EDMONTON – Nearly two-thirds of Edmonton and area residents don’t believe the provincial government should give money directly to Edmonton’s downtown arena project, according to a new survey by Leger Marketing.
The online provincial issues survey, sponsored by the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald, found 62 per cent of respondents said there should be no direct funding from the province.
Twenty-eight per cent said the province should provide direct funding and 10 per cent said they didn’t know.
The results come as Edmonton city council continues to search for $55 million to finalize the deal.
The city is hoping $100 million for the $480-million project comes from the province and Mayor Stephen Mandel said he has been assured in private that the province will make arrangements. Councillors recently allocated a $3-million annual increase in infrastructure dollars to cover $45 million of the provincial contribution.
In public, Premier Alison Redford and her cabinet have repeatedly said there will be no direct arena funding. On March 7, she authored a budget that hit the public sector hard.
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MacEwan University political science professor Chaldeans Mensah said he expects the austerity budget and recent wage freezes for teachers and nurses are what’s behind the public’s reluctance to allocate funding.
“It’s a balancing act,” he said. “If the province were to be in a more favourable financial situation, I think you’d likely find more support for direct funding for the arena, but the current situation makes it untenable. Funding for the arena has become difficult to sell politically.”
The provincial issues survey was conducted between April 9 and 12 and released publicly on Monday. The overall survey of 1,011 people is considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 time out of 20, but the margin of error for the arena question is 5.4 per cent.
The survey questioned a diverse group of residents who have agreed to answer surveys for the polling firm.
Pollster Ian Large said the result was much more negative than he expected. “It did actually surprise me, because I think support for the arena is higher than that,” he said, suggesting the vagueness of the funding formula for the project is turning some people off.
“There’s also a fair chunk of Edmontonians who don’t want the arena built at all,” he said.
The poll broke down results by gender, finding men are more likely to support direct funding than women. Thirty-two per cent of men answered yes to the question compared to 24 per cent of women.
The Journal sponsored a similar poll about one year ago, before the provincial election. That poll found 67 per cent of residents in the Edmonton region did not support provincial dollars being spent on the Edmonton arena.
In December 2010, the city sponsored a telephone poll of 800 randomly selected Edmonton residents to ask if they supporting moving ahead with the arena under the proposed funding arrangement, which also includes money from Oilers owner Daryl Katz, a ticket surcharge, property taxes on development around the arena and other city sources.
In that poll, 59 per cent said they supported building a new arena. Thirty-six per cent said no and five per cent were unsure.
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