Anon,

Very good question. Even if we accept that construction costs grow faster than simple inflation, why was the one built in Pittsburg last year for $320m and this one is $450m?

Rod Bryden was not the original owner of the Senators, Bruce Firestone was.
Firestone's vision was that a 600-acre town, called West Terrace, built from scratch in what was then called Kanata, would provide the cash flow to pay the $50 million fee for an NHL expansion franchise and a state-of-the-art arena. It was a real-estate play with an NHL franchise and arena as its centrepiece.
I know, I covered that franchise during those years.
Because the land was zoned farm land, the project had to be approved by the Ontario Municipal Board.
They approved the development of an arena and adjacent parking lot on the 98-acre footprint where Scotiabank Place now sits. But the OMB nixed the town.
Bryden was the financial muscle, such as it was, behind the franchise. He first bought 50 per cent of Terrace Investments, Firestone's real estate company, then bought out Firestone altogether.
The truth was, the franchise was under-capitalized from the beginning, but land rich. For the first few years, the Senators had a tiny payroll, anyway, so Bryden is being a bit revisionist to say huge salaries did them in.
They were strapped even when they were paying tiny salaries to the discards they had in their lineup.
Anyway, in the end, being land rich wasn't worth much. To make matters worse, the real estate market went south.
Ogden Entertainment (which eventually went bankrupt)underwrote the heavily mortgaged Senators to help them cover both the franchise fee and the arena construction.
Essentially, the Senators pledged future revenue streams as collateral for loans that Ogden guaranteed.
At any rate, they were cash-poor, to say the least, from the beginning, and eventually went bankrupt, along with Ogden.
Melnyk purchased the team and arena out of bankruptcy.
Ottawa was a model for how not to run an NHL franchise on just about every level.
The fact remains, using the Senators history as an example of a deep-pocketed owner footing the bill himself was never operative at all. It was a financial fiasco from the word go.
I continue to find it curious that in black-and-white Alberta, there seem to be only two ways to make a project work:
entirely with public money (Commonwealth Stadium, Rexall Place, etc.), but with no individual profiting unduly (whatever that means, because both Pocklington and the EIG had sweetheart rent arrangements); or for a rich individual/corporation to cover it all.
It seems a simple prism through which to see the world.
For the entrepreneur, it's not merely about the cost of a building, it's about the business case in the long haul. Two different things.
The quid pro quo for the city is largely in the quality of life boost a downtown arena can provide, in concert with a rich variety of other urban elements (LRT, existing office towers, RAM, shopping, restaurants, bars, night clubs, AGA, city hall, libraries, cinemaas).
For many in Edmonton, the focus is unswervingly on cost, though, never on benefit. This continues to baffle me. Are people here so ascetic they think a sterile, unstimulating downtown is the best they can hope for?
Perhaps a city whose downtown has been moribund for so many decades has no faith that anything could help improve it, whether it's an arena, an arena and a large museum, or an arena, a large museum, an art gallery, and a whole cluster of other projects housed in the city's downtown improvement plan.
It does take time and it does take many, many elements, including lots of residents downtown.
Edmonton has a long way to go, owing to decades of neglect. The arena is not the alpha and omega. But, along with other venues already mentioned, it's a good start.
Since cost is your fixation, how would you calculate the cost to Edmonton for having such a brutal downtown for so many years?
What is a reasonable cost to fix it?
And how should that cost be borne?

Good point. I look forward to parts two and three.
I am an Edmontonian and though I support the downtown arena, I don't support the lack of solid facts or metrics from either side.