million in future repairs — roof work, refrigeration systems, structural maintenance, accessibility upgrades — the obvious question becomes:

Is it cheaper to repair the old building than replace it with a vastly more expensive one?

Because the Memorial Centre has already undergone major renovations before. The city spent about $13 million modernizing the facility in 2003, and another $3.5 million on floor and refrigeration upgrades in 2019. Earlier reports also identified roof and HVAC repairs in the multi-million-dollar range.

None of this suggests the building is cheap to maintain.

But neither is replacing it.

And once the new arena gets built, the old one doesn’t simply disappear like a movie set after filming wraps.

Demolition costs money. Environmental remediation costs money. Site redevelopment costs money. The proposed downtown location itself already includes the former city bus garage lands and surrounding properties that required assembly and planning work before construction even starts.

Large civic projects have a habit of developing expensive side quests.

There is also the small matter of the 2027 budget.

The city’s $57-million commitment does not float above the budget like a decorative balloon. It lands somewhere. And according to the staff direction, the financing plan and early project spending are being pushed into the 2027 budget process.

That means this is not just an arena decision.

It is a capital-budget decision.

And capital budgets are where other projects go to quietly die.

Road work. Bridges. Parks. Facilities. Stormwater upgrades. Accessibility improvements. Transit needs. Deferred maintenance. The unglamorous stuff that does not come with architectural renderings, ribbon cuttings, or the phrase “world-class.”

If $57 million in debt capacity gets tied up in a new event centre, then other projects either move slower, get scaled back, or get shoved further down the municipal hallway. That is not anti-arena hysteria. That is how borrowing room works.

Money used for one thing is money not available for something else.

So the public deserves a clear list of what gets delayed, reduced, or sacrificed if council locks in this level of debt.

Not vibes.

A list.

And then there’s the calendar.

The entire business case leans heavily on activity: concerts, tournaments, events, visitors, downtown spin-off spending. Fine. But the public deserves to see actual projections, not just broad language about economic impact.

How many concerts a year?

How many tournaments?

How many nights is the building realistically expected to sit dark?

Comparable mid-sized Canadian arenas don’t suddenly become entertainment gold mines because they have newer seats and a cleaner lobby. Most facilities this size host a relatively modest number of major ticketed events annually. The rest of the calendar gets filled with sports, local bookings, trade shows, graduations, and community rentals.

That’s not failure. That’s reality.

But reality matters when taxpayers could be carrying debt payments north of four million dollars annually.

If you strip the math down, even a lower-end annual repayment of roughly $3.6 million means:

20 major events per year would need to generate about $180,000 each
30 events would need roughly $120,000 each
40 events would still need over $90,000 each

And that’s before staffing, insurance, maintenance, security, utilities, ice refrigeration, repairs, and all the invisible ways large public buildings consume money every day simply by existing.

Which leads to another question nobody at the podium seems particularly excited to tackle:

What happens if the projections are wrong?

Not disastrously wrong. Just optimistic.

What if the concerts don’t come in at the expected volume? What if tournament traffic softens after the novelty wears off? What if other cities land the bigger events? What if attendance settles into the same municipal rhythm every arena eventually discovers — busy enough to survive, but not profitable enough to carry itself?

Then taxpayers inherit the gap.

Because the debt payment still arrives whether the building is full or half-empty.

The heating bill still arrives.
The staffing costs still arrive.
The roof still ages.
The technology still becomes outdated.
The maintenance still accumulates.

The city doesn’t get to walk away from the building if it underperforms. It just keeps paying for it.

And then comes the affordability question — the one that tends to disappear entirely whenever civic leaders start talking about “world-class entertainment.”

If construction costs, operating costs, and rental rates rise, those costs don’t vanish into the air. Promoters pass them along. Event organizers pass them along. Eventually, ticket buyers absorb them.

A more expensive building generally means more expensive rentals. More expensive rentals usually mean higher ticket prices.

So while the city talks about attracting larger concerts and events, there’s a very real possibility that the average resident ends up priced further away from actually attending them.

The irony is hard to miss:

the public helps finance the building through taxes, then potentially pays more again at the box office to use it.

Meanwhile, all of this is happening while Peterborough continues wrestling with:

rising taxes
housing affordability
homelessness
infrastructure pressure
intensification
budget constraints

None of those pressures disappear because the city builds a nicer arena.

And finally, there is the way this was handled.

Mayor Leal’s $57-million motion landed the same day as the General Committee debate.

That is no way to treat a council.

Not on a decision this large. Not on a project this expensive. Not when the motion effectively asked councillors to bless a generational financial commitment with limited time to digest the moving parts, test the assumptions, or explain the implications to the people who will actually pay for it.

This was not a sidewalk patio extension.

This was a $57-million municipal commitment tied to a $170-million project, long-term debt, possible tax increases, reduced capital flexibility, and a major reshaping of downtown.

Dropping that kind of motion into the same-day bloodstream and expecting council to process it like a consent-agenda item is not leadership.

It is pressure.

And pressure is not the same thing as planning.

To be fair, the project could absolutely work. A modern downtown venue could become a regional draw. It could improve facilities for sports, concerts, trade shows, and tourism. It could reshape downtown energy and help reposition Peterborough within the region.

But “could” is carrying an awful lot of weight right now.

Because until the public sees hard projections — real event counts, occupancy estimates, operating forecasts, realistic revenue expectations, hotel-capacity analysis, capital-project tradeoffs, and worst-case scenarios — this still feels less like a finished business case and more like a very expensive act of civic optimism.

Maybe optimism is what Peterborough needs.

But optimism financed over 25 years at compound interest deserves harder questions than applause.

And before the city commits itself to decades of payments, someone should answer the simplest question of all:

Are we replacing a problem?

Or just upgrading it?