If we build it again with Expo 2025, will they come?
From the sounds of it, the boosters of hosting a new mega-event in Toronto are dusting off the Pan Am Games playbook.
Thestar.com
May 27, 2016
By Sarah-Joyce Battersby
New jobs. More tourists. Infrastructure investment. Development of the waterfront. David Peterson.
From the sounds of it, the boosters of hosting Expo 2025 in Toronto are dusting off the Pan Am Games playbook. A quick task, given the Games were less than a year ago.
Pitches to host the world come steeped in the language of legacy, infrastructure improvements, and “once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Just as the same language fills the pitch books, the same questions arise from critics.
“Legacy for whom, and infrastructure for whom? That’s the key question that has to be asked about these mega events,” says Matti Siemiatycki, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto.
A large-scale event, like an Expo, needs infrastructure to move people to and around the site. Beyond that, the footprint demanded for the six-month-long fairs, which attract massive displays from nations and corporations across the world, often means large swaths of land must be developed or redeveloped to house the fair.
In Toronto, proponents have targeted the Port Lands, a 356-hectare patch of industrial waterfront land east of the Don River, as an ideal site. The city and Waterfront Toronto have been working since 2011 to develop the land, but the project is not fully funded.
Bob Rydell, a historian of World’s Fairs (now known as Expos), says virtually all mega-events have resulted in massive upgrades to infrastructure, including transportation and, in the case of St. Louis, the beginnings of its sewage system.
“Pick a fair and you’ll find that,” he said.
Siemiatycki says the political reality makes mega-events a powerful catalyst for infrastructure development.
“The politics of getting all the interests on board to build big projects in one city rather than another seem to require some confluence of these firm deadlines, and that’s what helps drive these things forward.”
With competition from other cities, and within the city across different sectors, whether it be transportation, affordable housing, or cultural projects, mega projects can inspire coalitions of common interest to advocate more effectively, he says. But mega-events shouldn’t be the only motivation to build.
“If you have an interest in building infrastructure, make a list, figure out how to pay for it, and start investing, because it’s an important thing to do.”
Martin Muller, a University of Zurich professor who has closely studied mega-events in 17 cities around the world, maintains that “what’s good for a large event is not necessarily good for the city.”
Seville, host of the 1992 Expo, constructed cable cars, monorails and huge parking lots to accommodate 40 million visitors. Many of those sites now sit abandoned.
Muller cautions against the tendency to present mega-events as a way to “short-circuit” planning.
“The solution is to clean up your planning rules, or else accept that some projects are just not going to be realized, because there is legitimate opposition.”
In a 2015 paper, Muller urged organizers to stop intertwining mega-events with large-scale urban development, a trend that started with the 1992 Olympic Games, he said.
The conflation presents risks such as cost overruns, substandard construction and oversized infrastructure not suited to the city once the event packs up and leaves.
In recent years, organizers of the Olympics, Expo and the World Cup, seen by many as the top tier of mega-events, have been sensitive to the perception that such events leave cities bankrupted and broken, and reforms are being ushered in.
As the ashes from the CN Tower fireworks display were still settling, Pan Am organizers were touting the Games as a massive success for coming in under the $2.4-billion budget, attracting large TV audiences, and going off with relatively few hitches.
But less than a year after Kanye’s mic toss at the closing ceremonies, the work of gauging the long-term legacy of the Games has just begun. In December, Queen’s Park ordered an auditor general’s report into Pan Am expenses. No date has been set for its release.
In terms of the legacy of tourism and jobs, numbers from the city show a surge in part-time work in 2015 compared with 2014, with 7.32 per cent more jobs, which Toronto’s economic development division attributes to the hiring of support staff for the Games.
It also credited the Games, along with low oil prices and a robust real estate market, with a 2.6 per cent increase in GDP.
Going by the “if you build it, they will come,” adage, the legacy is being fulfilled.
For 2017, Pan Am venues have been tapped to host the Invictus Games, the World Police and Fire Games, and the North American Indigenous Games.
At the Milton velodrome built for the Games, revenues and participation are higher than expected, said local Councillor Rick Malboeuf.
He attributes that in part to athletes using the track in preparation for the Rio Olympics this summer. And though he was pleased, he retains his pre-Games skepticism about the facility’s long-term use.
“Right now we’re in the honeymoon phase of it, the novelty of it. But I think as the maintenance and operating costs increase, it’s going to become a burden for Milton taxpayers,” he said.
Montreal’s Olympic Stadium is a classic example for skeptics. According to Olympics researcher Bob Barney at Western University, maintaining the stadium costs $30 million a year, and that’s after revenues are factored in.
The last major Expo was in Milan in 2015, attracting pavilions from more than 140 nations and corporations. The budget for Dubai’s 2020 fair is pegged at up to $4 billion for the site and a further $8 billion on secondary infrastructure.
Mayor John Tory said he won’t consider an Expo bid without backing from the province and feds to help cover the costs, pegged in an Ernst and Young report at up to $3 billion. The mayor’s executive committee voted this week not to dedicate any public funds to studying the possibility, relying instead on third-party reports.
Toronto’s hangup about investing public funds in an unknown quantity is “par for the course,” says Rydell.
“It usually takes a few people of a certain kind of influence. People who have an ability to move big projects forward, to persuade other people that it’s a good idea.”
But the idea itself can’t just be a fair; it has to be that they are holding a certain kind of exposition, he said. Recent themes have included “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” in Milan, and “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,” for Dubai 2020.
A bid for Expo 2025 is due Nov. 1. At this point, without a clear theme on the table, Rydell doesn’t see Toronto having a strong chance.
“The main challenge is for them to figure out what they want to be and why people would want to come ... most people are not going to want to come to Toronto to see a fair to help waterfront development.”
THE PAN AMS LEGACY
Athletes’ village
Touted as one of the shiniest jewels in the Pan Am crown, the housing site in West Don Lands is slowly being converted into Toronto’s newest prefabricated community. An 82,000-square-foot YMCA opens Monday, and retailers, including the Running Room and Dark Horse Espresso, are setting up shop. The TTC will start running streetcars on the Cherry St. loop, an extension of the King line, June 19. The first two condo buildings should be full of residents by August, with 1,200 units still to be built.
Velodrome
Hamilton and Vaughan both took a pass on becoming Ontario’s sloped-track centre, in the shadow of torn-down cycling tracks in Winnipeg and Montreal. Proponents of the Milton facility have been adamant this isn’t the disastrous ’drome critics expected. Two-thirds of it are dedicated to general recreation: running tracks and multi-use courts. “Because it was a smaller-scale event we didn’t lose control of it” to the International Olympic Committee, urban planning professor Matti Siemiatycki says of the Pan Ams. The Olympics demand a 6,000-seat facility; the Pan Ams offered just 2,500.
Scarborough Aquatic Centre
In its first full year of operation, both revenues and expenditures came in slightly under budget, but the centre is on track to develop enough surplus to cover future maintenance. According to a report adopted by the executive committee this week, 30 sports organizations use the centre for daily training. It has hosted almost 200 community events, and more than 50,000 users took advantage of its City of Toronto parks and recreation activities.
Tim Hortons Field
The 24,000-seat facility that replaced Ivor Wynne Stadium is the new home of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and is used for other sport and community events. Plagued by construction delays, it opened 10 months late and is the subject of legal action by the team and the city, naming the Pan Am organizing committee and Infrastructure Ontario. The city claims breach of contract and negligence when it came to procurement, construction and development, and is seeking $35 million in damages. A city spokesperson said notices of action were filed to preserve the city’s rights, but all parties are still negotiating a settlement.
HOT lanes
In the height of driver frustration over the extended network of HOV lanes created during the Games last summer, Premier Kathleen Wynne announced that high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes were in the works. A stretch of the QEW, from Trafalgar Rd. in Oakville to Guelph Line in Burlington, will be the first lanes to allow pay-for-use by lone drivers in a pilot launching this summer.
UPX
Though completed in time for the Pan Ams, the $456-million airport express wasn’t used much for the Games, or after. The train wasn’t covered as part of the free transit options for ticket holders, and visiting athletes and dignitaries were shuttled on private coaches in the HOV lanes. Until Metrolinx slashed fares in March, the trains were running far below capacity. “The way it’s designed means that it’s going to serve a relatively small user base in a city that has a desperate need for public transit,” says Siemiatycki.
Affordable housing
Delivering more affordable housing is often touted as a legacy benefit of mega-events. The Pan Ams delivered 253 new housing units, chipping away at Toronto’s 90,000-plus household wait-list. The wait-list at one of the two new affordable buildings was almost four times longer than the available spaces, months ahead of the move-in date.
“Toronto” Sign
