Masich Stadium In for Major Upgrade
Government, School District, NDIT and athletic reps join in celebrating the announcement- photo 250News
Prince George BC..-Masich Stadium in Prince George will undergo just over $4.2 million dollars in upgrades.
The improvements will include a synthetic field which will become the new home for the UNBC Timberwolves soccer teams.
Funding for the upgrades is coming from $3.2 million from the federal gas tax, $775 thousand from the City’s capital plan and $250 grand from the Northern Development Trust.
The upgrades will provide numerous benefits to Prince George and the region.
The upgraded facilities will make Prince George more desirable when the City bids for major sporting events, synthetic turf will mean the fields can extend the season of use.
There will be a consolidated jump area, permanent throwing facilities and cages, track resurfacing and upgrades in the area in the way of trail development.
Work on the upgrades will start this spring.
Comments
Meanwhile, every baseball and softball diamond that is used by the kids in this city are an absolute disgrace.
Guess the kids in this city aren’t as important as the UNBC soccer teams.
field which will become the new home for the UNBC Timberwolves soccer teams
Fine, then it is about time that the money pit on the hill start paying for all the infrastructure it is using, and stop relying on taking money better suited to juvenile sports or other community needs.
Egads, they cannot even house their staff on their own site, they need government handouts all the time to pay rent in the downtown. OMFG
All we are going to have left in PG is a unbc, health services and government offices. Not one of these organizations produces and actual tangible product to add to GDP.
“Not one of these organizations produces and (SIC) actual tangible product to add to GDP.”
And your point is?
Only 29.5% of the GDP is produced by goods producing industries. The remainder is produced by service industry. That is the typical profile of a modern developed country such as Canada.
education services produce 5.2%; Health and Social Services 6.8& and public administration 6.5%. The tree combined produce about 2 thirds of the GDP generated by the goods producing industries.
Interestingly Construction and utilities are components of the goods producing industries. They produce 9.5% of GDP. They add to the hard infrastructure, the same as all the service industries ass to the soft infrastructure.
Without hard and soft infrastructure we can forget about the 20% of goods producing industries because they will not be able to produce them.
Education is an amazing service. It actually means that people who are properly educated understand such simple notions.
Let’s see all the thumbs down on this.
Consider them as maintaining
It’s not like the Timberwolves will be the only user, it says they will just start using it. Isn’t that a good use of the facility?
I presume that everyone else who used to use the stadium will continue to do so, and that they will have a better facility that, with the artificial surface, will probably end up costing less in the long run to maintain, than what was there before with the grass field.
If I’m not mistaken, the stadium required some maintenance and upgrades anyway, so best to do it now as it just gets more expensive the longer you wait. It’s quite reasonable for a city the size of PG to have a facility like this.
Exactly NMG. Soccer will have a stadium to play in and not have to worry about it being torn up by football. Football will have a better safer surface in the fall when the weather is lousy. It kind of brings Prince George into the 1990’s. Oh, NMG , I thought Phaneuf looked like a disinterested bantam player against the Red Wings.
Yeah, I’m not sold on the Phaneuf trade. I guess if he’s not relied on to play big minutes, it could turn out okay. I went to the game against Edmonton and it was probably the worst I’ve ever seen an NHL team play. Just complete laziness on the part of the Sens.
Can’t wait for the REDBLACKS season to start up again. It’s a blast down at Lansdowne on game night.
Election nearing.
Kudos to Loki’s comment. $3.2 million from the Federal gas tax? What about some contribution by the users of this stadium? Reminds me of $10 million+ for an art gallery and god knows how much coming up for a PAC, and not a dime of contribution from the proponents. The city should have used the gas tax for infrastructure repair to streets.
Don’t forget about the water mains and sewer lines
Of course the project will cost umm? probably 6 million or so, what with inflation and whatnot. Lets not worry about it, its time to celebrate
the winter games of last year. Taxpayers of PG are wonderful arnt they?
Another photo-op..can’t there be just one picture without the same individuals?
Do something newsworthy and you will get your photo-op.
Become the Mayor, and you will get many. It is part of the job. It is the part of the job I would hate, but it comes with the territory.
Education, Health, and public administration are paid for by the taxpayers who work for private business.
Governments run on tax dollars. No matter how much tax a civil servant pays, he has to get the money from the taxpayers and business taxes, in order to pay it.
As an example the Government pays an employee $1000.00 in salary, and then they take back $200.00 in taxes, so in essence the employee is working for $800.00 and paying no taxes. Giving the $200.00 and then taking it back was and is merely a paper shuffle.
The original $1000.00 came from taxpayers. So taxpayer not only pay the wages and benefits of civil servants, they also pay their taxes.
We, the people, live in a country.
We, the people, have to produce to live in that country.
Some of that production is for hard goods such as building, roads, etc. That is called the hard infrastructure and is mostly accounted for under “manufacturing” and utilities.
Then we have the raw material we find underground as well as on top of the ground such as wheat and trees. It feeds the people, as well as the goods producing industries.
To produce those hard goods, we, the people, have to have soft infrastructure in place such as financial institutes, transportation, telecommunication, housing, hospitals, entertainment, sports, schools, etc.
Services, which is the soft infrastructure, far outweigh the hard infrastructure in modern, industrialized countries.
Time people got over that and understood that. The less we support those services for the people, the less well off the people are.
We have recently been riding a wave that was fed by the gratuitous inflation of oil prices without taking care of manufacturing. We are seeing the results of that now big time in looking at a dollar which is worth 30% less against those counties which are keeping up with the US$.
Luckily we still produce much of the food in Canada and can buy food from countries whose currencies have also dropped against the US$.
Machinery to run farms will go up in price, unless Canadian manufacturers are available.
This country is run for the people, not for foreigners. We have to look out for our own. We cannot have the country’s so called “taxpayers” fighting each other. I look at that as tantamount to financial civil war.
We are all taxpayers, whether directly or indirectly.
Palopu, I have asked you on several occasions whether you are willing to join me as well as others who want to join to form a ratepayers’ association. You have always said no. Put your effort where your mouth is.
BTW, if the goods producing industries would pay their fair part of the taxes which actually pay for the cost of all the services which support them, such as fixing rut filled pavement made by all the transport trucks on the road rather than on rail, housing for the people they employ, food for those people, entertainment for those people, health services for those people, etc. then the rest of us would have to pay far lower taxes.
The lower the taxes are to our goods producing industries and service industries, which are primarily set up to service the goods producing industries, the more the rest of the people have to pay. We are competing with countries who have lower quality of life for their population. To give our people a lower quality of life is not the way to do it.
Learn from countries which are managing to accomplish being competitive while still maintaining a high quality of life for the citizens of the country.
They forgot the beer garden…looks like lots of room….pay for it self in 10-15 yrs….EH! lyn green…
Improvements to the City sounds like a great idea. Make PG a nice city to live in. This means making upgrades. Let’s keep this momentum going and this will be one more step towards growing our city to be something other cities wish they had……..
Go PG Go!!!!!!!
What I find really interesting is that we see the same people griping about spending money on one facility to insure it is maintained and improved going forward while in other threads have continuously chastised the city for letting civic facilities degrade due to lack of maintenance and / or improvements!
(ie, the Four Seasons Pool)
This upgrade will not only expand the usability of Masich Stadium it will insure it’s long term sustainability. The best way to insure that we the tax payer get the maximum bang for our Civic Facilities Buck is to keep them well maintained, and where necessary design improvements that will reduce their annual maintenance impact on the city budget.
I think this project achieves the latter and will insure the former!
Finally, I don’t see Tom Masich or any of his family in the photo. Hope he has some input on this project.
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