Last 10 signatories
- adele smith
- zoe woodley
- EH Wardley
- Simon Iles
- Katie Leaming
- Noelle Rumball
- Derek Lloyd
- Yvonne Goldwater
- Ben piper
- Clare Dunsford
Save the Bristol arena
Lead petitioner : Paul Jobson
Status: New > Draft > Rejected > Accepted > Collecting signatures > Awaiting submission > Submitted > Pending owner response > Closed > Withdrawn
Status: Closed
Petition
The petitioner request that Bristol City Council demands that South West Regional Development Agency delivers on its promise to build an Arena adjacent to Temple Meads Railway Station. Nationally Arena venues are built using public subsidy by government agencies such as the SWRDA.
Background information
The site chosen as the preferred location has cost a considerable amount of money to decontaminate and service with appropriate infrastructure. At the start of the process the SWRDA would have know that these costs would be in addition to the actual public subsidy required to build the Arena. Birmingham National Indoor Arena cost £57 million, Nottingham Arena Cost £46 million and the Manchester Evening News Arena cost £73 million. Therefore a Bristol Arena for £86 Million should still be considered a good use of public funds considering the abnormal site remediation works of £30 million and the comparable cost of other venues of this type.
THE SWRDA should not expect such as facility to be funded through the City Council's capital programme because no other Arena development has forced its Local Council to provide the lion share of funding and therefore accept the inevitable impact on the already underfunded local services.
It is clear that the SWDRA have either been particularly naive in their assessment of the cost of remediating the diesel depot site or intentionally led the people of Bristol up the garden path with no intention to fund the major share of the public subsidy required to build and Arena.
I hope the the SWRDA do the right thing and rethink there short-sighted decision and make good there proposal to develop an Arena for Bristol.
Signature Count
406
Dialogue
The city council shares the disappointment of the petitioners over the failure of this project. We worked closely with the South West of England Regional Development Agency and the commercial sector over a number of years to try to deliver a viable Arena for Bristol on the only possible city centre site that could be identified. The council can assure petitioners that it took every step over that period to impress upon the RDA the importance of such a scheme to our city and to the wider South West - and to encourage the agency to invest as much as possible into the Arena project and other cultural facilities in the city. The RDA is on record as stating that it believes further investment in the Arena project on the Temple Meads site is not a good use of public money and that higher costs and changes in the market have made the project too expensive to deliver. As petitioners will be aware, the RDA is a government agency and the city council has no powers to force it to use its resources in a particular way or to divert them from other projects across the South West. However, we will continue to present a strong case for Bristol and to engage in a constructive dialogue with the RDA over the potential for their investment in cultural facilities in the city.
