Dome proponents who suggest Mosaic Stadium is outdated suffered a major setback yesterday.

If you look at the fine print of yesterday's Riders' game, you'll notice the team had yet another sell-out; a 54-51 overtime thriller against Montreal.

In fact, if you read CEO Jim Hopson's letter in the team's 2009 Annual report, you'll notice another inconvenient number for the pro-dome crowd. According to Hopson -

"A regular season attendance record was established in 2009 after averaging 30,717 fans per game."

Ladies and gentlemen it's time to call in Murder She Wrote detective Angela Landsbury. What could be so awful about Mosaic Stadium that it's shattering team attendance records? If it's such a horrible place to catch a Riders game then why on earth are so many people piling into the facillity to catch the Riders each game?

The answer of course is that it isn't as bad as the dome crowd likes to suggest. Is it perfect? No. Is it fixable? Of course. According to reports obtained by the CTF, the facility only needs about $6 million worth of repairs to make it usable for another decade. With a bit of creative input from the private sector the facility could be improved beyond basic repairs.

One thing is for certain, the $6 million repair bill - which could be financed through a per ticket refurbishment fee - is a lot more attractive than spending $430 million  worth of taxpayer dollars.

By: Colin Craig
Posted: July 02, 2010
Topic: Saskatchewan

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